How I Built This with Guy Raz - Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

When Fokke de Jong started selling suits out of his dorm room in Amsterdam in the late 90's, he wasn’t planning on becoming the next Tom Ford—he just wanted to supply luxury suits at an affordable price. But he was so successful that around 2000, Suitsupply went from his side hustle to his full-time gig. Fokke sourced the best fabrics and production in Italy, and grew the business by selling his wares online long before that was the norm. Suitsupply thrived on Fokke's unorthodox ideas, like when he opened his first physical shop by the side of a highway, or when he goaded competition into suing him over ads. By 2011, Suitsupply had grown beyond Holland, opening stores in cities like London, Milan, and New York. Today, they have over 150 locations worldwide.This episode was produced by J.C. Howard, with music by Ramtin ArabloueiEdited by Casey Herman, with research help from Sam Paulson.You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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of any size, from simple deliverables to complex projects, from short-term help to full-time hires. You can finally let those old business titans and their tired ideas, rest in peace. This is how we work now. Visit upwork.com to get hiring talented professionals today. Hey, it's Guy here, and before we get to the show, you know that feeling when you think back to some of your early work and you cringe? Well, I recently spoke with Tom Hanks,

and he told me he gets that feeling too. He can't even watch his own movies. And for a man widely known as the nicest person in Hollywood, Tom Hanks also struggles with what it means to be authentic. Check out our conversation on my other podcast, The Great Creators. Just search for the great creators with Guy Raz wherever you listen to podcasts. And now, on to today's show. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal that did a blind test on suiting. And our website blew up. And I'm like, okay, we got to capture this momentum. I mean, this is a dream. We're doing an opening. We have all kinds of press coming. You know, I think six, seven hundred people on the guest list.

This was the moment. And two days before opening, I get a call from this landlord and say, her and you're going to open tomorrow. I said, yeah, yeah, we're all done. I mean, you know, big opening. Yeah, you're still, I don't have your permit closed out, so that's not going to happen. And I'm like, shit. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,

and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Foka de Jong started by selling suits out of his dorm room in Amsterdam and grew suit supply into a global fashion brand. Today's story is about improvising. And improvising is an important word here because every single entrepreneur will have to just figure it out multiple times along their journey.

For example, you can't plan for a city inspector to threaten to shut down your business because you violated an obscure zoning code. You can't plan on a supplier refusing to sell you goods. You can't plan on the factory that makes your stuff messing up all your product. You can't plan on your well-laid plan falling apart. But no matter what happens, your job is to solve the problem in a creative way and preferably quickly. And that is the story of suit supply. It's a fashion brand with around 150 locations around the world. Suit supply sells men's clothing and also makes made-to-measure suits.

And like some of the higher-end designer brands, all of its fabrics come from Italy. But suit supply sells high-quality suits at a fraction of the price. This was Fokadiyang's model from the very beginning, to build an efficient manufacturing and supply chain that would allow him to cut out unnecessary costs. and drastically reduce the price of a high-end suit. And by 2000, the year suit supply was officially founded, Foka was selling those suits online. In fact, suit supply was one of the earliest e-commerce retailers in Europe.

And today, around a third of its business happens online. Foka was born in the early 1970s and grew up in a small town in the Netherlands. He studied law and economics at the University of Amsterdam. and after graduating, he got one of those fancy management training jobs at Procter & Gamble, a job that practically guaranteed a stable career. But it wasn't the life Fouca was looking for. He wanted to be his own boss. And it just so happened that while he was a student in the late 1990s,

Foka came up with the idea for selling suits, which began when he needed to buy one himself. When my grandfather died at a very old age, You know, for his funeral, I needed a suit and a nice suit. I want to have a nice suit. And then somebody knew a guy that knew a guy that was selling suits straight out of Italy from a factory. And, you know, I met this guy, bought a suit. And then I thought, okay, he was using this connection to buy leftover fabrics that were produced into suits.

And it was very nice products. I was still studying. I needed a sort of a, you know, some ways of actually making a little money to get by. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to sell suits to my fellow students for, you know, their interviews, graduation parties and all that kind of stuff. Wait, hold on, hold on. You said, I'm going to sell suits to my fellow college students, but how were you going to, you were going to go get them from that same factory or from that guy that you bought? I would get that from that guy that, you know. You were basically saying, hey, let me just buy a bunch of suits from you and then I'll resell them.

I'll mark them up 20% or something. Exactly, right. And he was giving me a discount if I bought some more, and then, you know, I was basically, you know, a little distributor and folding up my bed in my dorm room when, you know, some of my buddies came in to come and fit. And then the problem was with student business, it was only a few times a year, right, when there were graduations or when there were parties, right? So, you know, it was not consistent. So when these events were not there, I was like, okay, you know, where else can. I sell them. And that's how I ended up ringing doorbells. Of businesses, basically. Of businesses. Yeah, it just went in, talk to the reception. Small businesses. No, we went all the way up to, you know, even I remember having events in the Dutch National Bank. Wow. And Heineken. You'd go to the receptionist and you'd say, hey, I'm selling suits and I'd love to show what I, could you guys organize a room for me where I could bring my stuff? It's not that something.

You know, you sort of, you have to talk to them a little bit. And, you know, it's that we did these events there and there. It's maybe something for you guys. I mean, do you think the guys are dressing well here? And I said, no, they could use some help. They would always say they could use some help. And that was sort of the hook in. Okay.

And then I guess at some point you decide to actually go to that factoring Italy to say, you know what, I'm working with this guy, but why don't I just go directly to the factory in Italy and see if I could just buy it from them? Yeah, exactly. And did that, by the way, did that guy that you were buying them from, did he get annoyed that you were bypassing the middleman? No, I sort of, at some point, my business got a little bigger, right? And this guy that was giving me stuff was running to its limits, right?

How many suits were you selling a week? I was, I think, you know, I did every Friday I had one of these events. Then I think I was doing probably 40, 50 a week. 40 suits a week. Something like that. Yeah. The problem was what actually happened was his business model. And he made this sort of deal where the factory in Italy was producing suits for some of the bigger brands.

Right. And they would tell these brands, yeah, well, you give me this cloth to make you a product. And we need 3.1 meter to make this product. But in reality, when they were really efficient, they only needed 3 meters or 2.9. So, you know, they always kept over and they're left over a little bit of fabric that they then made the same product for it and they just resold it through that channel. Wow. So they would essentially have excess material that was going to be like, I don't know, let's just say a name, Armani or something, whatever brand. They had extra material. They're like, well, let's just make a couple more suits and we'll just sell them without the label. And men would show up and say, yeah, you know, you can get this quarter of the price that it would cost in the store.

It was, yeah, it was a quarter of the price. And then what happened, of course, I was selling more. And I was telling you, I said, but can't you give me more? And he wouldn't have more because these excess fabrics, they ran out. So then I said, okay, but let me then talk to your source to see if I can work something out with them. Because I have, I think I have a bigger market. Wow. All right.

So you go to this factory and what did you say to them? I just said, I need more suits. and then I sort of found out what the whole business model was and why it was constrained. And they said, well, we can give you more, but then you have to buy your own fabric. I see. So they were willing to make the suits for you, but you had to buy the fabric. Yeah. So you could basically get these factories to make an unlabeled, unbranded suit, but the same quality for a third of the price or a fourth of the price.

Yes, and what I sort of, you know, I was new to this business. I had no idea how it worked, right? It's not like I was in my 20s and wanted to be the next Tom Ford or something. I just, you know, it was, it sort of started as a side hustle. And then I found out a little bit because I had to go through the motions of how inefficient that whole business work. Because this factory, they made a beautiful product. Yeah. But then, you know, if you look.

at how it was sold, they made a product for a brand and then this brand goes into a trade show. And these trade show, customers and there's agents bringing in these customers or agents selling it to, you know, independent stores again. And if you then add it all up, because I sort of knew how much this suit costs, right, and how much I could sell it for, which was a fourth of the price. It was at a luxury store. It was the same product. So then you start figuring out why is that? How is that possible? And who is making all the money here?

And then you find out that it's a lot of inefficiency of how the whole business was structured. That price ends up to be the price at some point. Right. And my distribution was very different. I didn't have to deal with all these people in between. Well, you were the distributor. You were the guy that was literally going to the trunk shows. Exactly.

I didn't have this whole big overhead. I didn't have occupancy costs. I didn't have expensive. You know, remember, I was in 2000, right? It was not the direct-to-consumer market. Right. It was not really, you know, invented yet. Sure.

I was basically able to, you know, reinvent the whole business model from scratch. You were also able to take advantage of changes in European law, right? Which is that you could have those shipped from Italy without dealing with customs or taxes or, I mean, because it was now relatively easy to get things back and forth between European countries. Yeah. I mean, it was at the time that Europe was becoming one market, but also one currency. And then it also coincided with the moment that e-commerce started to happen. I think that was the biggest change at the time. So I made a website and I was at this whole idea of selling high-quality suiting shirts and, you know, what goes with it, online.

Online, yeah. And I think at some point, that was the point that I sort of quit Proctor and Gamble. I thought, you know, this is something I have in my hands now. You know, let me focus on building something around this. You know, I'm curious because we've had people on the show, right, who've done things like, like work at a big company like Procter & Gamble for a few years and, you know, before going on to start their own thing. And the argument is that, you know, this is going to give you exposure to a whole new world and how big corporation runs. And it's going to give you insights and connections that, you know, that might help you build your own business, right?

So I know you decided to leave. But do you think that if you had stayed at PNG for longer that might be? have been beneficial? No, I don't think so. You know, what are you going to learn in an organization like that is, you know, first of all, 50, 60% of the effort in an organization like that goes to the political process, right? positioning yourself well and all that stuff. It's not just doing stuff, right? There's a whole lot of thing that goes along with it. And there's also a risk, right? Comfort. you know, you might think, okay, this is great, I make some money, et cetera.

And are you actually then going to make the jump five years from now when you're beginning your 30s, you make this nice salary, you bought this house, you met your first, you know, wife or a friend, or, you know, are you then going to make the jump? And the question is how relevant are those experiences of being in a big company, right? They're probably very irrelevant at some point if you have your own company, that's really big. But at the beginning, you know, they're not, I don't think they're relevant. The most things you'll learn are about just doing stuff. All right.

So you leave Procter & Gamble and you realize and you decide, I'm going to focus my attention on the suit business. When you first went to that factory in Italy and you're in your early 20s and you're like, hey, can you make me a bunch of suits? They were like, yeah, no problem. I mean, they took you seriously and it was relatively straightforward. I mean, these are factories that were used to working with big brands and big labels. So why would they be willing to work with like a 23-year-old kid? Well, that's a good question. But I was, you know, buying already some of the leftover stuff, right?

So I had a relationship with him. Yeah. And I was actually paying. You know, I was a legit customer. I was paying them cash. Yeah. And I came back and I got more and I paid it. So, you know, getting it sued together was.

not the hardest thing in this factor. What was the hardest thing was actually getting fabric. The fabric business was in Como, right, in the north of Italy. Around Lake Como. Around Lake Como. And, you know, it's there because, ready for a few hundred years, because the water coming from the mountain is extremely soft and it's great to wash wool in. And that's where the best fabrics in the world come from.

And I wanted to have the best fabrics. And the only way to do that is to put orders in trade shows that they would have. You know, they would have this every season, this convention on the Lake Como, very fancy. But I was not able to get invited there. You know, you have to be very legit to get in there. Yeah. And, you know, I had to do that through somebody else that was, you know, already a customer of some of these mills to be able to buy fabric. Right, because these are relationship businesses.

It's not like you can just call up and say, hey, can I order 20? I mean, it might be different today, but then you couldn't just say, can I order, you know, 40 reams of fabric? They only sold to specific clients, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, these were the mills like Vidalabar, Zena, all these kind of guys. They were also really protective for their, you know, they didn't suddenly want their high-end fabrics and then sold for a price. They could have never imagined their product was being sold for. So how are you able to, so you had to find somebody who was an existing customer and have them buy it for you and then you buy it from them? Exactly.

It was just getting in between. How did you find that person? That person already had a, you know, a little business that he was doing in Holland. Okay. And I just paid him a markup. Yeah. It's a little bit like wine. Like you can't just go to a burgundy maker and just go and buy their wine.

Like they're selling it. It's already spoken for. Like some restaurants are going to get it and some collectors are going to get it and some shops and that's it. And if you want to buy that wine, you've got to go to the other person who's already on that list to get it. You can't just get it. Yes. And what I also learned is that, you know, these people are also running businesses, right? And if you are able to show that you're actually, you know, you're legit, you're doing business, you can convince them of doing business with you.

It took me some time, you know. For the first years, they wouldn't even talk to me, right? Yeah. And, you know, and then you get a few ones on board and see, you know, that was especially when we went into online and they saw that we were maybe potentially the new thing that was going to happen in the business, stuff started opening up. And now our business is by far the biggest customer of all these mills in Italy. All right.

You were the pariah then. Now, obviously, it's changed. But let's go back to when you, even before you were the pariah, which is you're just a small-time guy trying to just do a hustle here, getting a bunch of suits and selling them in, but now you're buying more. And still, even in those early days, you're not doing this through a shop. You're doing this really just by going to businesses, from business to business, in Amsterdam mainly, and trying to sell suits. And when did you actually open your first brick and mortar store? What year? 2000. What happened is, and I think,

That was really the breakthrough. Because now I'm having this online business and online store, and it went pretty okay. You went pretty well. You know, people were buying stuff. But with this product, people wanted to have, you know, a place where they can do their alterations, fitting, see the product. That's still the case, actually, with fashion.

That people want to have some physical presence. So then I was thinking, okay, where, because I didn't have a lot of money to open a whole, you know, store on an expensive location. and I was thinking, okay, where, if I'm looking at my customers, where are they? You know, and most customers were driving and commuting, you know, back and forth from offices and appointments between the two biggest cities in Holland, Rotterdam and Amsterdam, big highway. So I thought, you know what, I'm going to make this whole, a little experience center and pickup point and tailoring and where can people, you know, pick up their product, see it next to the highway.

On the highway between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Yeah. Because that's where the business commuters were going. That's where the business commuters were going. Which was, of course, insane in the eyes of the whole industry. Insane that it was off the highway? Well, insane to have a business where you sell high-end quality suits on the highway. Oh, instead of like on a fancy street in a downtown.

Instead of on a fancy street. I think the newspapers were writing about this crazy store that was selling high-end suiting next to the highway online but now opening stores this was going to revolutionize retail and you know all the high-end streets in the middle of the cities were going to disappear and this was all going to happen right people when new change are happening are very hyperbolic and so what what happened was you know I opened this store which was completely logical in my mind I mean I was not really attached to this playbook I just wanted to have a store someone where it was the most easiest place where I thought my customers would be.

You know, I was surprised with it. But what the effect of our business was suddenly people were queuing up because we had so much PR. And this store, as you say, off the highway was not in Amsterdam. It was, I think it was closer to like Skipple Airport, right? Exactly. It was really next to a highway. We had a gas station. You had a store where they were selling magazines.

cigarettes and all that kind of stuff. And I rented a space next to it. And, you know, that was basically it. And you called a suit supply? I called it suit supply. And because that's what it was. You were supplying suits. I was like, you know, as straightforward as I could think.

It's a very utilitarian name. It doesn't actually scream out luxury. Like you hear that word, suit supply, and you wouldn't think luxury. You would think, okay, that's just that's what it does. Yeah. But at the time, it made sense because it was, we were direct to consumer, you know, very, you know, disrupting the market. And it was sort of a name that, that, you know, went well with that time moment. We were seen as the new solution to everything.

Which was also, by the way, imposed an immediate problem. Because these local retailers that were around them were looking at us with, you know, a little bit of an envy, I think. You mean competitive brands? competitors, yeah. Yeah. And what they did, they said to the municipality, these guys are in somewhere where you cannot have retail. This is not zoned for retail.

It's guerrilla retail. They said, this store can't be there next to a gas station because it's not a, wait, but why would they say that? What argument would they have to make that? Well, they had the argument that the unit that I was in was not zoned for retail. Oh, I see. Okay. And then I get this, you know, guy from the municipality coming in.

And, you know, we're helping customers. Yes, well, sorry, you're having retail here. You cannot have that. You need to close down. Huh. I'm like, shit. I put my 10,000 bucks I had, that's 15,000 bucks. I put everything in that store.

And these guys were seriously coming to with a letter that we were not zoned for retail, and we had to close down. I mean, I'm totally sympathetic to you. Like, I would have been pissed. But that is an amateur move, right, to open a store where it's not zoned for that, like you should have known. Yeah, I should have known. Well, I mean, how could I know that?

Because next to me, there was two units, right? I was also like, I can't believe this. This is actually true, right? Because it was so obvious that it should have been zoned for retail. And I went to the municipality and I just wanted to see the plans. I wanted to see the blueprints. And I got the, he said, well, you can go there, just wait for you in this little room and we'll bring you the blueprints.

And then you could sit in that room and went over these big pile of blueprints. And then I saw that one of my building. and it said exactly that unit next to us said with pencil. It was written in there. It said store and my unit said nothing. And so then I thought, okay, I took a pen. I practiced as long as I could to have almost the same handwriting as the unit where it was store written in. And I just penciled store in my unit.

And then I went back to the municipality and said, but guys, what do you mean on these? blueprints, it says store. I said, oh, okay. Oh, we didn't know. That was it. That was it. It would basically just handwrite store in there. And you're like, guys, you missed it.

It is here. It says store. And they're like, oh, okay, all right. Exactly. It just seems crazy. They just wanted to get rid of the problem, right? They had complaining people. They were probably sympathetic of what we were doing,

but just needed an argument of getting rid of the problem. I didn't have, I didn't know how to solve this problem other than that. Wow. And I never heard anything of them ever since. When we come back in just a moment, Foka takes suit supply global, decides to move production out of Italy and in the process almost destroys the business. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this. Before we get back to the show, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode.

of the show. It's usually just at the top of the app. And it's totally free. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2001 and suit supply has been in business for a year. And it's doing pretty well. In fact, Foka just made under 10 million euros in revenue just selling suits in one store and online. And then in 2002, Foka decides to take on an investment from a larger Dutch fashion brand. I thought at the time it was going to be beneficial for us to be part of a bigger business and that was public and, you know, we could learn something there. But it also, the other side was that I didn't give away any governance, right?

So it was still, you know, fully in control. Yeah. And basically their incentive was, you know, they needed to affiliate them with something that was online so that they could tell the market, It's, hey, guys, we have a strategy of online, and, you know, we're also looking at online, and this is the business that we've invested some money in. You know, at the end of the day, we were not part of that business, but sort of, you know, next to or, you know, could tap into some of the resources. I don't know if that was really that helpful, to be honest. Because these were just really Dutch fashion brands, right?

Very Dutch focused. What I wonder, though, is they put it in about 200,000 euros. in 2002. But your business, your revenue was like 8 to 10 million around that point time. So why do you think you needed that money? It doesn't sound like, it sounds like you had enough, I mean, I guess your margins were pretty thin. Margins were thin and you needed, you know, I needed the two, 300,000. I don't know, the exact number here anymore, right? But it was summoned that bullpark. Plus it was a credit line, right? When my business was growing at the time,

but I still had it to pre-finance all the fabrics, all the... You need to pay for it in advance. Yeah, I mean, I was... You didn't have, like, 30, you couldn't, like, order it and then pay 30 or 60 days later? 30 or 60 days, no, they were not giving me that credit yet. And, you know, the thing is, you buy your fabrics, then you have to send them to your factories. They have to produce it. Then they have to send it to your stores.

I mean, that whole process has your cash tied up before you... way longer than if you're just a, you know, a business that buys wholesale. Yeah. All right. So what, now that you had this cash, this line of credit and this cash, what was the plan? I mean, was it to just start to build like another 10 stores in the Netherlands? Yeah. I mean, that's the moment when, you know, the obvious wing was to expand and open more stores.

And I didn't have still a lot of cash. So I really went from, you know, this crazy location into other cities, but still doing the same thing almost, and finding spots that were, you know, interesting that I could create some kind of an experience in, and it was easy for customers to go to, but still keeping our occupancy cost low. So you were not going to the high street, the main street in the towns, where it was more expensive to the lease is more expensive. You were going, like, on the outskirts of town. outskirts or whatever inside the town but then not on main on main. Yeah.

My customers was coming for, you know, the quality of the product, the fact that it was an attainable price point, and they were getting a great service. So why would I now then go by the standard playbook of how everybody was building a fashion brand, even though I, you know, I knew the guys that put some money in was saying, no, no, no, you have to go there and there and this is how you build a brand. I was like, no, not really, because, you know, I can build a brand basically. on quality of product, based on quality of service, and just figure out to be more efficient so I can actually maintain that proposition. And how did people, I mean, obviously, you did not have a huge advertising or marketing budget

as you open the stores. Like, what would make them go in there? Was it mainly word of mouth? Like, you have some guy wearing a suit, and somebody would say, hey, where did you get that suit? It's really nice. Guess what? It was like 200 euros.

I got it from this store called suit supply. Is that how people would find out? It's more or less. Yeah, they talk about it. It becomes part of the conversation. That is the most important advertising you can get. If you don't have that, forget about it. You're never going to be able to buy against that.

So you were really, I mean, you had to be super efficient to squeeze profit because you were getting the fabric. It was being made in that factory. At that time was made in the same factory that you had originally bought the suits from still? No, I think we've expanded. or fabric, factory base by then. By then. Okay. I got it.

So you were, but, and you had these suits coming in from Italy. And, and I'm trying to figure out like, because you were getting attention in Holland. You were getting press attention. You were, there was buzz around this business. And I think, I think by like 2003, you had, I think, at least three stores in the country, right? Probably a little more, yeah, but eight, nine stores. Eight or nine stores, okay. Something like that.

And so, I know we mentioned this a little bit, but I'm kidding. curious about the competition, particularly in the Netherlands, because, you know, I think a lot of people outside of, you know, probably don't realize this, but in every European country, there are multiple brands that really just kind of remain inside the country, right, or maybe just in like the region or maybe only in Europe. And, you know, it would be like if in the U.S., every state had like 20 different fashion brands that were only in North Carolina or, you know, only in Alabama. And there are There's a little bit of that, but not really that much of it, right? So at the time, were the competitors in the Netherlands? Were they disparaging what you were doing? I mean, were they

because I think you were even sued by a competitor. I don't know if I'm pronouncing right, but it's O-G-E-R, Oger is how to pronounce it. And they sued you because they didn't like one of the advertisements. You had mentioned like, you know, their name and one of your advertisements and it basically said, hey, if you're looking for our shop, just go to Oger and turn left and then turn right and you'll buy our shot. The phrase was like that. He was constantly trashing or, you know, we're trashing our business a little bit. Oger was? Yeah, O'GER. Is it pronounced Ogre? OJ, yeah. OJ. Okay, forgive me. But they were like, I don't know, what's the equivalent? The most premium luxury store in Holland. And at that time, we opened a second store. We

opened a store in Amsterdam, in the city. But it was sort of, you know, in that area, but not in the main on Main Street, around the corner a little bit, et cetera. And then we had an ad that says, for a beautiful suit, you go to Oje, and then you'd take a left and a right. Basically, just a route to go to our store. Yeah. And it was sort of a little bit of a pawn and we joke. And it was a little tongue and cheek.

And he went for it. He started suing us on that ad. He is Ogey? Yeah, and I still have to thank him for it because, you know, it gave us a lot of momentum and a lot of publicity. So that store took a huge jump. So you've got 2004 or five, you're really in, still in the Netherlands.

When did you decide to move outside of Holland and open a store in the next country? I think, you know, that was one of the things I think I've waited for a little too long. I think 2008-9, I started with the first store in Belgium and then in London. Yeah. And London was an interesting example because... Very expensive to do business there. Extremely expensive. And it's the lion's den from suiting, right?

Saville Row, right. You're basically going to London and saying, hey, we can undercut their prices and offer the same quality. Yeah. So I wanted to open a store on Saville Row. And the funny thing with Saville Row was actually that that store was designed designated by the crown of London that could only have traditional English tailors there.

On Saville Row. On Saville Row. So we were trying to get locations, but we were getting, yeah, but you guys are not traditional English. So we went, took a side street and opened a store there. And then, you know, my PR, we were brainstorming about PR and so, you know, we're going to bolt your, we're going to bolt you on the location, on a bed, and you're going to sleep in there, and then we have all these alarm clocks, and then we bring in the press, and that we're going

wake up several row, right? We're going to be this whole new kid on the block. Wait, sorry. You literally brought a bed in there with a bunch of alarm clocks around you to attract... We bolted the bed on the outside of the building, like 10 meters high. You know, it was also like, you know, really scary. A bed on the outside of the building, 10 meters above the ground, and you had alarm clocks around it, and you slept in that bed and this was to attract media attention? Yeah, it was sort of the PR stunt. This was going to be your PR stunt. I got you. Okay. We have like a hundred or a thousand alarm clocks hung up on there, and they were all going to ring at the same time.

We bring the press. And you were going to be in the bed? Yeah. I mean, I was spending a few hours in the morning in that bed. The press came. All the alarm clocks would have. And the idea was, let's just do this stunt and we'll attract attention at least. Yeah.

We got this Amsterdam stunt where Mr. Orgey sort of bite. So let's see if we can, you know, stir up some trouble. All right. And nothing happened. It was... You didn't have any customers. They didn't have any customers. I mean, it was horrific.

And nobody felt for it. So wait, wait. So you were in this bed and like no one, like you're just looking down at the ground and there's like four people milling about? There's four people like pathetic. I think it was not, they was not going to hit the main news. So then I started hiring actors to be in the store to sort of browse around and sort of we had some dynamic happening. It was really... You just hired people to come and pretend...

Yeah. To show that your store was busy. To show it was busy. It was something happening. Yeah. It was very, very slowly picking up, picking up piece by piece by piece. I think it was a hard market to crack. How long did it take?

I think it took about two years. Two years. You know, 2009, 10... It started to happen. People realized that, you know, this was a really good product for an interesting price. And what we also did, I think back then, we put our tailor in the front of the store.

And so it was actually, you know, there were people working and suing and doing stuff. Taylor was sewing right in the front of the store. Yeah. And so people passed by and said, okay, you know, what's going on? Here was a little theater. You know, the store got busier and busier and busier.

And it was doing a few million, then, you know, five, six, seven, eight. It was a gradual process. So we slowly built a reputation. I mean, there was a key difference, which was on Saville Row, you go in, they would fit you. The tailor would, you know, depending on the store, the tailor would then, or the tailors would start manufacturing your suit on site in that store. You guys in 2006, about two years before, moved your manufacturing to China from Italy, where you were still sourcing your fabrics from, but no longer making the, suits in Italy. Tell me why you moved the manufacturing to China, 2006.

Well, what happened is, you know, at the time in Europe, is that manufacturing got, you know, more and more and more scarce. People with the skill set were getting older, leaving factories, young people didn't want to work in these factories anymore. And the skill set of making something really nice was slowly disappearing. The amount of people that were able to do it, we're getting smaller and smaller. And the amount of product that we were needing was getting bigger and bigger. So, you know, we had to find a solution. And I was reading the annual report of Zena at the time.

Which is obviously one of the big premier luxury brands. Yeah. Suit brands, yeah. Suit brands. And they were, you know, expanding into China. And they bought a joint venture into a Chinese garment manufacturer, a suit manufacturer in a town called Wenzhou. And I was like, oh, that's interesting.

If they were also doing that, then there must be a certain level of, you know, high-end quality there. So I'm calling this factory. You know, I got the number and nobody picks up the phone or nobody speaks English in that factory, of course. And so I'm thinking, okay, it's Christmas at that moment. And I'm like, okay, I have nothing to do because everything's close here in Europe anyway. You know what? I'll just take the plane and go to China and go to... knock on the door of this factory, right?

How much time is it going to cost me? A few days. And this is the time in China where, you know, it's not like now, everything is fancy and nice airports. You land in Shanghai. You take a taxi for six hours. You come into this village where there's hardly any street lighting. And there's one international hotel in the town.

I still remember the Victoria Hotel. And I check in there and in the morning, I'm sitting at the breakfast. There's only one European person there, and it's an Italian guy. And I'm thinking, okay, this Italian guy is probably, you know, part of the Zena group. Otherwise, why would there be any Italian here? And so I introduced myself. And this was Tosco.

And Tosko's complaining about, yeah, I'm just being put here with Zena because we bought this factory, and now I have to, you know, produce, because also part of our agreement in this joint venture. is that we supply in certain amount of production capacity. And I went into that factory with him, and he gave me a tour. I was amazed. This was, you know, something I'm like, I've never seen so much quality and so much detail before. It was probably one of the best factories I've ever seen.

Better than ever anything I've seen in Italy. These were two brothers that founded this, you know, from a very young age. And they had just one thing in mind. They were completely fanatic about it. They wanted to make the best suit in the world. And you looked at all the Italians, looked at all the brands, and they worked, you know,

their pattern making, their quality, their level was fantastic. And Zena figured that out. That's why they bought a joint venture in that. So I thought I struck oil, right? I came back from that trip. I'm like, guys, we found the best factory in the world. now our product can be so much better.

And by the way, we can probably also make a little bit more margin on it. That was not the main driver, but, you know, still, it was going to be more efficient. And we have, you know, enough production capacity there. You know, the guys want to work with us because we're actually solving a problem for them because they needed some extra, you know, food for the line. Yeah. For the production line. Because Zenya, it wasn't enough to just make Zenya suits.

They had to make all kinds of suits. They made all kinds of suits. And Genie was, you know, the stars seemed to align perfectly. So I thought, you know, guys, we're going to move to China, everything for the next season to China. Boom. But then, of course, we, you know, we didn't figure out of the logistic parts. And the fabric got stuck at customs for a month. Then, you know, this factory, we weren't used in working for international clients yet.

So they made it in the wrong model because there was stuff going wrong in translation. then, you know, they had to send it out and it was stock in customs again. There was so much stuff that needed to, you know, iron out from a logistic perspective. So everything was, you know, the quality was great, the craftmanship was great, but everything else around it, it was a nightmare. I almost tanked the business with it. You almost tanked the business by moving it to China. In the beginning, yeah, because if we would have been out of product for two months, you know,

where are we going to get revenue? So what did you do? How did you resolve that? I had to run the business here, and then I flew back almost every weekend. To China? To China. And be in the factory, just, you know, pushing and... You're going to China multiple times a month? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I went on the plane five, six hours and then started to push and get things done and be there. And then I got somebody internally that, you know, was just out of university. and working for us in the store. And now, you know, I said, guy, just come with me. Why didn't you stay here and just, you know, the only thing you have to do is make sure that these fabrics that are here are actually going into production, you know, and they were, and call me if there's anything going wrong.

Yeah. And, you know, this guy stayed there and stayed there. And slowly he actually helped us build up our whole production office in China. He learned Chinese in half a year. This was a Dutch guy? He was a Dutch guy. 19 years old. But he was a handy, smart guy, you know, great pusher.

And I just needed to have, I didn't need it also somebody that was crazy enough to stay there, right? They didn't have a, you know, a family or, you know, was tied into Europe. So I just needed a smart guy to sort of oversee. Yeah. All right. So you've got now, you work out the kinks. It's going to take you about two or two years. And you've got your person on site there in China, making sure that they're making it.

to your specifications, but the quality is good. You're happy with the end product. I mean, it sounds like these Chinese tailors are like artisans, like the kind of artisans that might have been in Europe 30, 40 years ago. Yeah, they were phenomenal. I mean, and they still are. I mean, their pride of being part of that business and making this product. And, you know, if the head pattern designer wanted to explain something to the team,

or the whole factory floor, it was silent. They were all sitting around him and listening in all. I find it extremely impressive to see you. I mean, everybody that discounts Chinese production, you know, it's, I don't think, know what they're talking about in a lot of cases. You had, so you had Italian fabrics being shipped to China. That's still your model today. And then basically they were cut.

The fabric was cut and the material and the pieces, those cut pieces were sewn into suits in China. Yes. So now you've got this operation going. Now let's go back to London. In London, you've got the store off Saville Row, but there probably still was in 2008, 2009, a kind of a snobbiness or snootiness about something made in China, a suit made in China. That some people wouldn't find that to be a quality suit. You want to have made in Italy or, you know, made it in London, even though the manufacturing base in those countries are very low, very small today.

How did you convince people that your suits were, you know, a high-quality product? Because the price point was lower. So already there, you know, the sort of the psychology around that is like, well, if it's so cheap, it must not be good. It started as in London, unlike other stores we opened, it was more of like a drip-drip effect, right? There were a few people that came in that were surprised about the actual product and the actual quality they were bringing for the price point. And I call it the Heineken effect. And we have a beer brand here in Holland. Yeah, sure.

And for us here, that is sort of, you know, it's a great beer. Yeah. But it's just beer. Yeah. Well, in, you know, any club in the world. Other countries, it's a premium beer. It's a very premium beer. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a good analogy. So the first customers that you're getting are customers that are a little curious, right? They might not be the conformity. driven people that are snobby and they're just shopping on Saville Row. I'm not going to get a customer maybe that, you know, once I have this, at that moment, this big brand name and say, okay, about the, I don't know, the $5,000 Zena suit or whatever. But you get the customers in the beginning of like, hey, you know, this is interesting.

These guys are doing something new. That helped us in London a lot because on one hand, you had these stores that had all craftmanship and such. But you also had a lot of customers that actually knew good product. Yeah. The same as in Italy. The same. You know, you could, people that feel, say, hey, this feels like good fabric and they fit it on and say, hey, this actually really feels good. So they, I think at the end of the day in London, the customer gave us the credibility. I think by 2010, you had 32 stores. And I think that was in three countries. So between Belgium, Holland, London, maybe you had one or two other countries, still mainly Western, all in Western Europe.

So you decide, and it makes sense, because if you really want to scale your brand, if you want to be a global brand, you've got to be in the United States. And so you knew probably already by 2009, 10, that you were going to eventually get to the U.S. That that was part of your plan, I'm assuming. Yeah, it was the biggest market. You know, it's everybody wants to be in the U.S. Because it's such a buying power. Of course, it's also an aspirational thing, right? You want to make it there and not just be a European brand.

But it was also, you know, everybody was saying it's the hardest market to go into the consumer market. It is so competitive. There's a lot of red tape down there. You know, I think the amount of warning. that I got for going into the US was almost endless. But I was going there every now and then, and looking around and, you know, I thought,

what we're doing is not really here. And I think at that moment, also, I felt that the market in the US was ripe for it. Just getting it done seemed so hard, right? Yeah. And so expensive. I mean, New York was, you know, London was expensive, but going into New York was a completely different,

different bowl game. And presumably New York was going to be your first location for obvious reasons. It's the capital of the fashion capital of the United States and also you could argue it's a suit capital of the U.S. because there's so many people in finance and law in New York men who wear suits to work. Yeah, New York was the obvious location. But also the most expensive. Most expensive, most competitive.

I guess so, well, you know, I'm just trying to get my feet wet here. I didn't even know if we were actually going to be successful in the U.S., right? I just wanted to get started, right? So to get a little bit of experience, you know, see how many of all these warnings that people were giving me were actually true. And I remember at some point we were, I was walking through Soho and, you know, finding locations. And at some point, I was looking up because I forgot about, you know, being on the ground floor too expensive. You know, it was cost, there's millions in rent a year. I was never going to be able to do that.

Millions in rent a year. for one store. For one store. That was sort of the ballpark, 1.52 million a year. For a lease. And you would have to sign it probably a 5 to 10 year lease.

Yeah, five years. And put guarantees behind it and all that kind of stuff. So we're doing okay, but it was not like, we were not able to do that. And so at some point, I see this little handwritten

piece of paper in a window on a second floor says for a lease. And, you know, go up there. there's this sort of furniture store on the second floor and it's a little messy and I call this number and I'm the guy landlord of that building you know yeah no problem 250,000 dollars and this landlord was very happy to give me a year lease with a six-month break and if I couldn't make it after six months I could happily walk away $250,000 so okay all right and you know it was another

shitty space. It was actually a nice spot, beautiful high ceilings, you know, something that could on the corner of Mercer and brooms. It was actually a typical Soho loft space of 4,000 square feet. And later, I found out why this was a handwritten piece of paper and why this guy gave me this deal, because he apparently was the landlord from hell and there was no legit broker that actually wanted to work with this guy anymore in the whole state in New York. When we come back in just a moment, that landlord tries to stop suit supply from opening in New York. And Foka learns how an infusion of cash actually slows his company's momentum. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2011, and Foka has decided to open a suit supply store in Soho in New York. He's drawing up plans and getting ready to build. out the store. And then what happens was actually one of these moments that, you know, you do a lot of hard work and sometimes you get lucky. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal that did a blind test on suiting. And we got out of that contest with a headline that a $600 suit supply suit was better or just as good as a $3,600 or money. That was the review they wrote after they ordered some stuff online. We were not even open yet. They're just the order.

We were just shipping already stuffed online to the U.S. And they just did a comparison and that, that's pretty great. I mean, what a lucky and fortuitous piece of media to get? It was phenomenal, right? And at that moment, you know, our website blew up. And I'm like, okay, we got to capture this momentum. We can't wait until we have all the permits done. Because it was going to take two months to get a permit even.

and, you know, the design zone for all this store. We got to open this store now if we want to keep this going. So we did a quick design, had furniture made and shipped in a plane. All the lighting has to be done, the walls have to be placed in. You know, something had to be done to that store. It was a mess. So we found probably, I know, some kind of contractor. It was probably the equivalent of the Sopranos that wanted to do it without permit.

So I opened this store. it's almost done. I mean, this is a dream. We're doing an opening. We have all kinds of press coming. I think six, seven hundred people on the guest list. Some really important people for the industry that we were able to get on the back

at the Wall Street Journal article. This was the moment. And so two days before opening, I get a call from this landlord and say, her are you going to open tomorrow? I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're all done. I mean, you know, big opening. Yeah, you're still, I don't have your permit closed out, so that's not going to happen.

And I'm like, shit, of course. I thought I had everything done. And this guy. Well, I said, don't worry about it. You know, all the permits are getting done. You know, our architect is working on. It's just a, according to him, self-certified job, you know, some phrasing I heard along the line. And it's going to be done.

Yeah. And I said, well, if you can have a way because it's not something you can do, figure it out with my lawyer. Here's this number. Call this lawyer. He says, well, I'm going to go on a holiday today, so it's not going to happen. I'm like, okay, this is, we need to find a solution. So I called this landlord back. I say, okay, I'm going to give you $150,000 as a deposit for me to open tomorrow and for you to allow me to do that.

And if I close out the permits in two months, fine. me the money back and otherwise, you know, it's yours. This guy was having the baddest reputation you could ever imagine. And he tells me, well, how are you going to put that in contract? I said, I'm not going to put it in contract. I'm going to trust you. I don't think everybody, anybody would have had said that to him in a long, long time. So, you know, I said, he said, well, okay, I'm thinking I'm never going to get this $150,000 back. No. But, you know, but. okay, at least I'm going to have my opening and I'm going to keep my momentum, which is way more important right now. At the end of the day, we had our opening. We had a lot of people come in.

It was fantastic. And the guy actually gave me my money back after three months. You returned the money when you got the permits. You returned it. But it was essential for us to do it. I mean, if you talk about momentum and that store was packed from the first moment and we had the first floor and then it was too small and we got the second floor and the third floor and the fourth floor and I think now it's six floors. When you, I mean, one of the things that you were doing from the beginning was having tailors in the stores. And this is like, this is not, you know, it's not like a retail shop where you just have like college students who are trained for, you know, a couple days and then they are selling on the floor. This is like a highly skilled job. So what were you doing to

make sure that you had, like were you putting your tailors through training program, you know, before they even sat in the shop, and presumably they were already qualified tailors, I imagine. Yeah, there's, you know, finding quality staff and training them is the hardest part there is. And, you know, in the beginning we were bringing people from Europe and training them and the tailors, but also, especially the, you know, our style experts on the store floor, these are two different job in our business, right? Somebody is selling it and pinning it, they're doing the measurements, and somebody is doing the actual work of doing the alterations and doing the suing if it's a ready-to-wear suit that needs to be altered. Now, both jobs need a lot of training.

Of course, you have in a city like New York, you have tailors. So we were able to find them and train them into how we want to do the work. We have a relentless high-end training program where we bring everybody to our one-week onboarding program. When you finish that, you're brought into a store, and you're paired with what we call a style expert. And you're getting, for two months, more and more and more in knowing all the details about style, about measurements and everything about the business.

We don't spend the money on advertising. We spend the money on training our people. And we also follow the progress very carefully. We believe our store teams, we all say are our marketing teams. I mean, I'm wondering how do you retain those people? Like, for example, I'm in the Bay Area. So if I want to go to the San Francisco store, I can set up an appointment.

I can go meet with a stylist or a tailor or whatever, and there's an on-site tailor. And we're now, especially in the U.S. and probably in Europe, retail shops are having a hard time, not just finding people to work in those stores, but retaining people. So if you're investing all this money in training, how do you keep people? I mean, they could get trained and then take off after a few months or a year. And then you've sunk all that money in training. Yeah. I think, you know, the most important thing is first your selection of people.

You know, you got to like your job. If you ask somebody at Apple, why do you work at Apple? Right. They're not going to say, well, how great their benefit packages and what their remuneration. They say, you know, I like to work here because I like the technology. I like the product. I want to be a programmer at some point or a product designer or, you know, they resonate with the product. That's the same in our business.

You want to work with us if you like to dress and style people and make them go out of the door to look good. That's where you get your energy from. And then it's about having a path for people, a career path for them. So we have what we call the sun and the moon path in our business, where the sun and the moon are both very important and to make sure that we have life on Earth. We would freeze the death at night, or we wouldn't have the tides.

There would not be life on Earth. So we're very clear about always, you know, you want a moon career, you want a sun career. The moon path is the mantra of the moon path is so we can only have. have eyes for our customers. And these are all jobs that make sure that, you know, everything works, that stuff is organized and stuff is managed and the roster is there and the product is in the store and so that the other part of the business can focus on only one thing

is styling customers and getting people into the door and creating attraction. And there we have very specific career paths that are, I think, new or different than other retailers. You can become a style expert in training other people, but you can also become what we call a key opinion leader, where we train you in how to represent the brand on social media or outside of the store, where you basically become sort of a, I would say, a mini-influencer, but with a very big difference,

that you're able to book an appointment with you on the spot, on your Instagram. So your style advisors have their own Instagram pages and have built their own followings? They're built their own following. They built their own Instagram pages. We work with them to create content. We train them on how to do this. So we build these career paths that are very, one is more operational

and one is more creative in creating attraction with customers and creating looks and style. And that leads into, the one path leads, you know, you could say at the end in the CEO. and the other path leads into a brand director position, as in the top of the pyramid almost. So to your point, what does retention mean? Retention means that you have to figure out

how you can create growth for these people. So they also have a feeling that it's worthwhile for them to stay with your business. Fulke, we had a couple weeks ago on the show, we had Michael Kores, the fashion designer, who turned his talent into one of the biggest fashion brands in the world It's certainly one in the top 50 and, you know, $8, $9 billion business. And he very consciously set out to do that to become like a Tommy Hilfiger or a Calvin Klein brand.

And one of the ways he did that was by making sure his products were available everywhere. Your products are only available in suit supply stores. But I have to imagine that in the past and probably even now, there have been people who've come to you and said, hey, open a suit supply, you know, a little shoplet in. of, you know, Gallery Lafayette, or open a suit supply inside of Liberty, or open one inside of,

you know, Bloomingdale's, and also sell suit supply stuff to department stores. And you'll be much bigger if you do that. You'll be a much bigger brand.

What's been your reason for not doing that? Well, you could do that. And you probably get some money. And it's very different for different products, right? I think Michael Coors is very successful

in the accessory business and handbags, right? And, you know, if you look at that business, and the thing from a service perspective that you have to do is make sure, you know, you have a nice product, and you have somebody in the store that gets you the right handbag from the back of house and sells it to you. The problem with our product is,

and the problem with our business, is it is, and I would say the Goldman Sachs of Retail, it's so execution-intensive to do it right, You go to our store because you have a dinner, a date, an important event, a meeting, a celebration, or whatever, something is important for you. So this person that is going to help you, you know, you got to have trust with. You got to, this person has to develop some kind of relationship with you. Then they have to do all the pinning right, the measurements right.

Then we have to alter it or even if it's a custom-made suit, make it for you. And it has to come back on time and then we have to fit it again. So this is a very high-touch service model that is almost intangible connected to the product itself. You know, if I try to separate the two of them, it's going to give me a little short-term success. But in the long term, I don't believe that I can separate the two from them and be a very successful brand over a longer period of time. But it's always going to limit your scalability, right? If you are only in suits of... I'm not saying this as a criticism.

I actually like that because you can control quality, but it is going to limit how big you can be. I don't know if it actually limits scalability. What it does do, it underpins sustainability. I think with doing that, we can protect the brand. We can protect what actually drives us and what drives us as a brand. So, you know, they always say, you know, I go to my stores. every six months.

I'm not saying all the stores, but probably 80% of them. And, of course, we celebrate everybody's success, but everybody has to name two things that we can do better. Now, they always tell me, I'm a focus. You cannot do that when you have 500 stores. I said, okay, well, you know, I'll figure that out when I have 500 stores, but I'm pretty sure that the only way to get there in our model is to make sure that we keep control of execution and excellence.

Because otherwise I have to change my model, I think. I have to start, if I just put a product in a department store, why would somebody buy our product and not something else? You know, the only way of doing that is then start spending huge amount of money on advertising. You bought out your, those guys who originally were original investors who had, I think a third of the company, you bought them out in 2015. So now back to being essentially the majority shareholder or at that point or were you, the hundred, did you own 100% of the company at that point?

Yeah. Wow. Okay. Around that year, your revenue, your worldwide revenue was about $200 million and you were growing. What I'm wondering about is you're in a business that is it's a high-end product. Your margins are very, very thin because you're trying to offer a competitive. positively priced product. So how were you able to squeeze out more efficiency to make more money from this? Like, what were your options? I think at the time, you know, if I look at the business

itself, we're in actually too many countries. We opened our business in the U.S., but also we were in Germany. We were in Italy. We were in, you know, our business is inherently inefficient because we're in so many different places. But don't you have to expand? I mean, I mean, isn't your only option at that point to expand, expand, expand, because your margins were so thin? No. I mean, yeah, you have to expand, but you also have to be, you know, careful of how to expand and what you do. We were able to, rates were extremely low. Capital markets were, you know, flooded with cash.

You could, you know, borrow a lot of money. It was cheap. Yeah. Cheap to borrow money. So you were able to expand by, obviously, with these low rates. But you're saying the expansion was not, because I would think the, I mean, I think by 2020, but before the pandemic, you're saying it was not a good strategy? Yeah, it's a good strategy.

No, definitely a good strategy. But what I said is, okay, when those rates were so low and money was abundant, you could, you know, suddenly from a constantly cash-strapped business, we raised a lot of debt and suddenly we had a lot of cash. Yeah. You know, I've never had like, you know, let's say, just a 50 million sitting on the bank account. Yeah. And as an entrepreneur, you have endless IDs, right? You always think, you know, I can do this and I can do that and then I can do that.

And naturally, that's always circumvented by, you know, not having enough money to do them all. Yeah. Right. So this changed. So then I opened, you know, for, okay, let's go full throttle. We opened, you know, we did a year when we opened, I think, 10 or 12 stores in the US when we only had 10 or 12, then, you know, at the same point, we started, you know, figuring out and opening a women's line and it was few women's stores.

And we did too much. And instead of gaining a lot of momentum and gaining scale, what happens is that your execution starts to suffer, your momentum starts to slow, and this big snowball that was rolling out of the mountain and accumulating a lot of that stops. and then you have to spend a few years of pushing it back in momentum again. I guess for you that sort of breaking point, for a lot of businesses, would have been at the beginning of the pandemic, March of 2020, right? Because I mean, you have at that point 135 stores, you've got the women's line,

and all of a sudden your business, I mean, still, you were doing a lot of business online, I think about a third of your business already at that point was online or maybe more. But without the shops, I mean, that's your identity. That's the customer relationship, right? And you had to shut them most of them down temporarily. Nobody, you get great to be online, but if everybody's sitting at home, nobody needs our stuff. Nobody is needing, you know, short suits, whatever. By then, we've expanded our collection into way more stuff than just suits, right?

We were in the more elevated casual part of stuff, but it's all product that you need if you go out, if you're social, if you're going on a nice date or a nice, you know, event. Those were not happening. So for us, it was business was just cratering. Your sales fell initially about 40% in that year. Tell me about what you were thinking, because here you've got a business. You started 20 years before that. It was just up, up, up and up and up every year. Growth, growth, growth, growth, up.

And then, bam, you've got this calamitous year. So the question is, you're in the middle of pandemic and you're thinking, holy, you know, crap, no one's going to be buying suits. That's the conventional wisdom, right? And so, you know, it would make sense to start thinking, well, maybe we should go into athlete's your wear. And there are examples of brands that really broadly expanded. Did you ever entertain anything like that?

No, what we thought about is, you know, what does the new suit look like? Yeah. Is, you know, people still want to have looks, right? And it's just going to get a lot harder for them because before it was a blue suit and a white shirt. And now it's suddenly, you know, trousers, chinos, white sneakers or slip-ons or whatever, five pairs of different styles of shoes. And then you can pair them with a polo or a crew neck or a shirt or and then it's a jacket or, you know, the amount of options to go into this elevated sort of replacement of that moment, of that dress

moment is suddenly endless. So we invented look builder where you could easily, you know, build your own looks. It's on the website. It's a feature of the website where you go play out. Yeah, it's a feature. It's super cool, by the way. It's in a model and you could just put on different clothes on, on this model. And, you know, the output of that technology would help us to create if you're shopping a certain item online, we could also immediately show you five different ways of wearing that item and actually be able to shop that look. And then we came out of the pandemic and we were doing all that kind of stuff. And then on top of that, a lot of people suddenly wanted to dress up and wear suits for all kinds of reasons. So we were selling a ton of suits.

And on top of that, our whole elevated casual on how we invented that was also extremely successful. You know, I'm curious about the financial side, which is you own, you still own 100% of the company today, right? Yeah. And so I am sure that you get approached or have been approached by investors or private equity or venture folks who are like, look, let's, we want to buy a chunk of this business. We will, you know, I mean, Michael Coors did this in 2004 or five where, you know, some investors came in, but a part of his business, but then helped him scale it, right, to a much bigger. place. Your business obviously is big, 150 locations, but would you consider it? Would you say, you know what, I'll bring on partners with big wallets, take some money off the table for me, and then we can use that money to fuel the growth of suit supply even further. Is that something

that you would maybe do? Well, I mean, you know, we get these calls all the time, of course. And it's always nice to talk to people and sort of to learn about how they, look at your business, right? I mean, you know, that's, but, you know, from a personal side, I'm happy to say that I've made my dough and I, you know, I don't have to take money off the table, right? Yeah. And on the business side, I had these conversations many times and, you know, I have to always say is that I ask myself, because it sounds great, right? But it's important to understand this. Why do you like your business? I like to be in control, have the freedom.

And running this business takes so much energy. It's 16 hours a day. There's always something going on. You're still working that way, even now, 23 years in, 16 hours a day? Oh, 100%. Seven days a week. Which I'm fine with, you know, if I have. But it's taking a lot of energy.

And you're almost 50. I mean, not to say I'm too. You're not an old guy. But that's a long time to work that hard. Yeah. But I like to put my energy in there. And if you lose control or you have to really think about what it would mean if you change that, if you would still be able to put the same amount of energy in there,

I'm not saying we're never going to do it or we're never going to IPO the business. Or maybe at some point I think it's good for the business or it's a safer, you know, I mean, I'm almost 50. You know, I'm going to, how much? Maybe I'm going to do this another 10 years. But it's also, you have to think about how. we're going to bring the business into maybe a different, I don't say, stratosphere or whatever you call it. But I want to be able to at least feel that I can attribute the same amount of

energy to it every day. Okay, one of the things we haven't talked about, because it really isn't that much written about you, at least in English. And we've, you know, we do a lot of research on all our guests. And so I just don't know much about your personal life. Do you have a family? Do you have children? Did you get married? I mean, were you able to to do that and all of this work over the last 23 years? I have two kids with my ex-wife. I was never married, but my ex-partner in that regard. With all that travel and all that work, 16 hours a day,

I mean, probably there were some personal sacrifices. I imagine you probably didn't get to spend as much time with your kids maybe as you would have liked. In the beginning where they were really babies and small and, you know, No, I didn't spend a lot of time with them. On the other hand, I very consciously spend a lot of one-on-one time on them when they got older, and I could do stuff with them and have experiences with them. I took them on traveling a lot with me. You know, there are not a lot of kids that have been in so many countries, I think, before they were eight or nine.

Your kids are adults now. They're older right now. My daughter is 19, and my son is 17. Either of them want to work for the business? And I think my son wants to be in, I think his only choice is also being an entrepreneur because he's so stubborn. So I don't know if he wants to work in this business.

And my daughter is very into design and so it could be. But one or the two would want that would be great. But I also have to say that I think the most fun of having a business is being able to build it yourself. So you would encourage them to start their own thing? I would encourage them more to start their own thing than, you know, to start managing my headaches. Yeah.

You know, we've talked for a long time, and you've had a long time to reflect on your story and what you've, where you are today. And obviously, it's a really successful brand that you built. But when you think about this story, and I'm sure you haven't recounted it in such detail, often in your life. How much of where you are today do you think is because of the hard work and the grind you put in? And how much do you think has to do with luck? I think most of it has to do because hard work and doing so much stuff all the time all over the place. And you always think as an entrepreneur, you know, 10 years, I think it someday is going to be less and less.

But, you know, it never gets less because you also start doing, you know, more. and more stuff again. And because, you know, the luck, somebody always said, is with the hardworking because, you know, then you also increase the chances of, you know, getting lucky every now and then, right? If you sit on the couch and nothing happened, you're not going to get lucky.

And also going against the grain a lot of times or following, you know, not the usual standard playbooks and not so much from any heritage as we want to be different because, you know, you didn't have a choice. You had to be different or you had to be creative to get to an end goal. Yeah. I think that's also the fun of it, right, at the end of the day. It's Foka de Young, founder and CEO of Suit Supply.

By the way, you remember how Foka would go into businesses and offer to improve the wardrobe of the workers? Well, Suit Supply still offers a corporate service and has helped outfit both male and female staff for brands like Four Seasons Hotels and Omega Watches. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to follow the show wherever you listen on any podcast app. Usually there's just a follow button right at the top so you don't miss any new episodes.

And it is entirely free. If you want to contact our team, our email address is hibt at ID.wondry.com. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Routemteen Arablewe. It was edited by Casey Herman with research help from Sam Paulson. Our production staff also includes Neva Grant, Elaine Coates, Liz Metzger, John Isabella, Carrie Thompson, Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, and Kira Joaquin. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.