Unfair Advantage

List of Resources: 

1. Advisors
• Valuable: I have people who I can each out to who will help me to form the company. This is pretty valuable as it is important to have people guiding you.
• Rare: These advisors aren't necessarily rare as there are many people who are involved in the clothing business. However, it can be hard to make connections to people who actually know and understand your market.
• Inimitable: There are other people who are involved in this sort of business who I'm sure would mentor other people.



this pic of stevie nicks has
nothing to do with anything.
i just love stevie.

• Non-subsitutable: I don't really consider advisors to be substitutable because there is no substitute for experience.
2. Creativity
• Valuable: Creativity is very valuable for my business because you need to be creative to come up with innovative designs.
• Rare: Everyone has a different level of creativity and has a different idea of it. So I would say that my own personal creative vision is pretty rare.
• Inimitable: Because it's my own personal creativity, I would say that it's not immutable by others.
• Non-subsititute: Creativity can't easily be replicated or replaced by another resource.
3. Vision
• Valuable: It's important to have a vision and goal for your company down the line.
• Rare: It's not rare for a company to have a vision or goal, but each one is specific to that company. I think that my company's vision to create like-vintage, quality, affordable t-shirts is fairly specific to my company.
• Inimitable: It's fairly simple for a company to come up with a vision or direction for a company and my specific vision probably isn't that hard to copy.
• Non-subssitutable: There isn't a specific resource that could take the place of a soil long term vision.
4. Customer support
• Valuable: It's important to know that your market supports the idea of your company at least a little so that you know you're not doing all the work in vain.
• Rare: Most successful companies have support from the customers.\
• Inimitable: It's easy to asses if the market liked the company just based on the sale and by conducting interviews.
• Non-subsituable: Customers determine the trajectory of a business and so without them then you can't really do anything.
5. Low Start-up Costs
• Valuable: It's good that in order to start my business, I wouldn't really need to do anything drastic. I could easily start creating designs on my computer and then making them myself.
• Rare: Many people create cool t-shirts at home and sell them for profit online on stores like Etsy.
• Inimitable: It's easy to imitate this business model. Anyone with a computer can create cool designs and have them printed on a shirt at home. You just need to know how. 
• Non-subsituable:  Not all companies have low start up costs because some are more high-tech and need fancy prototypes and heavy investment before they can even test the product on the market.
6. Listening
• Valuable: Its important to be a good listener in that you can hear what the market is saying and accurately adjust your business plan to better serve the customers.
• Rare: Being a good listener isn't rare. Most successful companies are open to feedback from the market so they can be innovate and change with the customers' desires.
• Inimitable: It's easy to be a good listener. Even parents start teaching their kids how to listen from a young age. It can be more challenging for a already closed company to change to an open one though because they could be opposed to change or attempt to disregard what the market is trying to tell them.
• Non-subsitute: There really isn't a good substitute to just listening to what other people are saying and then trying to figure out the way to best serve them.
7. Affordable
• Valuable: Having an affordable product is good as you can cater to wider market,
• Rare: Affordable t-shirts isn't that rare
• Inimitable: It's easy to make cheap t-shirts, but many of them aren't good quality.
• Non-subsituable: Affordability is a cornerstone of my idea, but is could be sacrificed if I wanted to cater to a different type of market or if I wanted super high quality.
8. Specific Market
• Valuable: As I said before, it's important to know your market. I will be catering to people with a very specific sense of style which is valuable because the company won't have to worry as much about covering all it's bases.
• Rare: Clothing already exists that carters to this market's sense of style, but they aren't t-shirt specific.
• Inimitable: Other companies could easily recognize and cater to this market. Some already do, so it's easy to imitate.
• Non-subsitute: It's good to have a specific market, but having to cater to a wide market wouldn't be bad.
9. Personality of Company
• Valuable: People like when a company shares their values and has a personality attached to it. So I think the fact that my company would have a specific personality is a valuable resource.
• Rare: It's not that rare for a company to have a personality and vibe to it. However, my personality is unique to me so no other companies would be exactly the same.
• Inimitable: Because it's my own unique personality, it's fairly difficult to imitate it exactly, but I bet others could probably get close.
• Non-subsitute: It's hard to substitute the personality of the company for something else. So I guess I would say that they're aren't really and substitutes.
10. Easy to Access
• Valuable: When I interviewed some people, they liked the idea of the store being online because it could replace the hassle of going to the thrift store. So easy access is an important resource.
• Rare: It's obviously not rare to sell clothes online. But stores that specialize in vintage-like clothing are a little bit more rare.
• Inimitable: It's pretty easy to initiate an online store in this day and age. Because it's cheap, pretty much anyone could do it.
• Non-subsitue: The substitute would be just going to the thrift store, which some of the people I interviewed said that they actually enjoyed. So there would be a substitute.

Top Resource:

    I'd say that the top resource is probably the Personality of the Company. It's hard to replicate the personality of any company exactly. For a lot of the customer base that I interviewed said that they liked the fact that the company would sell t-shirts that fit directly within their aesthetic.