What are you looking for in your dress shirt? #quality #fit #value #sneakpeek (Taken with Instagram)
Here are the CombatGent Headquarters we believe that the modern gentleman is only as good as the values he lives by… What are some of your rules to being Combatant Gentlemen?
How To: Combatant Date Etiquette
Recently, our Cadets have been receiving an on-flow of e-mails pertaining to what a CombatGent should wear on a first date. So, we decided what better way to understand the ins and outs of the first date than to give our Gents a how to on the do’s and don’ts in first date etiquette.
If you believe sitcoms, first dates are one of the most nerve-wracking experiences you’ll endure. Everybody is so nervous and jumpy you’ll be lucky if you get through the date without setting your waiter on fire.
While sitcoms are over-exaggerating, first impressions are very important, so there is quite a bit riding on a first date. But fear not, Gentlemen-in-Training, a few simple tips can make your first date go from “nerve-wracking” to “wonderful.”
Prep Work:
Technically, your date has begun before you even step out the door. You’re pre-date prep work is just as important as anything you say or do during the actual date.
· Shower and be thorough about it. All those little places that you don’t notice (behind the ears, under the nails,) she will.
· Wear your best clothes. The devil’s in the details here as well, as they show you care about your appearance. Make sure your clothes are free of rips, tears, and stains, and accessories, such as a tie bar or pocket square, can do wonders.
· Less is more with cologne. Cologne is for people near you, not people a block away. Avoid a potential asthma attack and be subtle with the stuff that smells. Only the steak should be marinated.
Before and After the Date:
Before you get to the actual date, there are some tricks to make her feel more at ease. Chivalry is dying a slow, painful death right now, which is a tragedy. Here are some basic tricks to make you look like a true gentleman.
· Bring a Gift. Not bringing a gift when you visit a person’s home for the first time is treason. It doesn’t have to be much (flowers are typical, do your homework and figure out what her favorite is,) but showing up empty-handed is just wrong.
· Open Doors. This is an act of good manners that should not be as rare as it is. Don’t just hold the door open for her, hold it for any woman you see. Also, help her out of the car.
· Protect Her. Those little acts of chivalry that show you care enough about her to protect her are crucial. Walk between her and the street to prevent her dress from getting splashed. Offer your coat if she’s cold. Just show her you care.
During the Date:
Once you’ve finally sat down and gotten to the actual date, here’s the real make-it-or-break-it moment. Manners and grooming can be taught, but here is where you have to let your natural charm and personality win her over. Some tips:
· Be Cool. Nerves are running high during a first date, but try not to let them make you get snappy. If the waitress spills water in your lap, laugh about it. If the food is taking longer than expected, see it as time to get to know your date better. If you dribble on your shirt, joke about it.
· Don’t Hog the Conversation. This is really easy to do when your nervous, as most people tend to babble. If you noticed you’ve talked too long, turn the conversation around (“I’m sorry, I’m babbling. Let’s talk about you.”)
· Tip Well. This is just basic human decency, but it’s important for two reasons. One, most young women have spent some time in a waitress’s shoes, and relate to the server. Stiff your waiter or waitress, and your date might take it personally. Two, there’s a good chance your waitress has been cheated by a customer recently. Tip well, and you’ll have made her night. Karma will notice.
First dates are almost inevitable, and since you’re trying to relate to a total stranger, can be incredibly uncomfortable. However, with some simple basic manners, they don’t have to be so bad. Learn the secrets of being a Gentleman, and first dates will be much easier.
Quality.Fit.Value - Product Spotlight - CG Shirting
With every garment we produce, Combat Gent promises to stay true to our founding keystones of Quality.Fit.Value. Over the course of our beta launch, we’ve been asked numerous times how we uphold this promise and what steps we take to ensure delivery of the highest quality goods to our customers.
To learn more about the basic anatomy of the Combatant Gentlemen brand and what gives life to it, we could easily point you to the site’s About page. Instead we wanted to delve a bit deeper than that and give our loyal CG-Army readers a glimpse into what really makes a Combat Gent garment a Combat Gent garment! From minor design details to pattern explanations, we want to give our Gents an inside look into what we do best: deliver quality goods for your corporate needs, all handcrafted with your wallet in mind!
And to do this, we have….drumroll please… a new blog segment: The Product Spotlight. Today, we’ve chosen to highlight one of our hottest selling shirts: the Windowpane Pink & White Buttondown Woven.
When referring to any garment (especially the one you wear on your daily grind), what do you think of first? What is your primary concern when choosing what to wear? Quality of the fabric, of course! That is why our design and production Cadets have made it a priority to source the best fabrics and cloths from around the world. Check out the Windowpane 100% Cotton shirt below… 
If you take a closer look, you will begin to notice that the devil is in the details. Here’s why:
Quality. All of our shirts use single needle detailing: From the placket to the yoke seams, the entire shirt has been hand cut and sewn to ensure durability and, most importantly, size consistency. Typically many would see similar style stitching, but with a lack of consistency in the look. This is usually the mark of mass produced items, which lack in personal touch and down right quality. Mass production sewing houses that have crucial crunch times try to mimic the classic way of shirt making, but will never achieve the consistency of a hand assembled garment. Our way of shirt engineering is and always will be focused on quality all around. From the cloth to the machine it is sewn on, nothing is left unnoticed.
Fit. All of our shirts were conceived through the use of a handmade pattern to instill perfection in terms of its fit. Fit and form are key to the success of any garment, our shirts are no different. Therefore, we decided to hand cut all of our patterns locally in-house within our Los Angeles facilities. For this reason, we were able to achieve the level of accuracy in terms of give, extra room, and durability. We take this exact step with each and every one of our garments and we’d hope that our Gents would expect nothing less.
Value. All of our shirts have been built with durability and multi-purpose use in mind: Whilst building our garment catalog, our CG Army were the first on our minds; hence, we made stylized fit and longevity #1 in our books! We wanted to make sure that every piece we produced stood the test of time so as an absolute must, we added a couple of really cool features like invisible collar stays and reinforced button stitching. These features alongside our high quality yarn count shirting cloth make for an excellent garment that will be a guaranteed repeat in your closet for years to come!
As always, we’d love to hear the thoughts of our CG-Army. Let us in on what you dig about our shirting collection and more. Shoot our Cadet’s an email: cadet@combatgent.com
Who Is The Combat Gent? - Series 1
Welcome to the first of our extensive blog series entitled: Who Is The Combat Gent? This blog series is revolved around who we consider to be Combatant Gentlemen and why. During this series you will see a plethora of gentlemen from all types of business backgrounds. Our goal with this series is to not only expose these gents’, but we here at Combatant Gentlemen feel it is rather inspiring to see how these men came up in the work force and created a clear route of success for themselves and their companies amongst these trying financial times. These men are who we consider to be true Combatant Gentlemen.
For our first interview, we got a chance to catch up with the C.E.O. and Founder of the internet advertising firm Retargeter, Arjun Dev Arora. These guys seem to be making all the waves today within the ‘startup’ community and we figured this was the best time to talk to Arjun about his grassroots with the company and how he has attained the success levels that the company has achieved today. Check out our interview below!
CG: Give us a brief description of Retargeter and its early beginnings.
AA: We started April 2009, and I was at Yahoo! running business development for their real estate entities and had a lot of exposure to the online world of display advertising, lead generation, business development, etc. With that exposure came the understanding that there was definitely an opportunity with the retargeting platform. Retargeting is a technology that existed for about 10 years prior to that and was available solely to fortune 200 companies that wished to spend around 50K – 100K a month in advertising, which of course was limited to just the Yahoo! inventory. Therefore it was pretty limited in scope. Seeing this first hand, my initial thought was ‘What if we made this a lot cheaper to run and increase the inventory available?’ (i.e. different search engines). So when we actually started the company (Retargeter), it fundamentally changed the way people viewed the technology and how effective it became. Retargeter clients could now see a nearly 10x reduction in cost between the old and new retargeting. In the start, we super scrappy; a one man band, so to speak. We probably raised a round of funding that was less than the cost of clothing samples you have behind you. Our idea wasn’t to sit in incubation for too long, but rather launch and start with revenues right out of the gate. Just like you guys (CG), we didn’t want to skimp on quality, while keeping pricing low. So our ethos basically became: if we could deliver a service that was super high quality and low on price, we would like to do that every single day. Our initial money wasn’t spent frivolously. Instead, we focused on building our core business needs and networking with other startups. In fact, we shared an office space with our payment processing guys for 3 months, and through building that relationship, it eventually relayed over to our business in the form of large discounts. Little breaks like this allowed us to provide quality services to our clientele, while staying price conscience.
CG: As a CEO and Founder, what is a typical day in the life of Arjun Dev Arora?
AA: To be honest, there is no “typical day” and I’ll explain that better. I would say my day is split 50/50 between external work and internal work. For instance, within the last month or so, 50% of my time has been split up between external meetings, conferences, a recent trip to the White House, and speaking at 500 Startups – so those high level marketing type things. Alongside that, I’ve had to deal a lot with business development, i.e. talking to people that would like to partner with us or people who are interested in our customer base…so a lot of meetings and a lot of calls.
The other 50% of my time is spent internally. It’s spent with one-on-one’s with the staff, internal meetings, and just being a part of each of the day-to-day processes of the company, which unfortunately leaves me no time to answer e-mails. I’m pretty much answering my e-mails between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. When I’m in the office, I don’t spend a lot of time on the computer. It’s mostly calls, meetings, or one-on-one time. Actually, just before this interview, I went out on a walk with one of our sales managers and we had a long discussion on how he wants to build out his sales team, and what he sees for the future.
CG: Seeing as Retargeter used very little funding from its inception only to gross huge numbers in revenue, what key elements of success would you say helped you to this point?
AA: Number 1 was hustle right out of the gate - putting in that legwork to obtain solid, long-term relationships with our clients. We’re not looking to sell someone for a quick hit; instead, we’re looking to develop with a company far into the future. By doing this, we have gotten bigger and bigger business through referrals. If I had to put it into 3 key points, it would be: hustle, focus on long-term customer relationships, and obtaining a great knowledge base - having the ability to educate people while inspiring confidence in our clients with our expertise. I think that it’s important for us to have that kind of credibility.
CG: How important is the working culture at Retargeter to its’ success?
AA: This is a good question because we define our values and our values define our culture. This was actually very important to us as we were building the company. We first set forth to determine what our values are. We then focused on laying the groundwork for our company culture. So just to give you a basic idea of what those values are: respect, focus on long-term relationships, fun, being personal, intelligence, hustle, humility, being bold and direct…things like that. Having those kind of values - the culture just flows. We love to have fun in the office. We’ve got foosball. We’ve got house music going all the time while people are up, they’re chatting, they’re personable. We find that this relays over to their close relationships with clients and even, internally, with one another. So the culture definitely stems from our value set. More important than anything else, especially being a young company, is establishing that value set first, then letting the fun flow.
CG: Obviously, having built a startup from the ground up, the idea of frugality is very important. In the case of your company, how did that play a role?
AA: I think it was incredibly important because, ultimately, we had to build a real business. It wasn’t like we had raised a boatload of money and we could wait around and figure it out. We had to be focused on revenue and cash flow from Day 1. We had to be focused on client retention from Day 1. I think just by nature of that, we had to be pretty frugal and conscious of our spending. Obviously not in a greedy way, but that’s the point of a business, right? So by bootstrapping, I think we had no choice but to understand that fundamentally, which allowed us to grow.
CG: Would you agree that in order to look and feel the part, you must dress the part as well? How important is wardrobe in your day-to-day, and does it play an effective role in how you are perceived?
AA: Yes, I definitely think so. One huge thing is the culture in the Valley (Silicon Valley) itself isn’t too formal, however, there is an important clothing style in San Francisco, especially for tech startups, that is appropriate and I think if you’re in line with that culture, then you do feel powerful. It gives you a sense of belonging. We don’t really wear full suits for the most part, but we definitely have our essentials. From blazers and jeans to button-ups and pullovers, it’s all about looking the part, while being able to express yourself.
CG: What’s up next for Retargeter in the new year?!
AA: Well, we’re scaling right now and we’re really looking forward to the growth. We’re hiring for positions across the board from sales and support to engineering, marketing, etc. We’re focusing predominantly on the sales side first, then building out each of the verticals that we’re going to go after like the marketing team, the engineering team, and so on…all while keeping our products available to our consumers at a below average price point!
CG: Well Arjun, it was great talking to you! Thanks so much for being our very first Combat Gent, and we look forward to seeing continued growth over at Retargeter!
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Be sure to check out the pics above! Arjun is rocking our Signature Cadet Fit Windowpane Pink & White Buttondown, as well as a few of our ties!
