Co-Founder of Portland-Based, Kickstarter-Funded Jean Company Exits

A Portland custom-fit denim company that got its start through Kickstarter funding is unraveling–a bit anyway.

In November 2014 Crystal Beasley, then a product designer for Mozilla's Firefox, and her partner, a former Levi's exec Gerald Ruderman, launched a company on Kickstarter that sought to solve a very common problem—helping women get jeans that actually fit.

Qcut, which uses a P.O. Box in NE Portland as its address, promises to solve the dilemma in a rather unique way, by using five numbers from customers to produce the perfect pair of jeans: "your height, weight, shoe size, bra size, and the size of your favorite pair of jeans." Those measurements are fed into an algorithm that spits out dimensions for the right fit. QCut would let buyers try out their new duds for a month before deciding whether to keep them.

The Kickstarter effort sought to raise $75,000. It actually raised $90,511 by December, and the company got a lot of hype in the national press. Fast Company referred to Qcut's mission to be"the Warby Parker of Denim."

Last week, however, CEO Beasley, 35, announced that she decided to "sever the relationship"with Ruderman, a Levi's exec in the '90s who worked on that brand's own sizing algorithms. She's staying on, though.

Ruderman's departure may have something to do with the arrival in August of Kate Ertmann, former Animation Dynamics Inc. founder, to serve as COO. Ertmann didn't respond to requests for comment.

Ruderman's exit aside, Q-Cut is behind schedule. In her letter to Kickstarter funders, Beasley lamented a delay in delivering the product expected by 621 customers. Without going into specifics, she implied the problem was logistical: "Even given the depth of experience we have, pulling together every last packaging detail, button, rivet, shipping system, spreadsheet and on and on is overwhelming. You don't get to skip steps."

However, she noted that 200 jeans manufactured in QCut's LA factory would be shipped to customers in the next three weeks. She's also hinted at plans for a brick-and-mortar shop and factory in Portland.

Many questions remain: Why would a co-founder split so soon? How does this algorithm work? What does my shoe size have to do with it? But for now, Beasley declined further discussion. "We are very much in the middle of the transition," she wrote in an email. "We need some space to work through things and let it breathe."

Willamette Week