The first year of Jeremy Cai’s factory tour produced a number that would look rather lonely in a pitch deck. He and Polo, his sourcing manager, visited more than 150 manufacturers across Asia, Europe, and the United States. Two agreed to participate. One made leather goods. The other made cashmere scarves. In the arithmetic of starting a company, two was enough to continue. It was also a fairly emphatic review of the proposal.
Cai wanted factories to earn more from the things they made, while customers paid less. The troublesome part was the interval between those two happy outcomes. A manufacturer accustomed to a purchase order and a deposit would have to finance production, wait for a shopper, and get paid when the product sold. A better share of the eventual sale came attached to a less comfortable present. The people declining his offer understood that distinction perfectly well.
Cai’s account of Italic’s first year, recalled in March 2022.
That awkward bargain sits near the center of Cai’s story. Italic, the company he founded in 2018, sells goods without the familiar luxury labels, working with manufacturers that also supply established brands. Before there was a website or a membership program, there was a son of manufacturers asking other manufacturers to try a different way of getting paid. The family connection helped him see the opportunity. It also gave him reasons to understand the refusals.
The dinner table had a supply chain
Cai grew up in Chicago, where manufacturing was part of the family conversation. Clients, equipment, quality control, and facilities were dinner-table subjects. A factory was something people in his family had to keep running. That upbringing gave him an unusually concrete introduction to business: someone needed to win the work, make the object, meet the standard, and persuade the customer to return. The vocabulary of a future startup was already in circulation at home.
His parents’ route into that business had detours. They immigrated to the United States and tried ventures that included electronics and vegan cheesecake. Cai has described his mother establishing a manufacturing operation with her brother. The cheesecake detail is a useful corrective to the tidy origin story. Families do not necessarily arrive at their eventual trade by recognizing destiny. Sometimes they try several things, and one finally pays the bills. Their son would also take the scenic route.
A detour through hiring software
He attended Babson College, left without graduating, and became a Thiel Fellow in 2015. Fountain, originally known as OnboardIQ, took him into software for hiring workers. The company went through Y Combinator’s summer 2015 batch. By fall 2017, Babson’s magazine was reporting that OnboardIQ had screened more than three million applicants across 40 countries. Whatever Cai’s eventual dissatisfaction with the subject, the work had found a substantial audience.
Leaving school also gave him an early encounter with the mythology surrounding young founders. In a 2015 essay, he pushed against the romance of the dropout. He described ordinary young lives underneath the startup narrative and warned readers against leaving college for glamour. The essay is wry, occasionally impatient, and conspicuously uninterested in turning an unconventional education into a universal prescription. He had made a decision about his own life. He did not present it as homework for everyone else.
The detour mattered. Enterprise software taught him how to build a company, but manufacturing offered a problem he felt personally drawn to pursue. He later acknowledged that hiring software had not been the dream that prompted him to leave college. There is an appealing lack of ceremony in that admission. A business can become significant while its founder discovers that the work he wants to spend years doing lies somewhere else.
Who gets paid for the label?
Cai’s complaint about direct-to-consumer commerce was that removing the retailer left another expensive layer in place: the brand. A company could sell online, call the transaction direct, and still buy a factory’s goods wholesale before attaching a substantial markup. From the factory’s perspective, the customer had changed names. Its place in the transaction remained familiar. Cai wanted to reconsider who held the inventory and who participated in the upside when it sold.
For Italic, that meant asking manufacturers to become commercial partners. In his 2020 explanation of the model, factories took inventory risk in exchange for the prospect of higher profits. This arrangement also required work that a factory could reasonably prefer someone else to do: marketing, logistics, design, and the customer experience. Removing a familiar intermediary does not remove every job it performed. Someone still has to answer the customer who wants to know where the parcel is.
His influences included Airbnb and Uber, businesses that helped other people earn from assets rather than buying all those assets themselves. He spent time in China and Italy developing manufacturing relationships. This is the part of an internet business that takes place considerably beyond the internet: meeting people, understanding their concerns, and returning when the first answer is disappointing. A checkout button is a wonderfully small surface for so much prior negotiation.
The ambition extended to the machinery behind that button. Cai has described forecasting technology built for an assortment with roughly a thousand stock-keeping units, as well as the judgment of experienced people in individual categories. In his account, manufacturers retained ownership of goods while Italic sold on their behalf. Payments and subscriptions were part of the same operating problem. A shopper could see a pair of earrings. Behind it sat a set of relationships, predictions, and financial obligations.
The club opens its doors
Membership initially offered an elegant answer to how Italic would make money. Customers paid for access to the assortment. In April 2021, the offer was being described as a $120 annual shopping club. It gave the company a reason to care about whether people kept finding things they wanted. A member who has already paid to enter has a reasonable expectation that there will be something worth returning for. The admission fee makes an empty shelf feel particularly personal.
But a club has an entrance, and an entrance can discourage the people it hopes to welcome. Italic eventually opened shopping beyond paid members, keeping membership as an optional upgrade. By February 2023, Cai was explaining that a broader customer base could help attract more manufacturers, expand the assortment, and improve prices. The change made the first purchase easier to attempt. Customers could judge an object before signing up for a continuing relationship with the company that offered it.
A recognizably different kind of founder emerges in these decisions: someone willing to revise a mechanism that had once been central to the pitch. There is no need to romanticize that willingness. Changing the rules also asks a team to change its work and a customer to understand the offer again. The more intriguing question is how a founder learns to distinguish a useful experiment from another distraction. Cai would become quite direct about that problem.
“You need to be both passionate and disciplined to succeed.”Jeremy Cai, June 2022
The discipline of doing it again
By June 2022, he was talking about the cost of shifting between membership and marketplace approaches. His lesson concerned patience: a strategy needs enough sustained execution to have a chance of working. Passion could help someone start. Repetition had to carry the business afterward. This is less cinematic than a founder discovering an idea in a flash, but it sounds closer to the work required to keep towels, cashmere, payments, and deliveries behaving themselves week after week.
That December, Cai was more specific about mistakes. He acknowledged over-ordering inventory and spending too much in the pursuit of faster growth. Italic had overhauled shipping and packaging and retired hundreds of products that did not meet its standards. He described a more measured approach to growth, with the customer’s experience receiving attention first. A smaller assortment can be an uncomfortable thing to explain after promising abundance. It can also give the next purchase a better chance of earning trust.
He had also become more explicit about Italic’s own identity. By June 2022, he was describing it as a brand and putting more emphasis on curation. Expanding supply created an obligation to the manufacturers whose goods needed to sell. He said the company had begun the year expecting to launch a thousand products and would probably launch a hundred. The distinction matters to his story: challenging the economics of familiar labels still left him responsible for making an assortment feel coherent. Taking away a logo did not relieve him of the work of choosing.
His approach to people was similarly practical. He divided his working time among operating reviews, service culture, and recruiting. He wanted experienced people when speed demanded knowledge already acquired, and ambitious people with room to grow as the organization developed. Responsibility belonged with the founder and leadership team when it came to setting the culture. The recurring concern was how decisions translated into daily behavior, especially once more people were making those decisions.
Back to the things people use
The public record now extends beyond the original factory proposition. Cai’s personal website lists Fountain, Italic, Carbon, Courtly, and Tonari under his founder activities. It identifies Carbon as acquired by Perplexity and Tonari as acquired by Creative Freaks. His investment list includes Ramp, Notion, and Perplexity. Alongside those names sit writing and bookmarks. The site reads like a compact inventory of interests rather than an attempt to make one company account for an entire working life.
At Italic, the annual letter signed by Cai and the team on December 31, 2025, returned to tangible details: new towel colors, bath products, bedding, and collaborations. It acknowledged difficulty keeping up with demand and announced an intention to introduce a collection nearly every 30 days in 2026. The plan was a statement of intent, with all the ordinary obligations that follow. Someone would have to make the goods, get them into customers’ hands, and do it again.
There is a pleasing circularity to where Cai’s story lands. A childhood spent hearing about clients and production led to software, then back to questions his family would recognize immediately. He gave those questions a different commercial arrangement and a consumer-facing name. The objects still have to justify the purchase. A label can provide a story before the box arrives; Cai has spent years asking how much of that story the object can tell for itself.