Old school tailor shop goes hi-tech with personalised stores

Bloomberg

At a traditional tailor shop, the kind that’s been around for centuries as an atelier for bespoke suiting, the personal touch has always been vital. Shoppers have relationships with their tailors, who know their style and what they’d want to wear. Now that relationship is getting a technological makeover.
Knot Standard, a custom-suit startup backed by more than $25 million in venture capital funding, has spent the past few years trying to figure out what suit its menswear shoppers want when they visit a showroom in person.
After numerous attempts, it has settled on something management calls a “Style Wall,” a way to effectively personalise an entire store for individual customers when they step through the front door.
Here’s how it works: Suit-seeking shoppers book their appointments online, pairing up with a stylist. Upon arrival, a wall of screens in the showroom’s common area is there to guide them through basic ideas, with photos and videos of models wearing the label’s suits.
If they’ve said, for instance, that they want an outfit for a black tie wedding, tuxedos and bowties will splash across the screens, providing inspiration for looks.
Then customers are taken into a private room with a wall of screens. This one is logged into the shopper’s profile, listing all previous purchases and sharing new looks that may
interest them, based on what Knot Standard has learned about their style and what the customer has come to the
store to buy.
It suggests pairings for items in their current wardrobes and knows their customisation preferences ahead of time. Here, the stylist can bring up different options—buttons, pockets, lapels—to show men the looks. They can compare types of collars and explain what goes best with what. Call it a brief education in suiting.
“We sell a very high-end luxury garment that is, in essence, selling confidence in what a guy wears,” says Matt Mueller, the company’s president and co-founder. “Those guys need to know that when they spend the time and money on this, it’s going to work.” What he’s trying to solve is that “confidence gap.” Guys want to be told what looks good on them, especially when they’re spending a hefty chunk of paycheck. Suits at Knot Standard start at $845, and prices can surpass $3,500.
Work on the style wall began about a year ago, when the company got a fresh cash injection from investors. Now the walls are launching in all of Knot Standard’s nine showrooms across the US—in such cities as New York, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. They’ll also be in the Manhattan flagship of Bloomingdale’s. The next location will open in Atlanta this spring. Each showroom will have more than 30 screens.