Our Story 

The British Approach...

While living in Bombay India in the late 1960’s I had some suits made which gave me a look of success like I had never seen before. Not only were my clothes a superior fit but my tailor continued to send me perfect fitting future orders without need of fittings, alterations, or my having to go pick up and try on new clothes. It was then that I decided to make a business of this superior and “lost art”  approach. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I had stumbled on the authentic, now nearly extinct, approach to custom tailoring as it had been taught by the British to the Indians and the Chinese when they colonized their countries.  At the time, and ever since, in any western country, where standard mass production patterns are available, tailor’s have skipped the long apprenticeship to learn the art of pattern making; a sad compromise to the original process.

Within 3 years of starting business,  a sales force of between 6 and 12  salespeople introduced Greg Chapman’s Executive Tailored Clothes to thousands of successful executives, attorneys, athletes, money managers, and CEO’s and measured up some 5,000 clients, many or most of whom turned to the firm for up to 45 years, through their entire careers. Today, clients from all across the country order and receive perfect fitting custom clothing by phone from swatches after having been measured up, whether in an office visit by Greg or a sales representative, or as part of a Casino VIP event, or as  audience members in one of Greg’s Dress for Success speeches to professional organizations,  corporate sponsorships around the country.

For centuries, custom tailors had learned the art of drawing a pattern to address the unique posture, shoulder line, and distribution of separate measurements of an individual client. It was during the 1960s that tailors in the Western countries (England, Italy, Canada, America, etc.) began short cutting their apprenticeship by modifying standard (off-the-rack) “block” patterns, a process that has come to be called “made-to-measure.” Our trial orders to tailors in Europe, all who now use this short-cut approach, have never met the “fit” standards which I experienced in India and that we have developed to the state-of-the-art.

That was the inspiration upon which I based my business in 1968; the ability to deliver a perfectly fitting suit without fittings or alterations. We studied why some suits fit better than others and developed formulas and methods which enabled us to direct our tailors and to utilize their craftsmanship and technical skills without depending on their “taste” or “judgment.”

Since 1968, literally thousands of clients have built incredible wardrobes often from across the country, all from an initial set of measurements taken 20 or 30 years ago (with size changes incorporated from order to order) without ever requiring a single alteration or fitting!