Jerry Hum’s $1 lesson in good taste

Jerry Hum found one of his career changes on a rack of used books. His architecture office was near the Strand in New York, and he liked to stop at the bookstore after lunch. There, among the dollar offerings, was Ruby on Rails for Dummies. He bought it. A person can spend rather more on a sandwich and emerge with fewer professional options.

Hum read on the subway and practiced coding around work. He had already made logos and simple websites as a teenager. Architecture had given him another version of the same interest: arranging an experience for someone else. His Cornell thesis imagined restaurant spaces assembled by moving robotic components. Even then, the building was allowed to change.

Professional practice offered less room for revision. Projects could remain unfunded; completed spaces did not necessarily work as intended. Software offered a shorter journey from an idea to something somebody could use, followed by the chance to change it. That appeal would carry him into a business where the selection could change every day.

Four enthusiasts, two months left

Hum’s future co-founders were Dennis Liu, Jonathan Wu and Steven Ou. Before Touch of Modern, they tried helping people discover and book activities. The problem was commercial as much as technical: enthusiasm for an outing did not automatically produce a workable transaction. They could attract interest without finding enough scale.

By Hum’s account, about two months of funding remained when they discussed their options with investors. Return the remaining money, keep pursuing the existing idea, or try a different business. A conversation about speakers had suggested a direction. One founder knew far more about audio than the others. Each had a subject on which he became the room’s resident expert.

They decided to sell products chosen with that enthusiasm. Hum recalled that the first day of preview sales brought in more than the activities business had made in a year. After three days, they took their small packet of evidence back to investors. Another million dollars followed. The experiment had earned more time.

A shop with an opinion

Touch of Modern launched in 2012 around a specific proposition. The founders wanted a shopping destination for people like themselves, especially men interested in design, technology and objects with something to explain. A product could earn its place through a useful invention, an unusual form or a story worth repeating.

The distinction influenced the interface. Hum described a service where the search function played a supporting role. Visitors could arrive without an item in mind and encounter something they had never thought to request. That is a demanding promise for a retailer. A search result can succeed by being accurate. An edited selection also has to be interesting.

The business connected designers with an audience prepared to investigate. Its job included doing research customers might otherwise have done themselves. Trust was the practical asset underneath the visual appeal: would a visitor believe that the people choosing these products understood why they mattered? A handsome photograph could begin that relationship. It could hardly finish it.

In July 2013, the company announced a $3 million funding round led by Floodgate, with Hillsven participating. Its plans included new product categories and a larger network of designers. The ambitions were already moving beyond assembling a few appealing objects. Finding enough of them, and building the systems to sell them, would require an organization.

The midnight buying desk

In early 2016, Hum described a distinctly inconvenient routine for exercising that judgment. From midnight until two in the morning, he screened products and gave final approvals. A team of buyers found the goods; the CEO still supplied the last inspection. The assortment reflected overlapping enthusiasms: furniture, watches, cars, machines, cooking and the outdoors.

The range could accommodate a solar-powered backpack or a ping-pong table with a wine chiller. There is an agreeable extravagance to solving the problem of where to put a bottle during table tennis. The person choosing such things, meanwhile, favored black V-neck shirts. Editing an eccentric shop did not require dressing as its entire inventory.

Hum also described himself as cautious about the business. Novelty had to bring customers back. His objects could be playful while his operating concerns remained plain. That combination helps explain the early company: considerable freedom in what went on sale, followed by an unforgiving question about whether the customer would return.

An architect’s hands

His private projects provide a smaller, more tangible explanation of his taste. Hum carved a stool with hand tools over many nights, using cherry for the legs and hububalli for a motorcycle-saddle-shaped seat. In 2015 he described using it to put on his shoes. A labor-intensive piece of design had acquired a thoroughly ordinary morning assignment.

He also reupholstered a Danish armchair by Harry Ostergaard in vegetable-tanned leather. He admired Tadao Ando’s ability to make compelling spaces at different budgets. Together, those details suggest a working definition of value concerned with materials, use and the experience of living with an object.

Watches were another interest. So were walks along Valencia Street, where the shops had helped him get to know San Francisco. These are pleasures that reward looking closely. His account of local life had room for hiking and a less elaborate enthusiasm for burritos. Even a curator deserves a meal that requires very little curating.

“I can eat burritos for days.”

Jerry Hum · 2015

The screen in your pocket

By January 2017, Hum was thinking carefully about the difference between browsing on a phone and browsing on a computer. Treating the phone as a reduced version of a desktop site missed something. Someone who had installed an app had already made a small commitment, one that could support a habit of returning.

Notifications could put unfamiliar products in front of that customer. A glance might lead to a purchase later, rather than during the same visit. The useful unit of attention was consequently larger than a single session. The retailer needed to give people reasons to keep the relationship going between orders.

Video became part of that effort. An unfamiliar mechanism or design can be easier to understand in motion. Hum wanted more of that content, including through the company’s publication, The Manuscript. The old enthusiast’s conversation had found another form: show how something works, explain the detail, and let a prospective buyer decide whether the difference is worth paying for.

The cost of coming back

By November 2018, the business was generating $120 million in annual revenue and had been profitable for roughly a year. Hum’s explanation involved a less photogenic discipline than product discovery. Marketing was a major expense. To reduce it without surrendering revenue, the company needed existing customers to purchase again.

Customer research helped identify what the shop meant to its audience and where it fell short. Faster delivery was one request. The team also compared the purchases of more loyal and less loyal customers, then used those differences to guide merchandising. Taste was being tested against behavior rather than preserved as the founder’s personal verdict.

As the company grew, Hum also identified hiring and retaining employees as a major challenge. A small founding team could work through questions together; a larger organization needed people who could carry the work forward. In a 2016 conversation, he distinguished that challenge from managing the customer relationship. The shop depended on both. Choosing interesting merchandise meant assembling a team able to recognize it, explain it and get it through the business.

There was no reason for a customer to separate the pleasure of finding an object from the experience of receiving it. A retailer could do everything right on the screen and still leave somebody watching a tracking page. Hum’s account of the work involved forecasting and communication with vendors. The exciting product had to survive a succession of very ordinary tasks.

Recognition, then a different ledger

Hum and his three co-founders appeared together in Forbes’ 2016 Retail & E-Commerce 30 Under 30 selection. That grouping matters. The business depended on several people’s abilities and interests, rather than one person’s taste being projected onto every category. A founder could bring judgment to an assortment without personally being an authority on every object inside it.

In 2016, Hum also received a Retail Innovator Award. Recognition arrived while the company was showing that its customers would buy substantial items through mobile devices. The phone had become a place where considered purchases could happen, alongside the casual browse.

The later company history complicates any smooth success story. In May 2022, the original corporation entered an assignment for the benefit of creditors. Substantially all its assets were sold to Touch of Modern LLC on May 27. The name continued under a different entity. That change belongs beside the growth years; a sales milestone never guarantees the durability of a business.

What remains of the maker

Hum has described making things by hand from childhood. In 2018, he connected that experience to a designer’s difficulty in finding a market for something unfamiliar. A conventional retailer can take time to adopt an unusual product. A frequently changing online assortment offered another route to people willing to look.

That ambition gives his career a continuity its changes of medium might obscure. There are buildings, interfaces, furniture and the presentation of other people’s inventions. In each case, somebody must decide how an idea will meet its user. The public role changed too: by his 2020 commerce interview, Hum was introduced as executive chairman.

Today, Touch of Modern’s terms identify TOMO Services LLC as the operator. Hum’s place in this account is as its co-founder and former CEO and executive chairman. The historical distinction leaves the personal story intact. A used book helped him acquire another way to make things. The more difficult education came in putting those things before other people, and allowing their decisions to matter.