Proper Cloth continues to refine its retail presence.
The men’s made-to-measure company has revamped and enlarged its SoHo showroom to better reflect its current business. While the space is only 10 percent bigger, the redesign has increased the number of fitting stations from four to six, allowing more customers to be serviced at the same time.
That’s one of the primary differentiators of Proper Cloth, according to its founder Seph Skerritt. He launched the brand in 2008 to create custom shirts online using a proprietary prediction algorithm and 3D visualization tools. Over the years, the company expanded its offering to tailored clothing, chinos, jeans and other more casual products.
In 2013, it opened its first showroom in SoHo in New York, followed by units in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The brand has also had a showroom on Fifth Avenue in New York since 2021, where it also offers six fitting stations.
Several years ago there was an influx of online made-to-measure men’s brands such as Knot Standard and Indochino. Not all of them have survived and Skerritt believes it’s due in part to the fact that when they opened showrooms, these retail locations were too small to make a significant impact.
“If you can only service one or two customers at a time, it’s hard to have an efficient operation if you can only touch eight customers a day,” he said.
So to better position Proper Cloth for growth, he expanded the footprint at 495 Broadway in SoHo, where the business has operated since 2016. In addition to the larger number of fitting stations, the space reflects a more contemporary design.
Proper Cloth started as a “scrappy little business out of my basement,” he said, and worked hard over the past decade to establish the infrastructure needed to be successful. Once that was created, the company answered the demand of its customers for a physical location. That led to the opening of the showrooms.
With the exception of the D.C. locations, the others are all “invisible to the street,” he said of their sites above street level.
“We’re not on prime shopping corridors,” he said. “We don’t rely on foot traffic and we want our showrooms to be larger so there’s more room for consultations.” The spaces are also more affordable and allow customers an “escape from the street,” he said. “It’s worked well for us.”
Although Proper Cloth got its start in shirts, tailored clothing has been growing substantially in the past four years, increasing to 40 percent of the total business today, Skerritt said. The company’s primary customer is an “affluent professional” man, 35 to 65 years old, who “wants clothes to fit better.”
Looking to the future, Skerritt said Proper Cloth is “actively looking” for additional showroom sites in other big cities around the U.S. including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Boston, Philadelphia and Miami. “Those are on the top of the list,” he said.
The goal, he said, is to add around 10 locations in the next few years.
“The bulk of our business is still online, but showrooms allow us to transition our customer to online and vice versa.”