Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor. You'd think that might give you a clue about the profits that can be made from tailoring. Bit if it suits you sir...EN examines the real bottom line

Thomas Mahon became an independent tailor in 2001 after training for 15 years with some of the best on Savile Row. Now he uses his house in Cumbria as the base for his business, English Cut, after realising he could reap the benefits of the prestigious Savile Row name without paying for permanent premises there at massive cost.

“The days of London being the centre of the universe are over,” he tells EN. “Not only is life much nicer here, I’m trading from my own home so it costs much less. 100 sq ft in London is twice as expensive at least, and you just aren’t going to sell twice the number of suits.”

Mahon’s prices start at £2,000 for a two-piece suit. He charges £2,475 for a basic three-piece suit, £690 for one pair of trousers and £2,000 for an overcoat. His prices differ very little from the lower end on Savile Row – though he says he can charge 20 per cent less than his competitors. English Cut will take a £1,200 profit from a suit
sold at £3,000 – a margin that Mahon admits would disappear quickly if he was to pay the rents on the Row.

Rents on Savile Row can reach £100,000 a year so the big name tailors are under pressure to sell a lot of suits. In the very early days, a suit from Savile Row would have cost around £102 and 18 shillings. Now, it will cost between £2,000 and £4,000 and, while many tailors on the prestigious thoroughfare think it ungentlemanly to discuss price, some will argue the rise is only in line with inflation.

William Skinner is managing director of Dege & Skinner, a family business formed on the Row in 1865. The business produces military wear alongside its usual tailoring business and, despite the prestige that comes with making dress jackets and ceremonial tunics for officers of the household cavalry, Skinner says military costume is typical of Savile Row’s miniscule profit margins.

The man-hours involved mean there is very little or no profit to be made but Skinner says the extra workload is worthwhile if the wellheeled Sandringham lot return to be fitted for everyday suits.

He says, “It can take up to 100 hours to make one ceremonial coat. If 10 per cent of those clients came back for their civilian suits we would be happy.”

The time-consuming methods used to produce bespoke clothing, coupled with rents that have continually risen, have forced the likes of Dege & Skinner to move out of their brightly-lit ground floor workrooms and under the stairs to make way for investment bankers who want rooms with views on an iconic street.

Skinner says, “The upper rooms are hot property now and the basement is the norm for us because of the price. It’s a difference in rent of nearly £90 per sq ft depending on which zone you are in.”

Skinner employs four cutters at his Savile Row shop to oversee the construction of the garments. Cutters in London will demand salaries of between £25,000 and £50,000, depending on their training and skill. Cutters pass their patterns and cuts to tailors who are often self-employed and paid a set fee per garment sewn.

A Savile Row tailoring business will usually have between 12 and 20 tailors on its books to call on for specific expertise – as they tend to narrow their skill sets to become experts in collars, button holes, or in tailoring with specific cloths.

Typically, a high-end Savile Row business will produce between 600 and 800 suits a year, each one requiring between 60 and 80 manhours to complete. Skinner says, “Seven or eight people are involved in making a suit, from the front man, sales man for cloth, a cutter, a coat maker, a trouser maker, and a travelling tailor if something is fitted overseas. You need another two people to deal with the invoicing and purchasing of cloth.”

As well as saving on rents, Mahon at English Cut also relies on a small staff base, but not by choice. In his early 40s, Mahon is young in his field – the average age of a British tailor is 55 – but he is already well-aware of the shortage of apprentices entering the trade.

“I have a couple of staff and I had one apprentice last year but, ultimately, if I go pop we are in bother and we are struggling to get people involved. It’s a hard slog for quite a few years on the minimum wage and they won’t get sent to college now either.”

When today’s established tailors started out they were in charge of at least three apprentices. Now even the best tailoring houses in the country are struggling to find one with the necessary staying power and skill to eventually fill the shoes of an experienced tailor. The prospect of a seven-year training period spent cutting and sewing on a £10,000 salary doesn’t cut much ice with youngsters dreaming of becoming the next Vivienne Westwood.

There are some younger businessmen outside London joining the tailoring trade and they aren’t afraid to poach the cream of the crop in cutting and sewing from the Row.

In Leeds, James Michelsberg has moved his business, Michelsberg Tailoring, from Queens Square to Sunnybank Mills in Farsley where he, like those on Savile Row, is planning to cash in on the industry’s history. He says a visit to his new shop will show customers the future of Yorkshire’s textile industry from a base in a manufacturing hive that has supplied worsteds, cashmere, wool and mohair fabrics to cloth merchants in Italy and Japan as well as to Savile Row.

Michelsberg has recruited several Yorkshire-based tailors on a freelance basis who cut and make up the garments while he measures up customers and supervises suit fittings. He has taken on one apprentice from a local college and is in talks with a Savile Row-based cutter with a view to taking him on full-time.

Michelsberg’s two-piece bespoke suits start at £650, but his definition of bespoke is different.

“We use a fusible instead of a solid canvas. It takes out some of the time-consuming handwork so the costs are lower and we can produce a bespoke garment in less time and, therefore, it costs less.

“After the first 12 months I looked at the bottom line and had to ask myself if I’d really grafted that hard for that much profit. But it’s picked up a lot since then, the momentum has hit and I’m doing very well. I targeted myself at selling five suits a week and I am doing more than that.”

Michelsberg’s links with the mill in Yorkshire mean he is in a good position to bargain for discounts on cloth – the second-largest expense for a tailor after manufacturing.

Mahon’s prices, of £2,000 upwards, are for standard cloths, which account for about 80 per cent of the trade on Savile Row. The standard length needed for a suit is three metres and there are more than 300 types of black cloth that will start at around £40 per metre. But for clients who want special cloths, like cashmere, Mahon has to renegotiate with the cloth merchants and pass the price on to the client accordingly.

Today, a baby cashmere coat can cost a customer £7,000 and the buttons on it another £7,000. At the top end of the scale, cloth embedded with diamond chips will cost £200 a metre, £600 for enough to make a two-piece suit. Cloth with 22-carat gold woven in as a pinstripe will cost £2,000 for three metres and a suit made of super 250’s will cost £8,000.

And clients with larger frames can expect to be charged extra. Some tailors will add ten per cent to the price of a suit for a client with a chest larger than 44-inches. Depending on the suit, that’s anywhere from £200 to £400 or more for expensive cloths.

Mahon has become famous in the tailoring community for his knack of selling the British tailoring experience to the Yanks. Between 75 and 80 per cent of English Cut’s business comes from US customers. One trip to the US could secure 145 garment fittings and 78 orders.

Mahon says, “Travel to the States, and the standard of living I adopt to match my clients’ while I’m there, does add significantly to my costs. But it makes good business sense.”

Despite the name, 90 per cent of Nicholas Jones Bespoke’s output of 15 suits a week is in made-tomeasure garments or “personal tailoring”.

Partner, Nick Hartshorne-Evans, says, “Made-to-measure and bespoke are both made from the same cloth length, but bespoke is a pattern cut just for you. We offer both levels of tailoring for commercial reasons.

“A personal tailored suit can take three or four weeks to make, depending on the client’s availability for fittings. A fully-bespoke suit will take between six and eight weeks.”

Prices at Nicholas Jones start at £850 and can reach £2,000 and over.

Both in their 30s, the bosses of Nicholas Jones say they are dedicated to changing the face of British tailoring. Hartshorne-Evans says, “There is a lot going on in the tailoring industry up north. Believe me, tailoring is back in a big way.”

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