December 15, 2005
english cut notes…
[Thomas working away with some classic 10-ounce Wool Worsted.]
Nick Hart, another Savile Row tailor, was in the Telegraph today.
Nick makes cool stuff. I’m not sure how good a hardcore tailor he is, compared to the ubertailors– Anderson & Sheppard, Huntsman’s, Welsh & Jeffries, Kilgour’s etc. Still, Nick’s “brand” is pretty groovy.
I’m seeing how he’s running his business, reading between the lines. I can tell he’s spending a lot. I’m not sure how much he’s making. Profitable? Who knows. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s still early days. He’s got financial backing, at least. Good luck to him, regardless.
English Cut now has all the bespoke business we can handle. Now we have to decide whether we want to just continue doing what we’re doing, or find some clever fashionista way to grow the company, like how Nick Hart is doing.
The thing is, I don’t want to do it the way Nick is doing it. Too obvious. Too expensive. Too many other people trying to do the same thing. Using other people’s money. Taking other people’s orders.
So the plan is to keep growing it organically. Slow is good.
A contradiction in terms don’t you think? You say “…has all the business we can handle” and then you want to grow organically? slowly?
Having catapulted the guy into the A-list blogosphere, you’ve run out of ideas? Nah…surely not.
I still get a lot of links from a comment I threw onto EC months ago and which related to something else from even further back. So has the Long Tail developed a whiplash on the upstroke?
If so then slow+organic won’t work. It’ll piss the prospective Kindred Spirits off ‘cos apart from nice stories and fun facts, they actually want to part with money for a product.
Is it the case that Thomas can’t get the hired help he needs to build the business? As you’ve said before, humans don’t scale well. That’s why you need more of them to do the same thing.
Bit of a conundrum don’t you think?
Should’ve said — it might on the other hand be possible for Thomas to grow at a greater rate than he otherwise would.
Assuming no price rise. Assuming there are tailors out there, thinking ‘I wish I could do better, I wish I could do fun things’ or something similar. Then maybe the task is to reach those folk so they’ll be more inclined to take the risk.
But then Thomas has to think about quality control and what an additional person or two does for his supervisionary duties…
It’s still a conundrum.
You could consider increasing prices, thereby confirming further the “quality” of the product offering.
Grow slow, grow strong — courtesy of Howies (a great brand — possibly not a microbrand though)
http://www.howies.co.uk/growslow.php?m=ow
Dennis, by “organically”, I mean by “not using outside investment”.
We have a few ideas
I thought you would have ‘fresh’ ideas Hugh…go at it!
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