Frew, who apprenticed with a Savile Row tailor, can — all by himself, and almost all by hand — create a pattern, cut fabric and expertly construct a suit that, for about $4,000, perfectly molds to its owner’s body. In a city filled with very rich people, he quickly had all the orders he could handle.
You don't have to be Wall Street to figure out the bleedingly obvious solution to being a starving artist who has so much work they have to turn work away. Raise the prices. Then raise the prices. Then when you're done with that, raise the prices.
At some point you'll be too expensive for the typical businessman, which will make you absolutely crack for a certain type of person common in New York, thus defeating all efforts at being less busy. So it goes. I guess you will have to raise prices.
No offense, but this could be really bad advice. Maybe the customers who'd pay 10k for a suit won't go to some guy's living room for fittings. Or maybe the price of top bespoke tailors in town is comparable, because they make better use of lower-paid assistants. Or maybe, to convince a bank to make the loan he needs to move into a nicer place, he needs to show the bank he has a large backlog of orders. Or maybe he's in the middle of following your advice, just raised his price, and will shortly raise it again because he's still getting enough orders.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying we don't get nearly enough information to decide! And that's ok, because that's not the point of the article.
Totally not offended by that comment, but I strongly disagree.
It is entirely possible that he's found the correct price for a suit: two hours' labor for his core customers. It is entirely possible that the devs who tell me their clients won't pay more than $20 an hour for Rails programming are accurate, and that they're correct in thinking that they're not skilled enough to work for better clients. It is entirely possible that the Rampaging Monster of Doubt actually understands how banks do loan underwriting better than e.g. the banker who you could confirm or reject that hypothesis in a five minute phone call.
But that is not the way I will bet. We're pathologically bad at this. Hiya, freelancer on HN: to a first approximation, you don't charge enough. Seriously. No information required to make that call. (This is said from a place of love. I don't charge nearly enough, either.) This guy, who produces things which rich people love and try to shove money at him for, so much so that he cannot afford to even talk to the rich people to take their money because he is so busy? This guy has our problem, too.
Starving artists who are starving because they produce something nobody wants to pay for are one problem. Starving artists who are starving because they think that they are a precious snowflake immune to Microeconomics 101 are an entirely different problem. They just need business sense.
The point of the article is to cry a bit about how the market economy is making true craftsmanship economically non-viable. (It practically tries to club you over the head with that conclusion.) The article is wrong. It has identified a problem to which there exists a trivial solution that will work.
From the last part of the article I quote the following:
"Even the richest customer simply has to wait — sometimes months — before the new suit is finished. No wonder so many pass up a $4,000 bespoke suit for a ready-to-wear Kiton version at twice the price."
So customers are clearly willing to pay more, but they are not too keen on waiting two months for the suit.
I guess there are clients that buy a given amount of suits every year and have time to wait, but there are other clients that buy a suit when they need one and do not think 2+++ months up front.
The question is if the former group is large enough to sustain his business, and if they are willing to pay more than $4,000. The latter group have clearly the dough, but don't want to wait, so they are really not a segment he can focus on.
So while hiking the price might work, it might be that the real problem here is time to market.
Direct benefit of drastically increasing pricing to best fit offering to profit curve: ability to hire skilled labor to accelerate delivery of offering to customers.
Without going to full automation I guess there are basically two process options here:
1) Add more tailors that work with the suit from start to finish, thus duplicating the work of the lone tailer Mr. Peter Frew in the article.
2) Split the process of Mr. Frew's work among different tailors.
One other company mentioned in the article, Greenfield, is implementing option 2): ". . . there are huge efficiency gains when one complex process is broken down into constituent parts and each worker specializes in one thing. At Greenfield, one worker sews pockets all day long, and another focuses entirely on joining front and back jacket pieces."
According to the article their suits sells for $2000.
Without testing it out it is hard to say if process option 1) will necessarily be seen as more valuable than process option 2) from the customers perspective. It is also hard to say if Greenfield's suits are of lower quality compared to those of Mr. Frew.
At the end of day the story the tailor(s) can create about their workmanship are as important as the prices and processes they put into action. Price is just one element in the marketing mix and can't been seen as separate from the rest, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix
I think the point of the article (which wasn't very clear; maybe Adam Davidson should stick to radio) was that even at a price most of us would consider expensive, this guy doesn't make much money. And the reason is that, as the modern economy makes everything else cheaper, things that depend upon people's labor get relatively more expensive.
So bespoke suits have gone from being a huge part of the suit industry to being a tiny part of it (not non-viable, just not very important). If bespoke tailors want to keep from becoming ever more expensive/niche, Davidson speculates, they will have to adopt at least some labor-saving techniques.
Note your solution--raising prices--is exactly what Davidson is annoyed about. As tailors raise prices, fewer and fewer people can buy bespoke suits. Which is bad. I'd like a custom-built suit, but I definitely won't bet getting one.
You've jumped into this assuming Davidson is writing about a business problem. But I think he's coming at it from a consumer point of view. He doesn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out if the bespoke tailor can raise prices because, well, higher prices reduce consumer surplus, so that doesn't solve the problem he's concerned with.
He doesn't have to jump from $4k to $10k. There's a demand curve and by raising prices from $4k to $5k and up he'll figure out where he can sit.
More importantly, he's already at $4k. The person that spends $4k on a suit isn't going to sneeze at $8k. The person who spends $120 for a suit, throws a fit at $240.
That's commonly believed by mainstream economists, as an article of faith. That there is a demand curve, and it always goes down. It's not always true, unless a huge number of axioms hold (none of which are true).
It's most obviously not true for prestige goods, which go up in demand as price rises (and then go down as no-one is able to afford them). Demand curves can be wacky, even discontinuous ... and don't always go up.
But if they don't go up all the time, then 99% of analytic macroeconomics (as it's taught) isn't analytically correct, and the communists might win.
1. There is a demand curve, or at least we can plot demand. I would agree it can be wacky.
2. It is very likely that even if we get the exact demand curve wrong, it is probably a net win for him to raise his prices given that he is turning down work.
The universe of potential purchasers consists of a set of agents (i=1...N) and each agent has a reserve price R[i]. If a good is priced <= R[i], Agent[i] will purchase it. If it is priced > R[i], Agent[i] will not.
The problem is that demand is not as simple as "agents will buy goods below their reserve price." Real world experience shows us that there exist luxury and inferior goods.
We can quite simply see that there are (many) agents who could buy any number of walmart jeans, but would never set foot in the store. Another chunk of agents currently buy, say, Levi jeans, but likely wouldn't buy those either, if those exact jeans were a third the price and sold in a discount store.
Similarly there are agents who don't give Levi a second thought, but will line up for jeans of similarly quality, trivially variable style and 10x the price.
The real world demand curves for blue jeans don't look like the simple axiom suggests.
I didn't claim the law of demand was perfect or that substitute goods don't exist. I was merely pointing out that wisty was wrong to claim the law of demand requires that "a huge number of axioms hold (none of which are true)." You need only one axiom which is, generally speaking, reasonably accurate.
Further, your example of jeans is trivially explained by noting that "jeans" is a broad category of goods, not a good itself. I.e., there is one demand curve for Levi jeans, a separate demand curve for hipster jeans, and a third demand curve for genuine levi jeans (not jeans that appear at first glance to be Levi, but sold by a shady discount store).
Your critique of the demand curve for jeans applies much better to various demand aggregates in macroeconomics, not the law of demand for specific goods.
I'm not sure this is correct. I remember in one episode of Mixergy, Andrew Warner said something to the effect of "X was the most expensive, so I bought it thinking they'd be the best and they sucked! Don't buy x."
You're missing the fact that nobody is denying that economic principles are a bit noisy in reality, and nobody's denying that demand curves are shaped by marketing and that the price itself is part of this.
And just to show how significant a 20% price increase would be:
If he raised the price just $1k, that's $2k a month, or $24k a year. That would increase his take home income by almost 50%, as he claims his current income is around $50k.
You're forgetting to figure in withholding, self-employment tax, etc... that $24K/year increase would be to his gross income, not his take-home income.
The article said he averages 2 suits a month, or $8K in gross revenue, so that extra $1K per suit would increase his gross by 25%, and his take-home by less. As a sole proprietor craftsman, there's no math that can get you a 50% increase in profit with a 25% increase in gross revenue alone.
Still, not a bad deal, assuming his customers are willing to pay it (I'm willing to bet they are).
EDIT: I shouldn't do numbers while eating dinner :). His take-home increase could be more than 25%, but it's unlikely to be anything close to all of the gross increase, particularly if he wants health insurance, which, if he has it at all, is probably coming out of that $50K.
I don't think that whether or not he wants health insurance should matter when talking about his income. Won't his health insurance cost the same amount if he increases his pre-tax income by 25%(I'm a bit ignorant of health insurance costs, I still have TriCare through the Army). It seems to me that even if he paid about a third of the extra $24k in taxes, that he would still be adding $16k to his current take home income, which is still over 30% more than he was making.
>Or maybe the price of top bespoke tailors in town is comparable
Yup. You'll get a beautiful bespoke (not M2M, truly bespoke) suit in an elegant showroom in Manhattan with fantastic customer service for the same money. I've bought basic suits for two-thirds the price, in fact. He might have an attractive pedigree via his apprenticeship, but that's not worth three times the price to me. There is real, legitimate, similarly credential competition here.
The real question is why hasn't he done this already? It's a fairly obvious solution. I suspect that there is some other force at work here, though I'm at a loss to guess what it might be.
It's too bad that the NYTimes didn't raise this question.
I know an African woman who used to go to the living room of some lady that charged her 20 pounds for work that she could easily charge 50 for - African hair can take a lot of work. This lady never raises her prices.
But she gets booked full 3 months in advance, and everyone who goes there raves about here and thinks she is ridiculously cheap.
Now, granted, a lot of those clients would disappear if she charged 30 or 40 or even 50. But she could afford to lose a lot of them, and even at 50 she'd still be cheaper than most similar quality competition in the area.
Simple solution to testing the prices? Hold back some time slots and offer a "rush" service to those willing to pay extra. Use a sob story about how this is family time she is giving up for you. Worst case she books slightly fewer slots for a while, and gives up on it.
But she is too scared to even try because she is terrified of customers going elsewhere... Despite the fact that people are willing to schedule 3 months in advance to get their hair done in her living room instead of walking into their local salon the same day.
Absolutely. I hate it when otherwise compelling articles fail to even raise a screamingly obvious question, much less answer it. The cynical me wonders if it is because the writers actually do know the answer, and it somehow weakens or distracts from their point. Or perhaps requires the telling of an impolite truth.
yes, things are not so simple. This man is not an idiot. He understand that raising the price could bring in more money with the same number of clients.
'He just increased his price'- Is not very nice if you want to get new customers.
Raising prices may actually increase sales. I think some of the problem is a lot of us are seeing this relationship between the tailor and his clients through the lens of software or service providers. For any right thinking business person there is no pride in going into hacker meetup and saying "I just had to upgrade from the 28 dollar a month plan to the 39 dollar a month plan at saas-of-the-month.com". Guys that buy 4000 dollar suits are operating in a different world. They pay 500 bucks for the custom fit, and the other 3500 bucks pays for being able to say they paid 4K for a suit AND you can't get one when it comes time to play "biggest dick on table" at the next board room meeting.
As patio11 often points out you're wrong about software & suits being in different worlds.
Any real software business is happy to upgrade from the 28/mo plan to the 39/mo plan if it gets even the tinniest benefit. I routinely approve those sort of expenses without spending more then 2 seconds thinking about them.
> Any real software business is happy to upgrade from the 28/mo plan to the 39/mo plan if it gets even the tinniest benefit.
But I'm not referring to benefits, I'm referring to "bragging rights". Say your company was utilizing a SaaS that offered a "Freelancer" tier and an "Agency" tier (where "Freelancer" costs less and offers less than "Agency"). Now if your company's needs could be serviced by the limits of the "Freelancer" tier would you pay more for the "Agency" tier just for the prestige of saying you pay for the "Agency" tier? No, you wouldn't. However that does happen with suits (or watches or luxury cars or other luxury goods), it's signalling.
FWIW: I was reading an article from Patrick / Patio11 just the other day when he talks about having experience with large companies upgrading their SaaS package just because the upgraded name sounded better on an expense report.
So it sounds like some SaaS upgrades may, in fact, be linked to the name of the package and nothing more!
I believe that is was from you I learned about a book, "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing", which I think everyone in this thread should read.
Why speculate about how to set a price when you can apply some structured, thoughtful analysis to the problem?
It turns out that pricing is at once a slightly mysterious art and yet can be grasped in a few hundred pages. And that almost nothing else has as much leverage over profitability.
The book was actually overkill for the reason I bought it (settling on prices for a SaaS project); but I've started recommending it to every small business owner I know. It's that good.
Just wanted to point out that was my first thought as well. Also, wanted to say that I make it a point to read your comment feed on HN. You're one of the 4 folks who I read regularly because of comments like this help me change how I view charging and valuing my work and others.
I'm on the lookout for more very high quality contributors; sticking to their feeds instead of the front page (I still check front and new, just not as often) has greatly increased the value of this site for me.
I don't read pg, because a lot of his comments come across as babysitting HN, which is necessary for him to do, but not something I want to spend my time on.
I believe that what you put before your eyes, becomes what is in your brain, and you can only think about what you've seen before. What you think about is what gets written on your heart, and our actions are based on our heart. So, I value what I put before my eyes pretty heavily and that's why patio11, tptacek, and SatvikBeri are good reads. Danso is really interesting.
patio11 -- Important because he reminds us (me!) about what we're really worth as programmers and beyond that if we want to increase our worth moving bits better isn't the most efficient way to do that.
tptacek -- I don't always agree with him, but I think his world view is probably the most accurate of anyone on HN. The reason why this matters to me, is If I'm being honest with my self, hugely reliant on mental models. I use tptacek as a source of mental models about the world.
danso -- He has some pretty interesting comments, and I find when he does weigh in, it's usually from personal experience. Photography, Journalism, and data are his big topics of interest.
SatvikBeri -- I've never met the guy, but if you can get past his telling of how he saved his employer $2MM in a single year (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4419277) over and over again, which I find very easy, he's worth reading. He doesn't post as much as the others, so I usually check in once a week or so. In a lot ways though, I think the $2MM story, is worth reading over and over again. It holds a lot of wisdom in how to approach business for the nerd-sphere.
I read HN on cell phone about 95% of the time, and have 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com in my host file, so I just have these guys bookmarked on my cell phone and check in with the top two daily, danso every couple days, and SatvikBeri about once a week.
I also read yummyfajitas and mechanical_fish as well, but far less regularly. Usually, when I see a comment they make, I'll click on their username and read through their comments if I have time.
Yeah I am also of the same opinion about high quality contributors. I have a Hacker News Reader iPhone/iPad app on the market and I just had a feature idea from this.
It would be awesome to tag users as favorites and then view their comments from the home page.
Also it would be beneficial to tag some users as annoyingly political so that their comments get hidden automatically.
One thing to keep in mind is that that comment is what made me start following you in the first place, so it does get folks attention. I wouldn't worry about comment diversity too much, after all I keep coming back!
Most of the time proponents of price-elasticity make me laugh. And, I do say this with respect. I used to be one of these proponents. I inhaled business book after business book once done with engineering school. And, I played the game. And I got my ass handed to me.
In the real world price elasticity works within a very narrow range that is industry and product specific and can --and usually is-- highly dependent on a huge number of external factors.
Discounts are one of my favorite. Believe me when I say that I've played that game multiple times. I used to own an electronics manufacturing business that made products for industrial and professional applications. I had to face the reality of product from Korea and China entering the market at half my price and offering 60% of my value. The result, no matter what I did, was the huge sucking sound of sales leaving for the competition.
Lower your prices you say? Did that. Multiple times. In multiple creative ways. Eventually matching their prices and accepting lower profits. "We'll make it up in volume". Bullshit! Maybe I sold 1% more product. That's it.
OK, how about more value. Did that. Multiple times. Added features. Added mind-numbing technology. No-go.
We are talking about products costing thousands of dollars per unit here. The fact was that people, particularly as the economy got worst, wanted Walmart, not Gucci. And so the business went to what they perceived to be the cheapest they could get.
Don't get me started on Asian companies dumping to kill-off competition. Nasty.
OK, well, how about the high end. I had very high end product as well. $50K per unit and above. High performance. The best of the best. Volume, just like the taylor in the article, sucked. We could make these "Ferrari's" but it was sheer pain and suffering, financially speaking. The general theory was that we'd sell a high-end unit and also sell a lot more lower-end units along with them. Nice dream.
So, raise prices? Sure. Why not? The problem is that people are only willing to pay so much for what they are buying. The "how much" is a multivariable problem that is nearly impossible to solve. This is certainly true for a taylor who only makes a few dozen suits per year. He can't experiment with pricing too much as word of mouth would destroy his business. If customer B learns that he paid more for the suit that his friend, customer A bought all hell breaks loose.
I know I sound very negative about this. I am just looking at it from the perspective of having experienced failure in price elasticity due to the product I was pushing existing in a very narrow trading margin. Volume couldn't really scale at the bottom or at the top due to different factors and price at the top was limited by what people were willing to pay for the product category.
Perhaps he can charge more for additional services that he might not be monetizing. One example might be to extend the delivery time on his standard $4,000 suit and charge a $1,000 fee for faster delivery. In effect he would be raising his actual per-unit price, but it would be in the context of easily communicable value. In the prior example, customers A and B would have on issue with what each paid because the conversation would quickly identify that B got his expedited, which costs money.
He could also take in an apprentice and see about offloading some of the work. My family owned several clothing manufacturing plants and so I am also familiar with aspects of this business. There's a lot that can be done by less skilled workers if one is smart enough to setup systems to make this happen.
Finally, he might be very well served taking his problem to a local business school to see about getting help from one of their various programs. His business could very easily become the subject of a class and he could have a small army of consultants helping him move it out of the garage.
> He can't experiment with pricing too much as word of mouth would destroy his business. If customer B learns that he paid more for the suit that his friend, customer A bought all hell breaks loose.
I agree he would need to be careful. But in this case because there are so many trivial ways in which he can differentiate the products in ways that will sufficiently justify price differences:
* Use more expensive materials. And mark it up heavily.
* Provide a luxury service: Visit the client for measurements with a couple of pretty assistants instead of having them come to you, and make the service look more upscale. Send someone over with samples and pictures to get feedback a couple more times than usual.
* Make things take longer to give the impression of more effort. There's a shoemaker in London that takes 6 months to produce your pair of shoes. They can optionally provide additional pairs to the same measurements, for a measly additional sum of 500 pounds per pair - the price for their first pair is not listed. I'm sure there are more - that's just one I stumbled over. But this one presents the long time it takes as a mark of quality and status: Most people just go to a store and buy shoes, but you, your shoes take 6 months to be ready. Of course it costs.
* Add on lots of stuff that indicate higher quality but that the client has no idea of the real cost/effort for: Finer stiching; more complicated patterns; more detailing inside. etc.
As you point out, he could also charge extra for faster delivery (on top of making his new "premium" service take longer by default, even), or flat out state that due to the demand, there is a waiting list, but a limited number of "rush" order will be processed if you pay a substantial premium.
This is very different from most technology products - suits, or fashion in general, is a very visible status symbol, and beyond a certain quality level, a higher price will often make the product more desirable even when there are no quality differences other than minor visible visual cues that lets those in the know realize that you've paid twice as much.
I think the economics of pricing your labour are different from the economics of pricing something you manufacture. I mean, yeah, in this case, he's manufacturing something, but his whole value proposition is that something constitutes an enormous amount of labour.
Yeah, he can hire underlings, but managing people is a completely different skillset. (I mean, to manage skilled people, you need to have a pretty good knowledge of that skill... but you also need to know how to manage people.)
Under those conditions? eh, I think that raising prices when you are turning away business makes a lot of sense. I mean, right now, I'm doing the same thing with consulting type work. I apologize and usually hand out referrals when I quote a price, but eh, I don't need the work. If I scare off the customer, good.
I think people are also more understanding about you changing the price of your labour than about you changing the price of a mass-manufactured good. Most people understand that you have busy times and not so busy times.
also note, in most expensive things? customers pay different amounts based on their negotiation skill and perceived ability to pay. I mean, I'm trying to sell co-location, and, well, mostly failing using the 'here is the price on the website; everyone pays this price' model. I even lowered existing customer's prices when I lowered the price for new customers. Nope. Nobody cares. In co-location, if you want to sell, you give 10%- for the life of the customer, including upgrades to the salesguy. (mind you, for the small fish, my customers, this guy just throws you an email and you take it from there. He does no work ongoing) Obviously, as my margin on the larger co-lo packages isn't all that much more than 10% (which is completely reasonable; it's not that much work for me... most of it goes to the data centre owner. I mostly just handle the network.)
Anyhow, I guess my point is that most customers, when buying expensive things, are absolutely used to the situation where you spend two weeks fucking around on the price, where everyone pays a different price and nobody knows what the renewal price will be. Sometimes, in fact, it seems to me like they prefer that model.
Incredibly in some cases this increases value, because it creates a product that is narrowly specialized and fulfills very specific need. People with that need would rather buy a product that does exactly what they need instead of something that also does it. Specialization and a higher price point serve as indicators of higher quality, and through that - a higher value.
Tried that too. Didn't work. I was Gucci. People wanted Walmart. At one point the entire thing becomes highly illogical. For example, people knowingly choosing to buy product that is known to be of low quality and unreliable. One of my resellers back then told me "if we sell ten of those, twelve come back broken". Still, people, for some reason, continued to buy that product. This is just one example of what woke me up to the reality that price elasticity only applies to specific, and sometimes only textbook, examples.
I agree, and that was the first thought I had. However, I have found that when people act in bizarre ways, it is sometimes because they are crazy, unintelligent, or ignorant. But much more often it is because they know something you don't know.
Indeed if he makes $50k off of 48 suits a year, he could nearly double his income by raising his price by 25%; if he is turning away customers that seems like a no-brainer.
It seems like the obvious solution. There must be a reason why that has not happened. People will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Ferrari mainly because they are so (artificially) scarce. And still they will have to wait a long time (two years) to get it. Incredibly enough the best advice to get your ferrari a little faster than other people is to suck up to the dealer. Could it be that a big part of his problem is branding and awareness?
The suit is dead for any number of reason, dittos bespoke clothing.
$4000 is several times what I spend on clothes in a year. It's several times what I spend on clothes in several years. There's a far less expensive option that's highly satisficing. Suits, once an inexpensive, practical, standardized alternative to more ornate and expensive clothing, are now the expensive, frequently impractical attire. The lead time to purchase is too long. And a far lower grade of tailoring is more than sufficient for virtually any occasion. That's basic facts.
There are exceptions -- people for whom the expense is neither extravagent nor unneccessary. It's a pretty small crowd, well within the top 1%, and probably more like the top 0.01%. Then divide by two, because, well, very few women wear suits (though women's fashion is its own discussion).
As TFA notes, bespoke tailoring doesn't scale. And it strongly suggests a rather fragile relationship between the garment and the wearer -- I can change in multiple of 25 separate measurements within a few months to a years time -- does this render a suit poor-fitting?
The made-to-measure alternative exists, and for many or most, it's a more-than-acceptable alternative for either formal or casual clothing. With correctly chosen measuring points, and if necessary, some additional tailoring, garments can be made to fit quite well. Cloth is pretty fungible. Sticking to conservative fashions, styles, and cuts means you'll have something that will wear well for years. And in a world in which off-the-rack sizing is increasingly problematic (aggressively styled cuts with little sizing leeway result in more frustrated customers), it's increasingly an option. There are a few vendors in the space, though I feel it's still waiting for its true visionary.
If you get out of your tech-bubble, you'll notice this as very far from the truth.
Suits are the work dress in consulting, financial services, pretty much anything where you're clients demand respect and are not in IT (IT and personal visual aestethics have an inverse relationship, in any big company you can easily tell who is in IT).
Try to attend a management meeting in Europe, China, Japan without a suit.
Within the suit world people from the US are also highly visible as the art of fashion seems to have been lost. While the rest of the world went with tighter forms, US men still wear balloon shaped trousers, as if the 80s never stopped. And the number one tell are the shoes. Italians shape the shoe world, pointy and long have been the way to go for some time now - but US men go in with big black round things, often not even polished properly. This goes up to CEO level.
There are certain elements of a push-back right now in the US as well, the first one being the success of the tv-series Mad Med which is a big advertisement for fashion and representative clothing. The second being a resurgence of elegant, masculine fashion - see blogs like the Sartorialist for a glimpse into that: http://www.thesartorialist.com/
A well-fitted suit does not signal money, it signals TASTE. Which is very hard to talk about in tech circles. Like looking at a well set up VIM instance, it tells you about the owner's habits.
> Try to attend a management meeting in Europe, China, Japan without a suit.
You don't even have to go as far as management meeting. In Japan, if you have any sort of white-collar job (with few exceptions in tech companies and research departments), you wear a suit.
Not sure Japan is the best example - suits there, as worn by the salarymen you're talking about, are hardly treated as fashion - they're worn with all the pride and enthusiasm of any other uniform, i.e. not much. Morning on the yamanote-sen is a sea of miserable-looking ill-fitting suits, all seemingly in the same two shades ("boring blue" and "grim grey"), lifeless translucent e-z-care shirts and $5 ties. I haven't had too much cause to wear suits in Japan but when I did a $1500 Hugo Boss and a decent shirt made me feel like frigging James Bond.
Not to say I didn't see nice suits, I saw plenty, just saying that your average sarariman sure isn't buying $4000 bespoke suits and frankly I would doubt $400.
The suit is dead for any number of reason, dittos bespoke clothing.
Why do you think the suit is dead?
I wear a suit (not always, but often enough to have an opinion).
I've never bought an expensive suit, but I nor do I buy cheap suits. I guess I generally spend around $500.
I work with people who spend $2000 on suits though. These aren't bespoke, but are from nice fabrics and cut very well (eg, Hugo Boss etc). I'm no suit expert, but I can tell the difference.
I can't say I've seen any particular decrease in suit wearing over the past 15 years I've been working, although ties are less common that they used to be.
In my experience location and field of work makes a bigger difference to suit wearing than anything else.
Don't know about other places, but at least in NoCal high status people don't wear suits. Since the only function of a suit is status signaling, it seems just a matter of time until everyone else catches up and suits will be replaced by bike jerseys or whatever.
I know it may not seem that way sometimes, but NoCal is not the entire world - nor does the entire world take their cultural cues from NoCal.
The suit is very much alive in NY, in London, the entire legal world, and in many other places. That's just during the day.
For formal events / outings it is SF that is the extreme outlier. In the rest of the country if you are going to a fancy restaurant, a wedding, an awards dinner or the like you wear a suit. The original rational for the suit actually still holds for these occasions - it removes the need to constantly chase the latest fashions, as many woman and all hipsters must.
Suits change according to fashion too. Most of us just don't notice and walk around happily oblivious to the hipsters/fashionistas judging us and sniggering between themselves.
When I bought my wedding suit, my fiancee dragged me to multiple shops and eventually had a lengthy discussion with a Saville Row tailor over whether to have one button or three buttons (two? I have no idea), as she believed one button suits would be coming back into fashion on the higher end, but most of the brands did not offer one button suits at the time. She was right. She had similar opinions about the cut...
I, for one, wear suits simply because I enjoy them. I like how they look. More and more, as I get older, oddly. In my 20s you would have had to force me into one.
It's definitely true that there is status signaling involved, whether it's conscious or not, although I would hesitate to say that it's the suit's only purpose (and in my case, that's a side effect, not the purpose). You could make that argument about any clothing if you go that far.
But...I've definitely noticed being treated subtly better when I dress for occasions. Go to a nice restaurant dressed for an occasion, and you'll tend be treated like it's an occasion (obviously your milage may vary - act like a jerk and you'll be treated like one, no matter what you're wearing).
"Extreme" outlier may be going a bit far. I live in the Southwest (NM). I found myself at a formal, Conservative Jewish funeral a couple weeks ago and half of us were wearing jeans. I was slightly overdressed just in slacks and a nice button-up. One out of the last four job candidates that's interviewed here came in anything fancier than that. I've been to four or five weddings out here, and never seen a shortage of bluejeans; seems like only the people in the wedding are expected to dress up out here. The only people I see consistently dressing in suits are lawyers, but they can waltz into court wearing cowboy hats and bolo ties with their suits without arousing a weird look.
We all have different experiences I guess, but the further West you go, the less formal the attire, and California isn't really as "extreme" as you may think.
Maybe it's just me, but wearing jeans to a wedding or funeral and not wearing a jacket and tie to a interview immediately signal disrespect and that the guest/candidate is too lazy to put in the requisite effort.
It might. But out here in the Southwest, we don't dress like Saudis even though their garb is better suited to the climate. For a lot less than $4000 New Englanders could wear mountaineering suits and that would probably retain heat and repel the elements better than a suit, but I doubt that one's coming around either.
Ultimately it's just a cultural difference, and searching for rationality behind it isn't going to bear fruit.
Norcal is a nice place to live, but it is not a fashion mecca.
In Southern California though the suit is totally impractical, unless you like to be drenched is sweat. Most of the world is the same at < 35 degrees latitude.
I'd go so far to say the suit is a minor cause of global warming ... all those high rises with no windows running AC all day. Mostly unnecessary.
Don't know about other places, but at least in NoCal high status people don't wear suits.
There seems to be a kind of inverse snobbery about smart dress at the moment, as if the 50-year-old CEOs of huge tech firms think that by taking off their tie we're going to think they're one of us, or the 25-year-old founder of a trendy start-up is going to convince us of their business savvy by wearing a T-shirt and trainers while giving a presentation.
Since the only function of a suit is status signaling
Really? I happen to think that smart dress looks better on me than casual anyway, but even without that, suits are fairly practical garments. A well-made suit is comfortable to wear all day. Suits have an easily removable jacket if you're hot, yet provide useful shelter for the elements if it's cold/wet outside. They have plenty of handy pockets for pens, phones, etc.
>>Really? I happen to think that smart dress looks better on me than casual anyway,
Your argument appears wrong because you assume the definition of a 'smart dress' involves wearing a suit.
The definition of 'smart dressing' has been changing rapidly. The very fact that demands for suits is less, shows the trend of clothing around the world.
Back during the days of slavery/aristocracy- costly clothing was automatically a status signal. What you are seeing currently are just echoes of that culture.
I would consider it stupid to spend so much on costly clothing. I am hiring people to write program, not for modeling.
NoCal is bizarro world for people living pretty much anywhere else. It is also tiny. High status people who are high enough status to get recognized regularly don't need status symbols to signal their status.
But that breaks apart in bigger environments, and out comes the suits.
Status signalling via wearable fashion is alive and well. There are hipsters living in my neighbourhood who spend well over $1k (average decent suit cost) on their outfits.
If anything, I suspect people on average are spending more on clothes around here.
This article doesn't read like a subtle "the suit is back!" pitch to me. It's a pretty interesting look at the economics of a couple of different ways of making better-fitting suits.
I agree that the interesting changes will come out of the made-to-measure world. Considering the difference in comfort (not to mention look!) that properly-fitting clothing provides, I'd be extremely interested in getting a nice made-to-measure suit if I had the sort of job or social calendar that would give me opportunities to wear it... and while I don't expect to ever be in the sort of job or circles that would require a suit regularly, I definitely look forward to an economical, quick(ish) way of getting a nice-fitting suit. Last time I bought a suit I had to wait over a month for alterations to be done at the department store anyway, so if someone can come up with a way of reducing made-to-measure turnaround to a month...
And then let me gets khakis and less-formal shirts made that way too... I buy a lot more of those than suits.
The reason you see made-to-measure more so with suits as opposed to more casual wear is because suits are highly structured garments. They have to fit correctly in a lot of different places, whereas knitwear like t-shirts and polos stretch and the same size can accomodate a wider variety of body types. There are lots of places that will do MTM casual button ups.
I have several MTM shirts and suits, and honestly I don't think it's really worth it. For a couple reasons, I'm much happier these days finding a brand that fits me off the rack and having it altered if necessary.
1. The grand promise of MTM is the perfect fit, but your first one or two attempts are almost certainly going to leave you with a garment that doesn't fit. At best, this requires more fittings, trips to the tailor, and time. At worst, you're stuck paying for a garment that you will never wear and cannot return.
2. MTM will always be more expensive. For example, Indochino suits are pretty cheap ($400), but for the same level of construction and fabric you're looking at a a $200 suit from Men's Warehouse. J. Crew sells $130 Thomas Mason shirts, and to get the same shirt MTM from my Hong Kong tailor costs me $200.
Yes, the article is, if you'll pardon the term, a cut above the usual "suit is back" PR hack job.
It doesn't make the suit any less dead.
And as much as I'm fashion averse, I've also found myself increasingly frustrated by the state of the fashion industry and lack of reasonable alternatives to actually take a mild interest in the article.
You don't wear a bespoke suit to fit the minimal requirements for a given occasion, you do it because of the way it makes you feel - there is nothing quite like wearing an item of clothing that is perfect in every possible way. It's really not comparable to a made-to-measure which tends to follow one of a set of patterns, none of which might be perfect for you.
If I wore suits I would have a bespoke one made, but as it is, bespoke women's clothing is more complicated financially - you simply wouldn't wear the same dress as often as you would the same suit, probably by an order of magnitude.
Lastly. Men in suits. Hot. Men in bespoke suits. Blisteringly so.
Women tend to be very underserviced compared to men in any case. Or at least that used to be so -- men have, for some inexplicable reason, come to accept a rather low level of basic service when buying clothing these days. Perhaps it is because casual attire is much more casual than it once was; dungarees were something one might have worn for rough or dirty work at one time.
I grew up in suits, or at least in jackets and ties. I've worn bespoke when I could afford it, including (then) casual tweeds. But in my youth, I was a more-or-less off the rack kind of guy. "Off the rack", in those days, meant that somebody would spend the better part of an hour with a marking chalk playing with the lay of the collar, the rotation of the shouders, the vent(s) and armholes (to the extent possible), and so on -- and that's in addition to the expected tweaks to the sleeve length, moving cuff buttons, hemming and cuffing trousers, altering the waist and stride to fit, and so on. That was part of the price of a $400 suit in the '80s, even at a chain men's wear store. Extra-cost alterations were things that went right down to the structure of the garment.
I was absolutely shocked to see what my wife had to put up with. Not only were the prices way out of line (at the same price level, things like seam finishing and so on are nowhere near as well-attended-to in women's wear as in men's wear, even if the garments themselves are comparable -- say something like a blazer). Then everything was extra, including the stuff that absolutely has to happen, like hemming a skirt or a pair of slacks. Ridiculous. You ought to throw yourselves a little revolution.
No offense, but just about everything in your comment is wrong. Your argument that suits are dead is way off the mark. Maybe in San Francisco it's not expected to wear a suit to a job interview or to meet with clients, but in every job I've ever worked at the men were expected to wear a suit and tie more often than not.
Your 1% comment doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Are you saying that only households making over $340k a year[1] would spend that much on a suit? My first job out of college was for $28k a year in a city. I had to spend much of that first year buying $600-800 suits because that's what I was expected to wear. I have friends that make what I make now and gladly drop twice what I would on a suit. It doesn't have anything to do with income.
I believe this was mentioned elsewhere, but a $4,000 suit isn't mainly about income or wealth, it's about taste. Pick up any $4,000 suit from a custom clothier and hang it up next to a $350 suit from Men's Wearhouse. You will absolutely be able to tell the difference from the other side of the room.
In Vancouver it's hard enough to find french cuffs on shirts, or even a super 150.
No one wears suits anymore and those who do just want cheap garbage, that's pretty much the point of the article.
The bespoke suit is the new Mac Pro, cheap to those who value it and overpriced to those who have no use for it, hence virtually no bottom line. (Mac Pros aren't a $24B business, but to those who desire them there is no substitute).
Get your t-shirts tailored and you'll start to see the value tailors can provide if you're the sort of person willing to spend money to look better.
It may only be the top 0.01% but there are also only really a handful of established tailors who offer full bespoke. I really doubt there are more than 100, maybe 200 tops. They serve all the oil money playboys, the Chinese new wealth, the business magnates, all of the world's wealthiest customers. Often these customers purchase suits in large quantities too (The measuring process gets significantly less intensive each time you purchase a new suit) and have the ability to fly the tailors to their homes. I think a lot of people here underestimate the sheer quantities of suits these 0.01% purchase. The average person here may have two or three suits, they may have two or three closets of suits.
If anything, bespoke clothing is doing better than it has in almost a century. China's incredible boom has led to a whole new crop of millionaires with an insatiable desire for western luxury goods. Suits, purses, jewelry, wristwatches, everything. LVMH's spectacular profits are a good proof of this.
People have been saying "the suit is dead" for a number of years now. Yeah, maybe it is, maybe we will never go back to Mad Men days of suits in the office and dinner jackets at night, maybe the suit as a consumer good is on its last legs. But the bespoke suit, the suit as a piece of craftsmanship is doing better than ever.
One of the first things I did when I got my first 'real' job was get a custom-made suit from a place in our neighborhood; it was $1000 and he did like 25 measurements and said it would be 2 weeks until it was ready.
Turns out he was sending the measurements to Korea where the suits are custom made then shipped back, and then they do final alterations in the US.
I've ordered 3 more since then by just sending an email & choosing a color - don't think I could ever go back to an off-the-shelf suit - custom fit is so much more comfortable.
I've thought about doing this too. The problem is my weight and body composition keeps changing a lot as I pick up different sports, so a thousand dollar suit I buy today may very well become too small or too big six months down the line.
If you get a custom suit (you don't necessarily need to spend 1k), usually they make it with enough fabric that you can adjust it in or out by at least an inch or so.
What I'd kill for isn't a suit, but a decent set of casual clothing that actually fits (see my post elsewhere on this post). I rarely-to-never wear suits. While not completely fashion-averse, I'm pretty pragmatic when it comes to clothing: it should cover my nakedness, not be uncomfortable, be easy to care for, and look reasonably well.
Jeans or khakis and button-downs work well for me, a washable wool could also work (dry cleaning really isn't an option). Contemporary clothing styles simply don't agree with me, and the made-to-measure and bespoke alternatives are still rather steep.
A legit ergonomic keyboard is also easily 10-15x the cost of a no-name USB keyboard that "works just as well". A MacBook Pro is easily 2x the cost of something that has the same specs on paper. A pro-grade DSLR is 4-5x the cost of a consumer-grade DSLR but in principle work the same.
I've gone from wearing random cheap jeans to wearing $150-200 fitted jeans, and the difference is immense. It's comfortable, almost scary comfortable, the fabric are very noticeably nicer, the fit feels great, and people around you think so too.
The question is: can I find something equivalent for less cost.
My experience has been, with sufficient searching (and yes, there's a time cost to that), yes, I can.
The upsides: I can see, feel, and fit the garment before buying it. When committing to tailored items, particularly online, no such luck. Clothing's pretty personal, I've never much been a fan of the online or mail-order experience. Their only advantage is that the in-store experience is rapidly getting to be as bad or worse.
The question is: can I find something equivalent for
less cost. My experience has been, with sufficient
searching (and yes, there's a time cost to that), yes,
I can.
As far as I'm aware, there is nothing equivalent to Outlier on the market today, much less anything at a lower price point. If you have information to the contrary, please do share.
I love Outlier, my first two pairs of their pants are almost clapped out with at least 5000 miles apeice in them, and I recently got another two pairs.
Surface Clothing is closest to being Outlier at a lower price point.
You're right that there's noone else in direct competition, but they do have siblings in converging verticals. You should definitely look at Rapha, nau, and Bonobos, each of which overlaps in a different way. You should also look for RRL shirts in boutique fashion stores, they've got some insanely great merino button-up shirts (they're never listed online).
I buy cheaper department store clothing and have it tailored. It fits me like a glove. The quality isn't quite the same, but the price come out in my favor.
That's the alternative I've generally taken, and it's cost effective.
The problem I'm running into these days is that clothing cuts are so constrained that there's simply not enough fabric present (shirts especially) to construct a fit. For slacks, it's that or that the alterations are sufficiently extreme that the results aren't appealing.
Most jeans cannot be tailored to any significant degree (other than inseam length).
If you're looking for a bespoke tailor in SF that does this, visit Spoon Tailor in Chinatown. Hong Kong tailors are some of the best in the world, and I believe suits start at $700+ depending on fabric.
I'm headed to a suit tailoring event that Indochino is doing in downtown San Francisco in a couple weeks. You can get measured for free and order right there it sounds like. Prices are decent ($400) and people here say the quality/fit is spot on. Glad to hear the industry is still alive for craftsmen like Frew.
http://www.indochino.com/traveling-tailor/display
I've had experience with both Spoon Tailor and Indochino. TL;DR: go with Spoon over Indochino if it's in your price range.
I've used Spoon for about 9 shirts and talked with them extensively about their MTM suiting. The quality is much higher on their suiting and the fabrics are nicer. Plus, as far as MTM goes their process is closer to bespoke. Multiple fittings are involved and they have a local tailor that does the pattern, if I recall.
Indochino's an affordable option out there, but they're definitely going the cheaper MTM route. Their suits are based off of ready-made patterns. They can't really do stuff like account for sloped shoulders or weird drops. Their details are also a lot more "fashion forward" (like skinny lapels) that will look dated in a few years. I went to their traveling tailor event in Chicago a few weeks ago and got a suit made up for me as a review unit for a blog I write and I can't say I'd highly recommend them over other MTM services that might charge more or ready-to-wear options that cost the same.
If you're looking for something at Indochino prices yet in "ready to wear", then I'd suggest checking out Suit Supply. Decent cuts, good fabric, good construction, affordable intro-level prices.
That's a made-to-measure (MTM) suit, which is a completely different animal than a bespoke. I get MTM suits for myself, but I have a cousin that buys bespoke. They're so nice...
Even the richest customer simply has to wait — sometimes months — before the new suit is finished. No wonder so many pass up a $4,000 bespoke suit for a ready-to-wear Kiton version at twice the price.
Isn't it pretty clear here that he should raise prices dramatically?
Clearly the demand is there (people spend twice the price on a inferior product).
The whole point of paying twice as much is that you spend a fraction of the time defining product specs, and don't have to wait.
If so many pass up a 50% discount to get immediate satisfaction, they aren't likely to change their preference for waiting once the product they already didn't buy becomes dramatically more expensive.
The whole point of paying twice as much is that you spend a fraction of the time defining product specs, and don't have to wait.
Raising the price stops you competing in the whole "I need a new suit" market. Now you are in the custom luxury good market, and there the time to buy isn't an inconvenience, it is a feature.
The whole pay-to-pick-my-Ferrari-up-in-Maranello takes a lot longer than the normal Ferrari ordering process (and is hugely inconvenient) and yet still is used by a reasonable number of orders.
You don't buy a Ferrari for transport, nor do you buy a luxury suit to cover your nakedness.
If people can sell $500,000 watches[1], then a $20,000 suit seems reasonable, especially when it comes with custom consultations etc..
Kiton is in an altogether higher tier. According to the Wikipedia, their ready-to-wear line ranges from $5500 to $8000, and their bespoke suits command $20K to $50K. They sell about 20,000 suits a year.
Clearly pricing below their ready-to-wear line only gets customers who are looking to save money, and people trying to do bespoke suits in that price bracket will get squeezed from below (premium made-to-measure (not the same as bespoke) suits) and low-end ready-to-wear suits from premium manufactures like Kiton.
Why can't the TSA make me a suit? They already have the measurements. I'm barely half joking here. Seems like this is one of those unsolved "solved problems".
You may have something here. You wouldn't even need millimeter waves to do it. Just a 3D scanner setup, which can amount to an old projector and some webcams. We should be able to use technology from 3D motion capture to build a physical model of someone's skeleto-muscular system. The hard part would be the domain knowledge. Someone would have to work closely with a tailor to convert his/her specialized knowledge about fabrics and seams and how clothing hangs off the body into algorithms. (And even then, you'd probably need a trained operator with a sense of design.)
X-rays used to be very popular for shoe fitting. I strongly suspect that millimeter waves have similar long term health issues.
And I don't see many getting naked in front of a 3D video camera set-up.
My general sense: any health effects are likely to be weak at levels typically encountered, but I'm holding as plausible that thee may be some effects.
Microwave oven radio waves are non-ionizing 2.4 Ghz and I suspect they cause several health issues to any living organism exposed to them, even for a short time.
For some people, there's a risk on the outside as well. Pacemakers.
Less so these days, but still.
My understanding is that there's a possibility of creating induced current in the pacemaker. Which is to say, the non-ionizing radiation has an effect at a distance, albeit in a manufactured artifact, not (in this case) organic tissue.
It is not the 2.4Ghz radiation that causes the trouble with pacemakers. Its the plain old magnetic field generated by the inductive inrush from the giant coils that convert the power to feed to the magnetron tube in the microwave. Any large inductive load poses the same risk.
I'm getting slightly different information. The best "how do Microwaves interfere with pacemakers" info I could find was from The Straight Dope, which indicated that it was actually microwave leakage, not the coils themselves, which induced the current. And I'm aware that among the reasons you don't nuke metallic objects is because of the charges induced. Another source showing effects of various EMR frequencies indicated that induced currents were among the effects of microwave and other longer-wave radiation.
That said, other risks for pacemakers include store anti-theft devices, most of which are also inductive coils so far as I understand.
One wouldn't have to be naked. With the right kind of camera and lighting, customers could also be wearing an opaque gown. (Some care would have to be taken to ensure that the software isn't tampered with.)
If he really does have mow siting list of months, you would think he'd raise his prices. He would make more money, some people wouldn't go to him for suits anymore, but that would just mean that others would get their suits more quickly
I agree, unless he loses more than half his business, why not double his prices? Maybe he only makes one suit a month that way, but he would sure have a lot more free time...
Some people just really love what they do, love being busy, and want to be able to share their gift with more people.
The certainty of constant sales/deal-flow has a value all its own too.
But don't let that stop you parroting the same advice to every self-employed/contractor/business-person who claims to be popular/keeping busy that we see on every. single. thread. on. HN.
Please do not order a suit off the internet. That is the worst idea ever.
I own eight suits and half dozen blazers. My first suits and blazers were all off the rack, including the high end brooks brothers. And they all fit me horribly. I never wear them now.
I didn't realize how horrible they fit until I went to bespoke suits and shirts. So from someone who wasted a lot of money do yourself a favor, go to the best shirt maker in your city and have a custom shirt made. Be prepared to spend up to $300 for the shirt (though $200 is more reasonable). Then use that as your template and send it to a tailor in hong kong who will make duplicates of the shirt with the same measurement for $30 each in the fabric selection of your choice. Best investment ever. I recommend http://www.jantzentailor.com/
For suits, I can't help you if you are in America. But if you are going to order a suit in the USA try to get a british cut, the style that Frew uses. Just don't order something off the internet. Lots of factors that go into what makes a quality suit that can't be expressed online.
What does this have to do with anything other than that both articles happen to use the word "suits"? This isn't a story about the suit making a comeback, it's about old world artisanship struggling to survive in a 21st century economy.
Graham also says in that column (and this is weird that I remember it, not having read it in five years!) "we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times."
Read the article more closely. This is about craftmanship trying to survive in an age where craftmanship itself does not scale. It's not about the "submarine PR" phenomenon that concerns the Paul Graham article.
I am willing to bet someone that knew what they where doing could program a machine to cut fabric based on all those measurements thus saving time. That by it's self is scale. Next step, 3d imaging to capture some / all of those measurements automatically. Once you start down the path it's the classic R&D vs vs market size debate, but nothing says you need to diminish quality as you start to scale.
Costco had a company that was bringing in 3d scanners to scan your body and then making suits based on those measurements. Haven't seen it advertised for awhile, so I'm not sure how well it actually turned out.
This may work for the initial fitting, but that is a relatively one. Some of the later fittings, particularly in the shoulder areas are more difficult and more trial/error.
Unless there is actual customer preference involved this is probably an area where more highly accurate measurements + a better formula + better construction could make this much faster. For people it's easier to fix it after the fact than do more up front calculations, but when a computer is finding the solution they can probably get vary close the first time.
In my opinion it's a lot of money, but can be very well spent.
A fantastically fitting and well designed suit is a powerful weapon in business, politics and life. Trends come and go, but suits always seem to come back into vogue, and you can really tell the difference between the highest quality bespoke suiting and shirts that the CEO/HNWI/high ranking politician wear, and the ones that lower levels are wearing.
Like it or not I've found that suits really work to project "rank" (whatever that means) - working on me and (sometimes) for me. So it's worth the money to invest in at least one very good one. Some say we should dress for the job we want next, or in ten years.
Add-ons beyond the initial investment can add up, including a range of shirts, ties, multiple work suits and suits for other purposes such as formal events and outdoor events in summer. However purchasing well means that these can last for years and years.
Suits for men are a lot easier, cheaper and last longer than business clothing for women, who have another order or two of complexity to deal with.
It's the same with "casual" clothes. Some people wear casual clothes that are not so casual or cheap on closer inspection.
This problem is as old as the Industrial Revolution, not exactly news.
I moved to India and here I can afford tons of household help. For example, I have a chauffeur, who comes from a community of highly skilled weavers who make traditional fabrics like this: http://bannacreations.blogspot.in/2012/02/ilkal-story.html.
Basically, there is simply not enough demand for those skills. So he chucks his skill - handed down from father to son for generations - learns English and driving, and moves to the city. He now hopes to soon move out from his slum to a real house. I wish him luck - he is ambitious and hard-working, and is making a niche for himself in a challenging world.
My Dad is a tailor, from ye olden days as well and cut his teeth measuring, marking and cutting. Yes, you can get a made to measure suit that's pretty much damn near perfect but when a truly experienced tailor works to produce a suit it's essentially a hand-crafted, one of a kind piece of art.
And oddly given my love of tailored suits I generally buy off the peg ones as I'm way too hard on clothing to justify the outlay (even with a family discount).
Beyond the skill of art, I would imagine that an advantage of a practiced tailor is also that you get to benefit from their knowledge of which styles or cuts would work well for your particular features, intent, and life story. Software can get the geometry right, but it's hard to program taste.
Would we really be better off in bespoke suits? It doesn't sound like this Frew has a very good life if he's having to work in his living room and can't afford his own suits. Wanting to have a someone personally spend 75 hours on your suit seems terribly egotistical; if they do it for the love of it then fair enough, but honestly I'd feel more comfortable in a suit I knew hadn't consumed so much human life energy.
Right, because the clothing industry at large has always been good about how it 'consumes human life energy'. While I get where you're coming from, I think it's more egotistical to deprive someone of their job because you think it's too hard for them, or that they'd be better off doing something else. It's his job. Plus, he's making 50 grand a year. Which is more than most teachers in the U.S.
Indochino.com is your friend. Bought a few suits there, and two shirts, fantastic fit & quality. You take about 20 measurements yourself at home (you need a partner to help) upload your details on their site, and boom. Free shipping, free alterations. Not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.
Plus Steve Nash is an investor; an NBA MVP can't be wrong, can he?
Interesting. I wonder how the foreign suit makers affect this business. I have a few friends that visit Thailand regularly and get custom suits made (cost is <$200 USD). For the price of one of these suits in NY, you could fly to Bangkok (in Business Class!) AND get a few custom made suits.
Those <$200 USD suits made in Thailand are unlikely to be top shelf. There is a huge business in southeast asia on rapid turnaround custom suits. It's not targeting the same market as real bespoke tailoring.
I have a weakness for bespoke suits. I live in Singapore, and have gone to the same tailor for seven years. He's superb, but you can tell from working with a great tailor why even "made to measure" suits can be disappointing. When I started with this guy, I would go back for two fittings after my initial measurements, and before the suit was done. The fittings would be done with the partially constructed suit. Many details were checked and little adjustments made: asymmetry in my body, the sway in the back, where I pocket my phone, how to adjust the jacket for my wallet, and making sure the right sleeve accomodates my watch (I'm left handed). I thought it was overkill. But worn, his suits are flawless and so comfortable the idea that a suit would be uncomfortable is a distant concept.
After the first few years we reduced it by one fitting.
My best friend from highschool has ended up in this world through his passion for all things sartorial (http://www.thearmourystore.com/).
He was involved in creating a wonderful documentary that follows suit makers of Naples called O'Mast (http://vimeo.com/16443611), which even for someone like me who knows nothing about suits was really interesting. I suggest checking it out as it'll give you an idea of the kind of skill required to make a custom made suit.
No matter what you may think about spending $4000 on a suit, it's a shame to see this kind of craftmanship dying out =(
Is Mark your best friend? I had the pleasure of seeing the documentary when it was screened in San Francisco and meeting Mark and Gianluca. It was pretty eye-opening to talk to people who really live and breathe men's tailored clothing.
There is huge demand for special clothing and believe it or not Suit today is a special clothing. The point is really people's idea of dressing has changed. There were times when costly clothing automatically meant something. Those days are gone. I find it difficult to imagine, people wearing suits to work these days. Most of them look like 'Odd ones out'.
I don't like to wear a suit, nor does anybody around me unless they are getting married or they are about to meet somebody powerful and rich. There fore clothing industry is 'optimized for the common case'. The only clothing I find worth buying these days is rugged jeans and polo T-shirts. Anything else and I find that to be focusing on ornament more than the substance. Therefore the demand and supply moves in that direction.
The place for bespoke suits today is the distinction that tailored clothing carries. So they continue to remain clothing for 'special occasions'. Needless to say if you want to maintain that sort of distinction, you can't use machines to scale. Because that would mean you that sort of clothing no longer carries that distinction.
Its not that these artists/tailors can't make money other way. They can probably get a job else where and live in better conditions- if they want to. But sometimes people stick to what they do and how they do for unexplainable reasons.
So what is it that makes the tailoring impenetrable to automation? For example why couldn't pieces be cut with a laser cutter? Why can Chinese workers create a suit in 30 minutes and US workers only in 10 hours?
I wonder if modern machines wouldn't be able to do completely different things, too. Why does cloth have to come in flat sheets? Maybe modern machines could produce cloth that already has shapes (like knitting machines, only more fine grained?). No more sewing required?
To me, my $4000 Savile-Row suit is worth twice as much. It's not bespoke, it's made-to-measure. Sort of half way to bespoke.
I don't need to wear suits, I never really have. I've always worked for relaxed companies, never been to a wedding (well, apart from the one I bought the suit for).
But I'm a skinny guy. Even the slimmest of fitting shirts and suits on the rack didn't really fit. My suit? It's like a glove. I put it on and feel awesome. And this is why my suit is worth every penny.
Spending a significant amount of time in Shanghai the past few years, I've frequented the Shanghai fake market many times. While some portions sell knockoff goods, the fabric section is quite spectacular. I can get a bespoke 2 piece suit for $100 or 3 piece for $150. I get custom dress shirts for $10. The material and craftsmanship is high and the primary market is expatriates (read: non-Chinese) living in Shanghai.
The way it's set up, is there are maybe 50-100 booths set up in the fabric market area. Each of the booths is rented out by a proprietor, and they are in business for themselves. Most operate by relying on an economy of scale behind the scenes. The sole proprietor would take your measurements in the shop, then send them to a behind the scenes system which processes hundreds of suits a day.
It is not uncommon to have your custom clothing done within 24 hours and shipped directly to wherever you are staying. Very interesting way to manage the economy of scale.
This article is offensive to me. Frew is a talented craftsman and a recent immigrant who single-handedly makes more than the average household in the US, and is in the top 1% of the world in terms of income. He has his own business that is all his through hard work, and has aspirations of becoming a famous designer.
There is no need to insult Frew about his work clothes or his choosing not to make a suit for himself. Frew is rich, and should be applauded.
I don't pay attention to politics, but I used to roll my eyes when right-wingers would talk about "new york times liberal elitism", but in this case I agree with the rednecks.
Not mentioned in the article, but if you're willing to wait, some of those Saville Row suitmakers will produce a bespoke suit for much cheaper than $4000. The trick is to add a 4 week wait time and ship the measurements off to India. And of course, if you can make the trip to India yourself (or plenty of other countries in SE Asia), then a bespoke suit will cost you less than $100.
I have often been tempted to go get a suit from these guys ( http://www.syedbawkher.com/) who promise a bespoke suit as good as Saville Row. However, the number they quote ~ $1000 is not exactly cheap enough for me to experiment.
I bought a couple $100 suits in Vietnam when I was there. The fit was good but the quality was low. They fell apart within a year. That was the experience that everyone I talked to who bought made to measure clothing there had. You get what you pay for.
There is one economy of scale which eventually hit the bespoke suit industry: robotics/automation. Eventually you will be able to make tailoring robots to do each step of the process, much like they do in car factories. With the proper software you could step into a booth, get a 3D body scan and have the suit finished in hours or minutes.
This may work for crude made to measure suits, but bespoke is often more about trial and error than incredibly precise measurement. It also has a lot to do with the preferences of the client, particularly with regards to the shoulders and armholes.
As for automation, a large number of MTM tailors currently email the measurements to a factory in Asia where the suit is cut by a worker getting paid pennies. The cost isnt necessarily in the making of the suit, its more the measuring and interactions between the tailor and the client that can take hours. For this reason alone I dont think we will see tailoring robots anytime soon.
If there was _every_ a task ideally suited (no pun intended) for automation, this is it. Plunk the 16 measurements required and you should have a high quality bespoke suit.
There are plenty of companies that already do that (Indochino, Modasuite, Black Lapel, etc). No one who cares much about fashion believes that they will overtake a good bespoke suit any time soon.
For example, measurement is not as easy as "wrap a tape around your arm". You have to take multiples to make sure you get people as they add water weight, you have to take it at the right spot which might change for each person, etc etc. Then, machine sewing still isn't as good as hand sewing. If each pattern is different then it's difficult to automate the sewing. Lots of little changes in each suit make it tough to both automate and maintain high quality.
The skill in measurement is an entirely different skill from that of doing the sewing, however. If you had a machine that could sew as well as a human, we could have an army of measurement experts sending them to the machines, which would churn out custom-made suits.
I think the bigger question is how to automate the sewing. If we could do that, I imagine it would make it much more scalable.
I think if we can make self-driving cars we can make machines that can make a suit. The reality is that it's probably cheaper to pay people to do it.
I have a friend who orders custom clothes from China. The quality is quite high and the price is lower than non-custom clothes for sale at Nordstrom's. Who is going to spent money making a machine to do this when the human labor doesn't cost anything?
That's slightly different. That's called made to measure. Its where you have one stock design and then its custom made to your body. For every M2M suit of a style, the patterns will match, label style will match, pockets will match. Its just the size that is different. I hear indochino does a pretty good job of making affordable M2M suits. For their prices I'd imagine a lot of the process is highly automated.
When you get a bespoke suit made, you walk in and sit down with consultant and you figure out every little detail. He helps you pick a pattern that matches your coloring, label width that matches your body size, number of buttons that match your personality. You end up with a suit that is 100% unique to you.
So think of how conservative it is. Someone older, and more conservative could pull of a double breasted suit jacket where someone younger would look like they are wearing a costume. Where something like a single button jacket would is a bit flashier and would fit someone who is much more out going and confident. There are a lot of variations on the same thing. I can just think of styles that run the scales of traditional vs modern and flashy vs conservative, but with those 2 axises you can do a lot to find something to really accent someones personality and style.
Single buttons have their roots in the single-breasted dinner jacket or tuxedo. If you want your jacket to have an increased level of formality, you'd go with a single button.
Two-button suits are more standard, common for business and every-day suiting. Formal enough for the majority of situations when you'd wear a suit, but not quite "after six" level of formality for an evening event or dinner.
Three-button jackets should be left to casual suits or odd-jackets. Adding more buttons on the single-breasted suit adds an increased level of informality. Works best on casual, seasonal fabrics like seersucker, linen, tweed, corduroy, etc.
Double-breasted jackets have their roots in the military and are often paired with peak lapels, which are more formal than the notched lapels of most suits. So, a double-breasted suit would be definitely on the more formal end.
So, I wouldn't say that buttons are about "personality" as much as it is the situation in which you'll be wearing the suit.
What you described on the bottom is not unique to bespoke, these details can be just as easily adjusted on a made to measure suit.
What's unique about bespoke is that the tailor (technically, the cutter) will make a brand new pattern just for your body, which will be based on a much greater number of measurements. Also, the fitting of a bespoke suit involves multiple fittings (http://www.thesimplyrefined.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/B...), using each iteration to ensure a perfect "fit" in accordance with the tailor's vision.
Made to measure suits, on the other hand, involve a single fitting. After the fitting, the suit is made, and can only be altered to the same extent as, say, a standard size suit that you bought at a store.
Not directly related to the article, but I was immediately reminded of the Arrested Development episode where the value of Gob's suit kept going up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Nl7VYFEaI
You don't have to be Wall Street to figure out the bleedingly obvious solution to being a starving artist who has so much work they have to turn work away. Raise the prices. Then raise the prices. Then when you're done with that, raise the prices.
At some point you'll be too expensive for the typical businessman, which will make you absolutely crack for a certain type of person common in New York, thus defeating all efforts at being less busy. So it goes. I guess you will have to raise prices.