Crystal Beasley on the Right Time to Start Your Own Business

Crystal Beasley was a product designer at Mozilla when she decided to take a sabbatical in Cambodia. Her exposure to the lives of the country’s garment workers got her thinking about smarter apparel–not only how to manufacture clothes more ethically, but how to improve the frustrating process of finding something that fits.

A few years and one $90,000 Kickstarter campaign later, QCut is a reality. The label will offer jeans in 400 different sizes, each pair algorithmically-tailored to fit the woman who orders them. The company just completed their first test fit in San Francisco, plus a seed round of funding, and is currently scouting locations for their Portland retail location.

Crystal’s leap into a new field sounds like a daunting proposition, but she told me that the newness of this experience is what she’s loved the most. She knew her product idea would resonate after hearing countless stories from women about how hard they were to fit.

“It seemed impossible,” she said, “because we can’t all be hard to fit.”

These stories, along with her own frustrations, drove Crystal to dig deeper into the idea of making clothes to order. She wondered, putting realism aside, what should the process of buying clothes be like?

When she got back to her job in Portland, she found that her interest and investment in product design had faded. Despite the immense risk, and without any guarantee of success, she left Mozilla and set out to make her idea a reality.

Every day since then, Crystal says, has been about taking the next step.

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