High end, high quality alterations chain.

[David Reeves]

With people buying clothing online and even measuring themselves up online, do you think there is a market (in the U.S) for a chain of well run, well marketed alterations tailors? Very much in the same vein as a dry cleaning chain but with more polish.

Would you use a service like this?

 

[Academic2]

With people buying clothing online and even measuring themselves up online, do you think there is a market (in the U.S) for a chain of well run, well marketed alterations tailors? Very much in the same vein as a dry cleaning chain but with more polish.

Would you use a service like this?

Regarding question 1: In principle, sure. In practice it really would depend on where they would be located. Larger urban areas will already have competent tailors, so I doubt that the necessary demand would be there. Small towns and rural areas wouldn't have the population needed to make this a profitable venture—just not enough customers. Finding the middle sweet-spot would be the business challenge: finding places with guys like us where there aren't people capable of doing much more than hemming trousers. Perhaps a better idea than a chain of tailors would be to train and certify individual tailors; a particular menswear store could advertise that its tailor is, e.g., David Reeves Certified.

Regarding question 2: As a consumer I love the idea, and wish there were such a service where I live. Lack of such makes me considerably more timid about certain on-line purchases than I otherwise might be.

Cheers,

Ac

 

[jrd617]

Hard to say. Most corner dry cleaning shops and large department stores already can do good basic alterations. Sleeve/pants length, pants waist, etc.

For complicated stuff? Well, there are about 200 million American adults. Lets say 100 million of them are men. How many of them actually care about things like properly done waist suppression, shoulder width, chest drape, sleeve pitch, stride length, jacket length etc. is hard to tell. I'd hazard it's something like 0.5% to 5%. And most of those 500,000 to 5,000,000 individuals probably reside in large cities where good alterationists exist.

Still might be worth pursuing if you can brand it with the David Reeves name and get the word out via the #menswear blogosphere.

 

[unbelragazzo]

Is there a high end, high quality chain of dry cleaners?

 

[jrd617]

Rave is just one store, right?

 

[Shirtmaven]

the only problem is finding good tailors who know how to fit, as well as speak enough english
to understand what the customer wants