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January 21, 2005

wired tailor

6 Comments

“English Cut”, the blog of my pal, Savile Row Tai­lor Tho­mas Mahon only went live a day or two ago and already it’s being tal­ked about. Nice to see.
Just saw Tom Peters blog­ged it. Cool!
Yeah, I tur­ned Tho­mas onto blog­ging and hel­ped him set up the web­site. This is what I said in Tom Peters com­ment sec­tion:

Tho­mas’ busi­ness is inte­res­ting to me. It’s very “niche”, cer­tainly, but the demand for bes­poke English suits is fairly steady, but the supply of young tai­lors willing to endure a 7-year appren­ti­ceship has been drying up over the last 50 years. Now the ave­rage age for a good English tai­lor (at Tho­mas’ level) is around 60.
So even if the mar­ket for bes­poke is tiny, there’s only about 20 peo­ple IN THE WORLD who can cut an English suit at Thomas’s level. And a good por­tion of Tho­mas’ direct com­pe­ti­tion have never even sent an e-mail before, let alone star­ted blog­ging. So once Tho­mas saw the pos­si­bi­li­tes of blog­ging, he jum­ped right at it.

Right now I have no finan­cial invol­ve­ment in Tho­mas’ blog or tai­lo­ring busi­ness.
Still, the idea of a “Wired” Savile Row tai­lor is such a no-brainer… it was just one of those things that came together over beers one eve­ning.
[UPDATE:] The definition/explanation of the word “bes­poke” is here.

6 Responses to “wired tailor”

1. John says:

   January 21, 2005 at 12:41 PM

   I saw the men­tion on Tom Peters weblog and remem­be­red that you were wor­king with an ups­cale tai­lor; I figu­red it had to be your client.
   The idea of a “Wired” Savile Row a no-brainer? Exactly! Just like the idea of a Wired GC!!
2. tonygoodson says:

   January 21, 2005 at 12:42 PM

   Taylor’s Weblog

   Right that does it, I’m off to be a plum­ber (but without the pooey bits). Don’t you ever think, stuff it, I’d much rather be doing a phy­si­cal trade thing. Crea­ting something that you can look at and say,
3. Tom Maszerowski says:

   January 21, 2005 at 3:14 PM

   Hugh, for­give my Yank igno­rance, but what is the ori­gin of the term “bes­poke”? Goo­gle and wiki­pe­dia don’t have much and dictionary.com tells me what I already knew.
4. hugh macleod says:

   January 21, 2005 at 3:29 PM

   Tom, an definition/explanation of “bes­poke” is here:
   http://www.englishcut.com/archives/000004.html
   I’ll also update this entry with the same info…
5. Nancy says:

   January 21, 2005 at 4:00 PM

   Years ago I loo­ked this up, Tom. I wrote something somewhere on a news­group about the Ger­man usage of the pre­fix “be-” as com­pa­red with the English use of the pre­fix. Many times simi­lar, some­ti­mes not. You might start searching a little further back if inte­res­ted in the lan­guage.
   sprechen=speak
   besprechen=discuss or agree upon something.
   (past tense=besprochen)
6. Nancy says:

   January 21, 2005 at 5:06 PM

   Inte­res­ting to note that the the first hit I got on goo­gle when I tried to look that up again brought me to
   Mic­ro­soft Natual Lan­gauge Pro­ces­sing.
   http://research.microsoft.com/nlp/
   … keep wor­king on that tricorder.