Harvard, Lingerie, and Instinctual Decisions
December 10, 2015
I read “Proof Data Can’t Always Help You Make Decisions.” (Note: you may have to jump through some hoops to read this article. If that’s the case, speak with the real journalists at Fortune, not me.)
The write up is by a person who attended Harvard and founded a lingerie company called Adore Me. This seems quite plausible.
The point of the write up is that a person with an advanced degree from the prestigious French university Les Mines, originally École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris.
The write up featured this statement:
I [Morgan Hermand-Waiche] did some heavy researching and everything I found only emphasized what a terrible idea it was to start a lingerie company: A single player whose reign seemed never-ending fully dominated the lingerie market, barriers to entry were sky-high, and every single player that had tried to penetrate the lingerie market had failed—even huge brands with a lot of money and resources like Abercrombie & Fitch and the now-deceased Fredericks of Hollywood. The data clearly pointed out that this was a no-go. As a usually very rational guy, the story should have ended right then because data was telling me to give up. But for the first time in my life, I had a gnawing feeling that didn’t go away. And because that gut feeling went so against the very definition of my data-driven DNA, I knew I just couldn’t ignore it. And so I, a man with no knowledge of lingerie, started a lingerie startup.
Adore Me was a success. No math, no analytics, no Big Data. Just a hunch. I wonder what Louis Paul Cailletet (1832–1913), physicist and inventor or Georges Charpak (1924–2010), Nobel Prize in Physics 1992 would say about this approach.
Harvard, lingerie, hunch—makes sense because Adore Me is “ranked No. 2 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies in NYC.”
Stephen E Arnold, December 10, 2015
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Harvard, Lingerie, and Instinctual Decisions : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search