Kirk Keel Built 99 Shirt Sizes - Then Learned the Customer Was Somewhere Else

There is a pleasing bit of mischief in building a clothing company around the proposition that clothing sizes are mostly fiction. Small, medium and large look orderly on a shelf. Human beings, inconveniently, do not. Kirk Keel saw that mismatch and responded like the mechanical engineer he had trained to be: gather measurements, search for patterns, replace the blunt system with a more precise one.

The result became Stantt, the menswear company Keel co-founded with Matt Hornbuckle in 2013. Their early system used nearly 200,000 measurements and millions of data points from 3-D body scans. A customer's chest, waist and sleeve measurements could be matched to one of 99 shirt sizes. The mathematics promised something between a tailor and a rack: near-custom fit without the usual ceremony or waiting.

It was an elegant answer. The market, as markets enjoy doing, supplied a different question.

An engineer walks into the closet

Keel's résumé does not read like the conventional overture to a fashion career. He earned a mechanical engineering degree from Penn State, then worked across operations, quality, supply chains and subcontract management, including roles at Lockheed Martin and experience at General Electric. An MBA at Georgetown followed. At Johnson & Johnson he moved through brand-management jobs on products including Monistat, K-Y, Bengay, Band-Aid topical treatments, Neosporin and Polysporin.

That route gave him three useful dialects. Engineering asks whether a system works. Marketing asks whether anyone cares. Operations asks whether the promise can be delivered repeatedly. A shirt customer, with no patience for departmental boundaries, asks all three at once.

“I am an analytical thinker who loves to constantly ask why. A/B testing makes me smile.”Kirk Keel, describing his operating style

Keel's own description is revealing because Stantt's history is less a straight line than a sequence of tests. The original insight belonged partly to Hornbuckle's frustration with baggy shirts. The solution belonged to their shared suspicion of inherited standards. Why should a handful of letters describe a population of bodies? Why should made-to-measure require the traditional cost and delay? Why should an apparel company make mountains of finished inventory before knowing who wants what?

In 2013, the pair left their corporate marketing jobs and went full time. They carried the 99-size idea into New York's garment district and found a factory owner who was admirably economical with encouragement. Keel later recalled her answer: “Please...go back to your corporate job. You guys are crazy and this is a tough industry.” It is funny now because the company survived. It was also a fair summary of the odds.

The useful failure

Their first crowdfunding campaign missed its goal. That could have served as a neat conclusion: interesting technology, insufficient appetite. Instead, the founders treated the miss as research. They reconsidered the message, put the potential backers rather than themselves at the center of the story, and tried again. The second Kickstarter raised $120,195 - more than eight times its target.

The lesson was not merely persistence, that overused virtue sold by the yard. They changed something. A stubborn founder repeats the pitch louder. An experimental founder studies the silence.

The online proposition still carried friction. Men could understand “better fit,” yet many did not want to do measurement homework before checking out. At pop-ups, something changed. Customers liked being measured. They liked trying different sizes and finding the one that worked. What had felt like labor at home became service in person.

For a company born in the direct-to-consumer moment, the discovery was almost impolite. The future was supposed to bypass stores. Stantt's customer wanted a fitting room.

Retail was not a retreat

Keel and Hornbuckle followed the behavior. They brought Stantt to trade shows and specialty menswear merchants. Store salespeople already knew how to discuss fit without making a customer feel like a geometry assignment. A set of try-on shirts made the algorithm tangible. Once fitted, a customer could return online and order another fabric or style.

This was not digital versus physical. It was physical first, digital later. The store provided confidence; the website provided convenience. Stantt's clever technology became most useful when a person introduced it.

The wholesale network grew. By summer 2019, Stantt was carried in more than 300 doors, including Nordstrom stores and roughly 180 specialty stores. In a later tenth-anniversary reflection, Keel thanked more than 600 retail partners, naming Nordstrom, Dillard's and Bloomingdale's among them. Stantt's current site advertises in-person fittings through more than 350 locations, a figure that reflects its active store locator rather than every relationship accumulated over time.

“Brick-and-mortar shops are the last place we thought we would find success in acquiring new customers when we initially launched.”Kirk Keel on Stantt's unexpected channel

Retailers did more than distribute the product. They edited it. Keel emphasized that “every store is different,” and credited industry veterans who helped the outsiders understand the shirt business. Early stores asked for new fabrics and details. Six fabrics became a much wider set of options. The company added collars, cuffs, monograms, pockets and alterations. A big-and-tall line expanded the sizing system. Trousers followed.

The seam between data and taste

There is a temptation to describe Stantt as an algorithm with sleeves. That understates the operational work. A broader size range can create an inventory nightmare. The company's made-to-order model was designed to avoid stacks of unsold finished goods. The promise then depended on manufacturing one unit at a time and delivering quickly enough that “custom” did not feel like a season of one's life.

The current assortment includes dress and casual shirts, pants, suits, sport coats, quarter-zips and polos. The site now advertises more than 150 customizable sizes and home try-on kits. The number grew; the logic stayed recognizable. Collect a few useful inputs, narrow the choice, produce for the person.

Keel has also maintained the marketing thread of his career. He co-founded CPG Camp, a training organization for brand managers. Its stated purpose is to teach the practical lessons its founders wished they had known earlier. The organization reports training people from more than 250 organizations in 30 countries. It is easy to see the family resemblance: turn experience into a system, then make the system accessible.

By 2026, Stantt was again talking about direct-to-consumer growth, this time with a decade of store credibility behind it. Keel discussed improved product pages, photography, advertising and the peculiar full circle of making online acquisition work after wholesale had built the foundation. The original channel had not been wrong forever. It had been premature and incomplete.

A bigger wardrobe

In July 2026, Stantt acquired Vastrm, a made-to-order knitwear brand known for customizable polos and related pieces. The deal extended Stantt's offering into premium knitwear. Keel described it as a first step toward a platform of modern apparel brands. Terms were not disclosed.

That ambition makes sense beside the old question Keel asked in Stantt's earliest days: “What if our entire closet looked like that?” At first, “that” meant a shirt that fit. Now it points toward an operating platform that could apply fit data, made-to-order production and retailer relationships across more of a wardrobe.

The appealing part of Keel's story is not that an engineer imposed order on fashion. Fashion would never tolerate such insolence. It is that he kept allowing people to complicate the system. Backers changed the pitch. Pop-up customers changed the channel. Retailers changed the assortment. A failed online assumption eventually became a better online business.

Stantt began by objecting to the idea that every body should conform to a few standard sizes. Its founder appears to have applied the same courtesy to the company. He did not force it into the original plan. He kept taking measurements.

A size with a street address

One of Stantt's friendlier decisions was to name sizes after New York streets. The technical system could have produced a thicket of codes, the sort of thing that makes perfect sense in a database and feels like a prison number on a label. A customer might instead become an Essex, Broadway or Carmine. The name does not explain the geometry. It gives the geometry a little dignity.

That detail captures the balance Keel's career has required. Data is valuable because it can notice difference at scale. Branding is valuable because nobody wants to be addressed as a data point. Stantt's system sorts bodies into many more clusters than the usual rack, but the interaction still needs tact. Fit is unusually personal. A better size must feel like recognition, not diagnosis.

The stores supplied that tact. A trained salesperson could take three measurements, suggest a sample and make an adjustment without turning the occasion into a laboratory practical. In 2017, one retailer explained that the app would recommend a model, then move up or down when the sample needed refinement. Another described customers ordering several shirts once the result worked. The mechanism sounded technical; the successful moment was emotional and very old-fashioned: a person looked in a mirror and liked the answer.

Speed mattered too. Stantt was delivering made-to-order shirts in about seven days during its early wholesale expansion, compared with the multiweek wait associated with conventional custom work. That turnaround changed the category in the customer's mind. The purchase could feel special without becoming a project. It also asked a great deal of manufacturing and fulfillment. Precision is charming in a fit quiz. It becomes a discipline when fabric has to be cut, sewn, checked and shipped against a clock.

Keel's operations background is easy to overlook beside the body scans. Yet the algorithm could only recommend a shirt; a supply chain had to produce it. A sizing breakthrough without dependable delivery is an impressive way to disappoint people. The brand's wholesale partners repeatedly emphasized both fit and arrival time. In this business, the second promise protects the first.

What the operator kept changing

Across Stantt's timeline, Keel kept separating the fixed idea from the flexible machinery around it. The fixed idea was that more bodies deserved a precise fit without conventional bespoke expense. Almost everything else was negotiable: the campaign language, the sales channel, the fabric count, the product categories, the role of stores and the route back to ecommerce.

That separation is harder than it sounds. Founders frequently mistake a distribution preference for a principle. A company introduced as DTC starts treating “direct” as a moral position. A software layer becomes the identity even when customers prefer a human guide. Stantt's retail move preserved the insight while discarding some fashionable packaging. Wholesale did not dilute the technology. It gave the technology interpreters.

The company also learned to price and design for the channel it actually had. A wholesale partner needs margin, samples, training and confidence that an order will arrive correctly. A specialty shop may understand its local customer better than a distant brand team. Keel's phrase “every store is different” is plain enough to disappear on first reading, but it rejects the fantasy that distribution is merely a pipe. Each shop is a market with a memory.

That attitude required connections as much as analysis. Keel credited Fred Derring for encouraging specialty stores to try Stantt and former Gitman executive John Minahan for sharing industry knowledge. National sales director Katie McCarthy described early meetings where retailers began removing their shirts to be measured. The scene has comic energy, but it also reveals the social work beneath adoption. An unfamiliar sizing system became believable because trusted people were willing to try it in public.

By the time Stantt introduced trousers, Keel called the program the company's largest launch since its beginning and suggested the category might eventually outgrow shirting. Pants were not a random adjacency. They were a test of whether the sizing logic traveled. Dress shirts had proved that a body map could replace a coarse label. Trousers asked the same system to cross a more complicated border.

The Vastrm acquisition extends that question again. Its made-to-order knitwear gives Stantt another category, additional product knowledge and another set of wholesale relationships. A platform of apparel brands is a more complicated undertaking than a wider catalog, and the public announcement did not pretend the work was complete. It did show how Keel now describes the asset: not simply shirts, nor even 150 sizes, but a repeatable approach to modern apparel.

The pleasure of being corrected

Keel's public comments are generally practical. He talks about store differences, fitting behavior, tests and rollouts. Even his anniversary recollection of the skeptical factory owner lands less as revenge than as a measurement of distance traveled. The company became “more than we could have ever imagined,” he wrote, before shifting attention to customers, retail partners, the team and board.

That is consistent with a founder who says A/B testing makes him smile. A test is an organized invitation to be corrected. It trades the pleasure of being certain for the pleasure of finding out. Stantt's first campaign, its DTC friction and its surprising wholesale traction all provided corrections. Keel's advantage was not getting every premise right. It was keeping the premises available for revision.

Clothing offers a particularly good education in humility. A shirt can look immaculate on a specification sheet and wrong on a shoulder. A channel can look efficient in a presentation and awkward at checkout. A factory expert can offer sensible reasons an idea will fail, and the reasons can remain sensible even when the idea survives. Reality does not grade the elegance of the argument. It tries on the garment.

For Keel, the next act carries a larger version of the original tension. A platform seeks scale; fit insists on the individual. The work will be to make one serve the other. His career so far suggests the method: start with the data, enter the room, watch what people do, and keep enough fabric in the plan for an alteration.