BUSINESS
The Story Of Jeremy Cai and Italic’s Success
Jeremy Cai is the founder of Italic which is an internet shop that sells luxury products without
the brand names or the associated markup. Instead, the company creates its own products, which are then mass-produced by the same factories that produce high-end names like Alexander Wang, Burberry, and Prada.
Park City, Utah-based Illinois native Because of his family’s decades-old manufacturing firm, Jeremy Cai is intimately familiar with the current retail supply chain’s flaws. It has offices in Chicago, China, and Taiwan, and has been producing industrial parts like car, mining equipment, hydraulics, and more for over 40 years.
Cai founded Italic in 2018 to address the retail industry’s pricing and value disparities. Italic is a DTC internet marketplace that sells apparel, jewelry, and home goods that are all elegantly designed and typically minimalist.
With a family history of entrepreneurship, the idea for Italic began to take shape, with the goal of making it more than simply another label. Although Jeremy recognises the value brands provide consumers, customer service, product design, payment orchestration, and operational fulfillment, he believed Italic could align its own incentives with the manufacturer’s, allowing them to get a higher yield on existing production capacity without having to change their own business.
The price is established by the producer, who distributes the profits with Italic. Italic now sells 100 items, ranging from cashmere sweaters to leather wallets to 400-thread-count linens, and wants to expand its product line by 2020. In November 2018, it received $13 million in investment.