Here’s what happened when we created our own made-to-measure shirt at Tailor Store
When we recently received an email from Tailor Store – an online retailer specialising in tailor-made clothing – inviting us to create our own made-to-measure shirt, we were intrigued.
Given that we are more accustomed to buying our shirts from Sainsbury’s than Savile Row, the idea of commissioning a bespoke garment conjured up images of time-consuming measuring sessions and hefty price tags. So, we were curious about how Tailor Store would measure up – pun intended – in terms of how easy it would be to create our shirt, what the quality and fit of the finished product would be like, and whether or not the end result would break the bank. On the latter point, Tailor Store kindly gave us a voucher code to cover the cost of the shirt (which was nice – as we don’t get nearly as many freebies as you might imagine) – but it was still important to see whether the company’s products offered great value to our readers.
What is Tailor Store?
Like us, you may not have heard of Tailor Store before – so our Directory Listing here is a handy place to start. Basically, the company was founded in 2003 in Sweden, and has grown to become the biggest tailor-made clothing firm in the world, serving customers in Europe, the UK and beyond.
Its speciality is high-quality made-to-measure shirts – which customers can create themselves using the online designer tool – but there’s also a range of other product options, including suits, chinos and men’s and women’s polos.
Designing your shirt
Creating your own shirt at Tailor Store is actually really easy – and rather fun, too. You begin with a default white shirt (at £39.95), and then the interface prompts you to customise it one step at a time.
So, you start by specifying your fit (slim, normal, loose), and then choosing from a multitude of fabric options. Plain, checks, stripes, stars – there’s certainly a mindboggling array of choices. We went for the classic Teya design (a light-blue stripe), but chose to jazz it up with a gorgeous pink floral print for the inside collar, under collar and inside cuffs, and a matching hot pink thread for the buttons.
What’s really impressive about the interface is that all your choices update live, on screen, on a beautifully detailed representation of the shirt that you’re creating. So if, for example, you decide that your option of a narrow placket really doesn’t work (the placket is the double layer that holds the buttons and buttonholes, apparently), it’s really easy to keep experimenting with all the options until you come up with a look that is just so.
For a bit of fun, we also decided to go for the monogram option – embroidered in hot pink thread to match the buttons – to give our shirt a truly personal touch.
Finally, of course, the most important bit is the sizing. You can either enter the measurements based on your favourite existing shirt, or (as we did) build a ‘measurement profile’ using three easy measurements – your height, your weight, and your collar size. Drawing on data from thousands of satisfied customers, Tailor Store claims that this information is all it needs to create a perfect-fitting shirt – and (assuming you’ve entered all the measurements correctly) promises to have your shirt altered or remade if it’s not a 100% perfect fit.
And the damage for all this? £93.10 plus £5.95 P&P, which for a completely bespoke shirt seemed pretty reasonable. After all, you can easily pay £100 or more for a shirt in one of those designer stores that we have to work hard to keep ourselves away from.
Once your order has gone through, you can log in to check its progress. Two days after ordering it, we were quite excited to see that the fabric had been cut!
The shirt arrives
Tailor Store promised us a delivery time of 10-20 working days – which is fine for a product that’s being created especially for you, from scratch – and sure enough, we received the email saying it had been shipped ten days after placing our order. Another seven days later (it does have to come from Sweden, remember) it arrived! So, did it live up to expectations? Absolutely!
The mock-up on the website gave a pretty clear idea that the shirt we had ordered would be nicely made and have beautiful attention to detail, and the finished product certainly doesn’t disappoint. The fabric is good and thick (always a sign of a quality shirt), all the little details we asked for are perfectly executed, and – perhaps most importantly – it fits like a dream.
It was packaged and presented with care, too – a feature where many online stores do fall down. If you’re paying quite a lot of money for something nice, you do expect the presentation to be in keeping with that – and the attractive Tailor Store ribbon, wrapped around the shirt, added just the right splash of luxury.
Overall verdict
Overall then, we were very impressed with Tailor Store – not just with the quality and value of the shirt itself (which looks really smart on as well as off), but also with the superb and intuitive online design interface, the good communication, and the timely delivery.
There’s still a place, of course, for our supermarket and Primark shirts for everyday wear, but if we wanted to make an impression with a really good quality shirt that reflected our personality (i.e. those pink florals) then we’d definitely consider ordering from Tailor Store again. Who knows, perhaps we’ll go for the whole suit next time?