June 2, 2005
english cut ready-to-wear
I’m finding two main issues about selling Savile Row suits:
1. I’d say well over 90% of English Cut fans either can’t afford $3000 suits, or aren’t inclined to spend that kind of money on them.
2. Bespoke suits don’t scale. Tom can make 3 – 5 a week, and that’s it.
So we’re looking at ways of going into the ready-to-wear market.
No, we’re not thinking of selling $1200 designer label stuff. That stuff is junk; it’s a ripoff.
Right now English Cut is making the best suits in the world in the $3,000 dollar range. We want to do the same in the $500 – 600 price range. Not too cheap, not too expensive.
It’s a potentially huge market. A lot of suits at that price range are made by people who don’t know what they’re doing– watch out for howlers like 3 buttons on the cuffs, “keyhole” buttonholes on the lapels etc. It all looks tacky, because it is.
We’re going after the sharp, classic English cut. Soft yet authoritative lines, strong cloth designs (e.g. classic “Fuck-you pinstripes” etc.). All the little details done properly (like, FOUR buttons on the cuffs, like they do it on Savile Row).
And then line extensions. Shirts, ties, cufflinks etc. All carrying the “English Cut” label. Or one idea I like a lot: business casual for our many U.S. West Coast readers.
Think Ralph Lauren, only smaller and sharper.
[Factoid:] John Vizzone, chief designer of Ralph Lauren Purple Label, doesn’t just wear his own clothes. I’m actually not sure if he wears Purple Label himself, either. I do know he wears Savile Row. Same with Calvin Klein. When Tom worked at Anderson & Sheppard, he cut for them both.
[NB:] If we do this, we’ll still be giving the full-on, obscenely expensive bespoke Savile Row treatment, of course.
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I’m one of those who can’t spend $3,000 (or even half of that) on a suit, but you’re describing the kind of suit that I can afford every now and again. I’d love to have one — or more — with the kind of design traits you’re describing (even if it wouldn’t reflect the kind of hand-sewing expertise that one can get in a bespoke suit).
Trying to get at that market is worth thinking about. There’s a lot of competition (at least here in the US) from established retailers who have access to cheap sewing and materials. But as you noted in your post you can distinguish your product from theirs in several ways.
Well, sadly, there will be a lot of compromises required if you want to spend less than $600. Fused canvassing as opposed to hand canvassing, machine-sewn lapel edges instead of hand-sewn lapel edges etc etc.
But as you say, there’s a lot of things you can do to sharpen the look of that price range, that a lot of suit makers are currently not doing, for one reason or another.
Whatever price point we enter, we’re only going to do it if we can make the best of its kind in the world (or damn near, anyway).
There’s no point, otherwise.
As much as I’d love to have my own suit from English Cut (and $600 is certainly closer to my current price range than $3000), I think I’d be a little sad to see it. Obviously you and Thomas understand the business better than I, an uninformed observer, but there’s always the risk of devaluing the brand, no?
As a consumer, I’d be excited; as an admirer I’d be disappointed.
Good luck, whatever you choose.
i’m looking for a suit at around that price point. how long until the ready to wear line is ready to go?
“Bespoke” T-Shirts
After starting to read the gapingvoid, I learned a ton about the word
Consider doing suits for women too. Trousers (not jeans) for women hardly ever _truly_ fit unless they have an elastic somewhere. For jackets, the size where my shoulders look right is too tight at the back; one size up, the back feels comfortable and the shoulders are bulky and horrible.
I’ll take the Armani look: not what he sells, but what he wears: jeans and a tshirt every day.
http://www.ruggedelegantliving.com/a/cat_re_real_estate_tmp.html
It’s interesting to me that your 2 issues point in opposite directions: too much demand vs too low demand.
Going into a totally new (down-)market might be a solution, but lots of craftsmen have tried that route and found it left them unhappy.
I am in the market for a new suit about once a year and would definitely buy an English Cut branded suit for $600. Go for it!
I think you and Tom have a great idea, truly disruptive in the context that the status quo will be rocked to their very foundations.
How do you expect to scale if the demand increases to a point where Tom can’t produce the suits fast enough? If you need to outsource some of the production, will you consider going to other countries with lower overall costs, like The Gap does with Li & Fung?
If so, is the notion of “English Cut”, and the emotion that is elicited the remarkable aspect of the idea?
I can suggest another reason that you’re not hitting the volume you want. The richest people I know aren’t geeks. I’ve worked in tech for a decade and the people I know who run hedge funds and movie studios don’t know what a blog is.
RSS is great for reaching middle-class 30 somethings who spend to much on Macs. The big money’s still listening to the radio and watching TV.
My best friend has a Bentley he loves, an iMac G4 he bought a week before the G5’s came out (“What’s the difference? I only surf the web and write email”) and won’t by an iPod because “Putting the music on it’s going to take ages”.
Think different, think lazy, think referral bonuses and an affilite program.
Oh, our bespoke’s not going anywhere. We’ll still happily sell you a $3,000-$50,000 suit if we decide we like you (yeah, the suits start getting that expensive once you start ordering rare cloths like vicuna etc.). Heh.
But when I was in my pre-bespoke days, I always knew the suits I could afford weren’t as good as they could be. Now’s my chance to do something about it
Sign me up, Hugh…
Let me just put in a plea for those of us with Sidney Greenstreet builds, here (54″ chest, 34″ sleeve, 48″ waist, 29″ inseam) — I’d buy three right this minute.
Sam Sugar, we are indeed getting the volume we want. Tom’s been working flat out for months.
But we’re opening up to other opportunities. In particular, we’re opening up to scalable opportunities.
Like it says in The Hughtrain– business is change, there is nothing else etc.
I’m up for that, but I’m in the UK. One shop, anywhere at all, or direct sale, would do nicely.
Do you have a rough idea of a price in pounds yet?
(PS this might be a duplicate post, connection a bit dicky today. Apologies if so).
Owen
We’re thinking
I’d be in the market for that kind of suit — most definitely. I’m a guy who only has a couple of suits, so I’d like the one’s that I have to be killer. That said, I’ve only bought department store suits — I never really saw the difference between $300 suits and $600 suits, so I tend to buy $300 suits on sale. And I’ve never had a suit that I genuinely liked.
I would spend more money on a suit if I knew that the quality was actually there and I wasn’t just paying for a more expensive label sewn into the jacket.
“I would spend more money on a suit if I knew that the quality was actually there and I wasn’t just paying for a more expensive label sewn into the jacket.“
Yeah, well, a lot of designers make their money from folks like you never finding out “the real information”.
I think there’s a vast untapped market for people willing to pay that extra bit more, in return for actual substance– informed and educational substance– rather than the usual razzle-dazzle designer pretension.
Imagine a young lawyer, with his first job in a firm, right out of law school. He can’t afford Savile Row yet, but he needs to look “The Business” nonetheless.
That’s the kind of target market that interests me. Not the pretentious toyboys who mistake magazine ads with reality.
Bring on the most hardcore, discerning clientele in the world. And we’ll still make better suits than they’re currently used to getting.
We’re doing that already with bespoke. We want to do that with ready-to-wear now. That is all.
Sounds like you are talking about a range of suits made from low-quality cloth with nice detail…
The entire point of bespoke is that it’s correct.
Otherwise, it’s not.
I’d stick to route one and find another Tom.
Suits that don’t fit won’t work — however many buttons you add.
OK, my head’s buzzing now — I’m genuinely excited about this.
Can’t wait to hear more about the ‘model’ and how it differs from yer average clothing retail. I will have to wait until you are ready to tell all, which is fine.
My instincts are saying ‘direct sales’ is the way to go — ie. knock out a big chunk of retail margin and the saving goes into the suit itself. As you said, the fanbase exists already. And it will tell its friends if the result is a good one — me, I see 50+ clients each month and we all need a decent whistle from time to time.
Maybe with a handy ‘guide to how to size yourself up properly’ by Thomas, send
“Suits that don’t fit won’t work — however many buttons you add…“
Heh. It works for Armaini. And Brooks Brothers. And Hugo Boss. And Purple Label. And Marks & Spencers. And Calvin Klein. And Christian Dior.
Most suits, by your definition, don’t work. Because most suits aren’t bespoke.
And even then, most bespoke suits aren’t as good as ours.
Life is tough all over
For what it’s worth, I’m in for the idea.
I want a bespoke, but I can’t afford it just yet, 6 — 700 I can do for a sharp suit.
I am one of your young lawyers, just out of law school, who needs to look the business. Two things. First of all, most of the American legal market is business casual. I’m starting at a top 25 New York firm, and we’re business casual. Last summer I worked in Philadelphia, and they’re casual there too. Really, only half of DC’s firms and much of the South, especially Atlanta, are still business formal.
That said, 1) suits are still required for the courtroom and any time a client will be seeing you, and 2) I still want to have a few suits in the closet.
What I am doing, is going to Thailand after I take the bar exam in July. I’m going to get a bunch of suits made “bespoke” there. And a bunch of pants. And shirts. And it’s only going to cost me 1/3 of Tom’s cheapest suit. I have been meaning to send an email to Tom to ask about this, as it’s fairly common among me peers.
Don’t worry, I know my suits will still be inferior to true Savile Row bespoke. But I have no doubt they’ll be quite a bit better than the Brooks Brothers starter suit I’m wearing now, that cost me nearly $600 and the lining started fraying within the year I purchased it. I can’t afford Tom now, but when I get married, I want it to be in a suit cut by Tom.
I know (I believe) (maybe) Land’s End.com has an avatar that helps you sort out measurements and fit online.
Presumably there is state-of-the-art software somewhere like that that would allow a category of English Cut to be the initial fit department for suits that are partially low-end bespoke, and partially high-end ready-to-wear, and people (such as the plethora of commenters here) could order online ..
Given that it would be a case of ordering through the blog of a welll-known master tailor and asking for and using all the necessary measurements provided by the customer and the avatar, a substantive amount of trust is necessary to do that (versus the trust one hands over to some gormless sales person at C&A or even Harvey Nichols).
I think a good part of that has already been established by the fact that Tom has the blog, the profile, the skills, the business idea .. additional requirements might be issues such as a great after-sales service capability … for example, the possibility to return the suit once with more precise measurements, as long as the customer paid for the shipping .. or something like that.
Disintermediation, or is it re-intermediation (??), along with new business logic … after all, all business is change, etc.
I would definitely be in for a suit at $600 with the EC treatment.
And I don’t even wear a suit to work…
The company that runs the LandsEnd.com fit program is called Archetype. Very interesting, if still rather primitive model. I ordered some “custom” pants from them for $115 that were definitely worth the price, if not a scosche (Pittsburgh term, as in, “let those pants out a scosche more in the seat”) more.
You know you’re treading into difficult waters, Hugh, but I’d be thrilled to see a suit that approximates the bespoke quality at the price point you quoted.
Put me on that list as well.
Sold… I’ll start saving my pennies.
Sounds like a great idea, especially if you have plenty of sizing options to choose from. Any plans to branch out to the ‘Made to Measure’ market too?
Is it going to be an Internet only operation? Or will we have a chance to pop down to Tom’s shop to try things out and feel the fabrics?
The trouble with made-to-measure is that to sell a lot of suits, you have to measure a lot of suits.
Which means you have to have a lot of “tailors” on the payroll. And they need to be managed.
It’s a surprisingly crowded market, and the margins are tiny. Not my idea of fun.
What about some kind of crazy outsourcing thing?
Get the measurements and orders online. Make deals with tailors in Thailand/India/wherever. Every three months, you and Tom fly there for a week and supervise the production, eat great food, etc.
Red the Lawyer here needs enough suits to make it worth going himself. But most folks don’t.
There are already companies that will come and measure you for a suit made in India. Maybe you could do something like that, get an apprentice in each of your major markets to do the measuring… and then what sets you apart is the fact that Tom supervises the actual production, and that his designs are the “originals” from which your custom copy is made.
Some kind of gray area between bespoke and ready-to-wear, affordable but also with a lot of story, and yes you have to wait a bit but Tom’s not flying to Bombay every day.
What would I call it? Duh…
GLOBAL CUT
$500 – 600? Wow, cheaper that I thought you’d aim at. If that were pounds I’d have been pleasently surprised.
I so need a new suit, I couldn’t fit into my nice italian one last time I checked.
Or I could just loose weight. Hmm. Nope. New suit. And Hugh,
Barry, the price point hasn’t been finalised.
Wow, $50,000 for a suit. Still, I guess big money has to be spent if you want to have a suit made out of an endangered, protected species.
Don’t do it. Really. It’s a sell-out. Hire more tailors and cutters if you want to scale.
I’m currently on a diet to lose a lot of weight that has built up over the years. Once I’m down another 4 – 5 stone (already lost 3 stone in 6 months), and I hold it at that level for a few months, I’m going bespoke suit — no point in buying expensive suits if they’re only going to fit properly for a couple of months.
I would easily buy 5 in the first few months. I would consider English cut. I am your market.
However, if you did ready-to-wear, I’d think “Here are people who want money more than they want quality. They want to compromise in the name of wealth”. That goes against every value I hold — it’s vulgar and nobody wishes to be robed in symbols of vulgarity. You’d lose my custom for one.
Sorry if this sounds very Victorian, but bespoke suits hold values that do not scale in the way you intend. If you can’t handle the demand, recruit more people like Thomas or get Thomas to train people. You could have tailors and cutters all over the world.
What you’re proposing is akin to Ferrari producing a people carrier because more people could then afford a people carrier. That’s how Burberry got into the hideous mess they’re in now with the chavs. English cut is supposed to be aspirational, not accessible. Don’t throw that position away — it’s just outright foolish nonsense.
Paul, cars are not Ferrari’s sole income stream. T-shirts, fashion brands, accessories etc.
Secondly, English Cut is not aspirational.
I’m always amused when people say “just hire more tailors”.
I seriously doubt there are 12 tailors in the world who can cut at English Cut’s level.
If there aren’t more than 12 tailors in the world who can cut as well as English Cut, you’ve just found your new market.
Sell scholarships to tailors. Improve the tailors. Show them, for $20,000 and over 12 months how to do it right. Then hire them.
You’ve spent the last lord-knows-how-many-months telling us how rubbish non-bespoke is. You’ve just said that there are only 12 tailors in the world who are as good.
What are you now saying? That you want to sell crap. You are, by definition of your own marketing, your OWN WORDS, proposing to sell complete and utter crap. Because you know, that’s what scaling is all about after all. To hell with everything we’ve just said, let’s just pile up some sweatshop goods and sell them for a huge markup. Sure, we spent the last six months telling the world that quality is worth paying for, but if they can’t afford it, what the hell? We’ve got kids to put through college, and who care about the customer?! NOT US!
Seriously, do this, you’ll see your business die within weeks. You will be heralded as two-faced liars. It’ll kill English Cut, permanently. You can’t have two marketing campaigns that contradict each other. If you must have two sales channels, let them complement rather than conflict — take a leaf out of Tesco’s book re: Value vs. Finest.
Unfortunately, as Seth Godin would put it, you’ve already started telling your story. The story you now want to start selling directly conflicts with the one you’ve already started. You can’t do it without losing everything.
Seriously, your way forward is to find a way of getting bespoke to everybody — sell scholarships, sell training, deal with it.
All I can say is, ‘Please keep me posted.’ The Lucire Men supplement launches next month. Anything that’s slightly disruptive is welcome.
Heh. Paul, five points:
1. I never said off-the-peg was crap. I said designer label was crap, for the money they’re asking. Big difference.
As Thomas said in one of his posts:
“Luckily for suit lovers everywhere, with modern technology there are now some really good ready-to-wear, manufactured suits being made, starting at only a few hundred pounds. Fifty years ago, suits that were both good and cheap did not exist. The tech simply wasn’t there.“
Also:
“For the money, the British high street retailer, Marks & Spencer makes as good a suit as anyone. I rate them highly.“
M&S suits are around the
I too am surprised to hear you talk about ready to wear, given your appreciation of a proper fit. Generally, only those who have a close-to-“perfect” body get a good fit with ready to wear, because it’s not practical to make all the alterations required to properly fit anyone else.
The only way to get a good fit without the cost of bespoke is made to measure, which someone else mentioned earlier. Yes, the “tailors” required to do the measuring have been a problem. However, there is now a way to do made-to-measure without them. Anyone with a couple of days’ training can do it, if armed with a system called “The Fitter”. The Fitter combines a mechanical body-measuring device with software that determines what to order, based on how the human experts do it. Details at http://www.thefitter.com/. Not yet in the UK, but it’s at the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York City, plus some other places in the USA, Canada and France. (Disclosure: I am involved in the company.)
I know of these machines. I also know similar machines in the past have not been too successful.
Why? Simple– people want to be measured by tailors, not machines. It’s all part of the experience. Perception is everything.
But perhaps people’s attitudes have changed etc. So good luck to you.
At all levels of the suit business, from $89 WalMart to $8,000 Savile Row, there are compromises in price, design, fit, brand image, time between order and delivery, scalability etc etc.
So then the question is what cocktail of compromises are the suppliers and the customers willing to make. There is no one answer. If there was, we’d all be doing the same thing already.
Here’s an idea then.
Why not get a computer to kick out gapingvoid.com knockoff cartoons so other people can use them too, and syndicate the blog cards to a whole load of printers so that everyone can have them?
Paul’s comparison to Ferrari is spot on. People spend a lot of money for the feeling they get when they’re seen in (as opposed to driving) one.
As for the Armani, Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren issue. I wonder how long they were trading before they opted for a ready-to-wear option? Also, as far as I know, they were never (selling) Savile Row in the first place.
So people are talking about English Cut, that rocks, really, but here’s the thing, they’re talking about a bespoke tailor (old school) that blogs (new school) they’re not talking about the suits…yet.
Why not let the pure-bred suits settle in the market for a year or so, get people talking about the amazing craftsmanship, and the comments they get from people when they wear it? With respect, right now you say that it’s the best suit in the world, but I think my Mum’s lasagne is the best in the world, others disagree, the proof of course is in the eating.
You’re not there yet, if you go ready-to-wear too early, you’ll be known for ready-to-wear. For me, this is by far the biggest issue, assuming of course that you want to be known as the best suit brand in the world.
Two last suggestions:
Read Stephen Brown’s “Free Gift Inside“
Don’t believe your own PR…!
Also, Rohan:
Sure, off-the-peg has fit issues. That being said, Thomas wears a lot of off-the-peg himself (jackets, not suits), when he’s dressing casual. His body size is luckily well shaped for it. So he doesn’t have an aversion for it that perhaps a 6’6″, 300 pound man would. Which makes it easier for him to sell.
So maybe our market is just for people who either want full-on bespoke or are well sized for off-the-peg jackets. Perhaps the people who don’t want either would be better off finding another tailor?
[First rule of business: don’t try to sell to everybody.]
“You’re not there yet, if you go ready-to-wear too early, you’ll be known for ready-to-wear. For me, this is by far the biggest issue, assuming of course that you want to be known as the best suit brand in the world.“
That’s an excellent point. That being said, I’m guessing it’ll be at least a couple of years before we have a ready-to-wear line ready to launch. I’m just including my readers in the conversation at an extremely early stage.
Meanwhile, there’s other (very exciting) stuff about to happen which will accelerate the “bespoke” conversation… which I’ll go public with at a later date.
Hugh
The guys at Hackett went down this road 20 years ago — they began by selling used bespoke and then made to measure suits with bespoke features. A few shops and then inserts in major retailers.
I almost agree that “people want to be measured by tailors, not machines”: just change “tailors” to “people who appear to know what they’re doing”. One of the distinguishing characteristics of The Fitter is that a human still measures the customer, using a mechanical device that is in effect an improved measuring tape. The process takes 15 – 20 minutes, as 46 measurements are taken (not like the 3D body scanning systems), and the measurements are quite accurate as long as the employee is trained (and doesn’t have a bad hangover: that happened once and the resulting suit was beyond saving). Then the software recommends what to order, based on those measurements — but the employee can make adjustments if desired (this is primarily for the veterans who want to add value; in fact even the inventor of the device admits that the system does better than he does and no longer “improves” its recommendations).
The measuring device is also able to take an inseam measurement without any embarrassing closeness between the employee’s hands and the customer’s groin — which permits female staff to completely measure a man, and men tend to buy more from women (some women, anyway).
So the system continues with the human element, but leaves the hard part to the experts whose knowledge has been embedded in software.
I agree that your future ready-to-wear products will best serve those who have a close-to-“ideal” body. For those who don’t, and there are many of them, those who can’t afford bespoke should really go for made-to-measure. Made-to-measure will also give a slightly better fit than ready-to-wear even for those who are able to wear off-the-rack. You referred to the weakness of made-to-measure in its dependence on skilled “tape men” (as we call them here in North America); in fact The Fitter was developed specifically to solve that problem, together with the matching problem of finding people to make difficult alterations to ready-to-wear garments.
Fundamentally, we see made-to-measure as a valuable approach, but one that’s been held back by various limitations that we believe we have eliminated. It fills the gap between bespoke and ready to wear.
Bespoke doesn’t scale. This is news? Artisanal products have never scaled.
I predict that English Cut’s venture into volume production will lead to another brilliant realization: manufacturing imposes tradeoffs among price, customization, and quality. You can balance the tradeoffs differently than other manufacturers, but you can’t make them go away.