Darden grads aid Forgetful Gentlemen

After starting with 50 cigar boxes and an initial investment of a couple hundred dollars, two recent graduates of the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia are looking to expand their startup that makes it easier for busy, modern men to be gentlemen.
Forgetful Gentleman LLC has reached nearly 10 percent of its yearly sales goal of $50,000 after only about a month of sales, according to co-founders Nate Tan, 26, and Brett Nicol, 28.

The company has been selling Elephant Cards for the Forgetful Gentleman out of a booth in the Charlottesville City Market on Saturday mornings for the past month or so.
Inside a cigar box are four happy birthday cards, four thank-you cards, four blank linen cards and 12 envelopes that come with full postage. Priced at $25, the Elephant Cards also come with unlimited e-mail and text-message event reminders and a Mad Libs-style “Gentleman’s Guide to Articulate Writing.”
With the product, Forgetful Gentleman is targeting both the established modern-day gentleman and those trying to establish themselves as gentlemen.

The idea for the cards sprang from the founders’ own negligence when it came to mailing birthday cards and thank-you notes. Handwritten notes add a personal touch that’s growing more important in today’s increasingly connected —and increasingly impersonal — digital age, Tan said.
This is just the first stage of Forgetful Gentleman’s plan to help the “classy, sophisticated modern man” be a gentleman in all aspects of his life. Elephant Cards address the writing phase. They are meant to provide men with an alternative to the sappy, cartoonish types of cards commonly available. It seems to be a paradox that there are no cards angled toward men “and yet there’s the most pressure on men” to send them, Tan said.
Tan and Nicol, the self-identified “original forgetful gentlemen,” launched the company in November and have been operating in Darden’s Business Incubator since late May. The two newly minted MBAs said they plan to leave the incubator in August.

The incubator provides the infrastructure and environment their business needs in this early stage, Tan said. Professors are available to bounce ideas off of, and office space is provided in the Darden building with the incubator’s other 10 startups. And while the gentlemen haven’t needed it yet, more than $8,000 in funding is available to them.
“It provided the opportunity to make the entrepreneurial leap,” Nicol said.

By building relationships with cigar stores from Charlottesville to Balti-more, Tan and Nicol were able to work out deals for cigar boxes. Once they put together the first 50 sets, Tan and Nicol discovered the demand for aides to the modern gentleman. Selling to customers ranging from mothers to betrothed men looking for groomsmen gifts, Tan and Nicol went through the first 50 quickly and, after reinvesting the profit into a second round of sets, learned the biggest challenge is getting the product together, Nicol said.
“It’s just hours of us sticking stamps on envelopes,” Tan said.

Now Tan and Nicol are preparing to scale their “bootstrapping” endeavor to meet an increasing demand. Without promoting it, Forgetful Gentleman made a number of sales this past week off its recently launched Web site, forgetful
gentleman.com, with orders coming in from as far away as Colorado.
Discussions have started about their next product, possibly a numbering system to help men coordinate their clothes and break out of the safe mode of dressing, Tan said.
“We think there’s room for expansion in all aspects that gentlemen need,” Tan said.