David Fudge, director of brand marketing for Bonobos

Today Betabeat is launching "Ask An Expert," a new video series sponsored by FedEx, where you can live chat one-on-one with leading industry experts in social media, real estate, law and brand marketing and get their advice on scaling your business.

We're kicking it off with David Fudge, director of brand marketing for Bonobos.com. The company, which is backed by Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Nordstrom, started with the simple idea of making better-fitting pants for men and is now one of the largest online apparel brands in the U.S. 

Mr. Fudge oversees Bonobos' brand and content strategies, including its marketing campaigns, emails and social media. He will be online from noon to 1 pm today answering your questions on how to use social media to grow your brand. Tune in here to join the conversation.

One of Bonobos' displaced Ninjas. (Photo: Tumblr)

Many startups are able to work remotely with just a laptop and a working Internet connection--though good luck finding one right now. But for ecommerce companies focused on pushing products out into the real world, "just ship it" is taking on a whole new meaning. Between extensive power outages and three days without a functional subway, the disruption is likely to last through the week.

"Eccommerce companies are lucky since we don't have physical stores--we can handle a break pretty easily," said Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan. "We are a little bit like an airplane," he added: "you can turn off the engine for a little bit and there is no problem--if you turn off the engine for a while it is a disaster, but a few days is not a big problem."

That doesn't mean recovering from Sandy has been painless, though.

Many of the companies we talked to didn't have power, and they were preparing their customers for delivery delays.

JackThreads CEO Jason Ross reported that the company's Soho HQ is closed, as they've got no power. Many employees don't either, but they're doing their best to work. Problems also stemmed from JackThreads’ facilities across the East River: "Our warehouse and photo studio in Brooklyn have been shut down the last two days which has delayed our sales calendar as we can't receive merchandise, photograph merchandise or ship anything," he told Betabeat via email.

Mr. Ross expects the warehouse and studio will be back up and running sometime today, offering any employees who can get there a place to work. He's hoping the Soho office will be back online by Monday.

Bonobos' offices at West 25th and 6th Avenue are also closed, as they don't have power. "While Bonobos' 'free & fast' shipping generally arrives in two-days, delivery delays are expected," spokesperson  Kaitlyn Axelrod told Betabeat via email. Packages are getting out of their Massachusetts warehouse, they might take a few extra days to reach customers.

Meanwhile, Bonobos' customer service staffers in New York City are working where they can, and the Palo Alto team has stepped up to support them. "Ninjas are available via phone, email and social media to help customers track packages and answer questions," said Ms. Axelrod. The company's stylish employees have even created their own Tumblr, chronicling work-from-home post-Sandy.

Birchbox, Rent the Runway, and AHALife are all dealing with delivery delays, as well. "There have been a lot of elements out of our control," Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman told Betabeat.

Even for companies with working offices, it's all hands on deck. BaubleBar's Flatiron HQ didn't even lose power or Internet--"not sure how we narrowly escaped that," cofounder Daniella Yacobovsky told Betabeat via email. Yesterday, almost all of BaubleBar's staffers made it into the office, trekking from four of the five boroughs.

"People who lived near one another carpooled in (most with 2 hour + commutes), lots of folks brought food for the team and everyone has collectively put down their work and come into operations to help QC and fulfill orders," said Ms. Yacobovsky.

For the most part, companies seemed grateful the damage wasn't worse. “We’ve gotten in touch with every member of the team and they’re all safe," JackThreads' Mr. Ross said, sounding upbeat. "Everyone has found a safe place where they are able to work diligently and stay positive and productive.”

While Gilt Groupe doesn't have power in its main offices, the company's Brooklyn outpost (typically used for photo shoots) should be up and running again today. Because their customer support and distribution centers are located outside New York City, Mr. Ryan expects delivery delays of no more than a few days, and since they shoot product photos almost a week in advance, they haven't missed anything yet. "But one or two more days and it would have had an impact," said Ryan.

As it is, the hurricane has "hardly impacted business." They maybe lost 10 percent of sales for Monday and Tuesday, but overall they came out about even: "The bottom line is that some people had no electricity or phones so they obviously did not shop, some had mobile only and were bored so they shopped a little and some had both and were locked in their apartment and bored and they shopped a lot," said Mr. Ryan.

"In general, we got off very lucky," he said.

UPDATED: Gilt Groupe also tells us that, to help the affected areas get back on their feet, Gilt City NYC  will be donating 30 percent of profits from now through Sunday to the Red Cross's hurricane relief efforts. AHALife will also donate 15 percent of sales from October 31 to November 4 to the disaster response organization Team Rubicon.

Additional reporting by Nitasha Tiku.

Is Groupon really a tech startup? Why? Because it uses email? Because it uses an algorithm to trigger a deal's tipping point?

The lines are especially blurry in New York, where media, ecommerce and fashion are the strongest markets. Angel investor Mark Birch mused on the topic this morning. "Technology is required, but it is certainly not the differentiator," he wrote. "And do not expect the winners to be based on the best tech. It will come down to execution, closing deals, smart user acquisition strategies, and superior service/community." Sounds like Silicon Alley's specialty.

One thing does seem to be held in common across the range of new tech startups: scalability. This may be why some tech VCs are investing in more mixed-blood startups. If the business can scale with the speed of Facebook, Tumblr or Pinterest, it seems to be fair game—whether it's eyeglasses, custom pants or Internet-enabled grilled cheese.

Dealbook's Evelyn Rusli has the best piece on the investment, in which she notes that Nordstrom acquired flash fashion sales site HauteLook last year and has budgeted $140 million for ecommerce this year, a 40 percent increase over last year. And while Bonobos was spending more and more on marketing, Nordstrom-in-chief Jamie Nordstrom envied the conversational tone Bonobos took with its customers, a quirk he discovered while "scouring the Web for innovative ideas."

Mr. Nordstrom was particularly impressed with Bonobos’s e-mails to consumers, which included customized elements and links to quirky You Tube videos that weren’t related to fashion but appealed to Bonobos’s male clientele.

Meanwhile, Bonobos CEO and founder Andy Dunn admitted that, "We understand there are people who still want to touch and feel clothing before they purchase." We can all learn things from each other. Wonder if Nordstrom will start telling customers that its pants will make their "butt look great."

Mr. Eisenberg.

Accel Partners, which is invested in all the companies you've heard of from BitTorrent to Facebook, as well as all the ones you haven't, from Chakpak to YuMe, announced a year ago it had picked up a New York office in the Google building at 111 Eighth Ave. But apparently the venture capital firm was holding back.  "The early plan was to use a rotating case of Accel investors from other offices— including Jim Breyer and Theresia Gouw Ranzetta. A sort of professional flophouse, if you will," reports Dan Primack at Fortune.

But it's now public that Accel has hired David Eisenberg, employee no. 1 at Accel portfolio company Bonobos (he's @davebonobos) and Upper West Side newbie, as entrepreneur-in-residence.

Accel's New York investments include but are not limited to Birchbox, Bonobos, Etsy, Lot18,  Salescrunch, Loosecubes, Learnvest and BaubleBar (plus whatever fantasy football startups Mr. Eisenberg is sourcing right now). Betabeat called Accel's office to find out how many staff are in New York—"I can't tell you, because I don't actually know"—and got transferred to Palo Alto. Sounds like Accel is yet to get rooted. S'okay, guys—we all know how tough it is to move to the city.

Currently on sale!

Bonobos, the popular e-tailer that launched in 2007 with the promise of a better-fitting pair of pants (ones that could hug CEO Andy Dunn's "surprisingly meaty thighs"), is raising a $15 million equity round. According to the company's latest Form D, Bonobos has already raised $7,999,973 toward that goal, with $7,000,027 still up for grabs.

The issuer is listed as Bonobos itself and not Mr. Dunn in particular. The equity is offered in "Series C-1 Preferred Stock and the common stock issuable upon conversion thereof," and the round is unrelated to a merger or acquisition.

The Form D says the date of the first sale was January 5th, 2012 and six investors have already signed up, so the round is closing fast. The last time Bonobos raised funding was December, 2010, when Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners invested $18.5 million to help with customer acquisition.

Perhaps this latest round will go towards being able to support traffic from all those new customers. Bonobos experienced such an "epic fail" last Cyber Monday when 60 percent discounts drove traffic to 10x what was expected that questions regarding 404 errors, slowness, and false charges shot up to the top of Quora. But the entire staff pitched together to respond, including Mr. Dunn, who fielded phone calls until 3am and Director of Customer Experience, John Rote, described by some as a mythical hybrid of "man/unicorn."

The Bonobos 404 page.

File this under how to handle an epic fail. We didn't even know Bonobos had had an epic fail on Cyber Monday until we got our Quora newsletter this week, in which the top question was: "Why did Bonobos have such an epic fail on Cyber Monday 2011?" Apparently, the e-retailer was overwhelmed with traffic for its up to 60 percent off discounts and had to take down its site for days. But before it could, the startup accidentally charged customers who hadn't made orders, served up agonizing slowness and surfaced repeated 404 errors—a nightmare for a company that strives for Zappos-esque customer service.

In the Bonobos office, it was apparently all hands on deck with the customer service team, a.k.a. ninjas@bonobos.com. The Twitter popped off with apologies and self-deprecating jests, hashtag #SaveBonobos. "We experienced 10x more traffic than we planned for. And we planned for a ton," UX lead Jon Schlossberg wrote on Quora in the (unofficial) post-mortem. "The incredibly high volume revealed several major issues with our infrastructure, the worst of which resulted in charges to customers' credit cards without an order being placed."

In order to avoid serious harm, Bonobos pulled the site and decided to take a rain check on Cyber Monday deals. The company is close to having refunded all the inaccurate charges and given all affected customers "a personal apology that included $20 store credit."

Read the entire ~1,500 word apology, which has been upvoted 200 times on Quora as of this writing. Some other key excerpts:

On the tech team:

They've maybe slept a total of 5 hours in three days. We have our internal resources, our web dev shop, three senior engineers from a Magento specialist agency, and a SWAT team from Magento itself-- led by their CEO-- actively working on the site.

I'll reveal more here when we're further out of the weeds.

On customer service:

Nearly everyone who works at Bonobos has stopped what they do normally and are pitching in to answer phones, emails, tweets, Facebook posts, grab lunch and dinner and second dinner for everyone, and in general contribute to the highest morale I've ever seen at this company (which is saying a lot).

For example, Andy Dunn, our CEO, has been balancing time coordinating the tech team's efforts, keeping the entire staff updated on progress, sending inspirational emails, and... answering customer phone calls til 3am.

On unicorns:

The culture in the Ninja Dojo is phenomenal. I say this as an outsider—as a designer, I'm usually not answering phone calls— who has been assimilated the past three days. And that culture can be largely attributed to one man/unicorn: our Director of Customer Experience, John Rote.