Written by Menswear Style in Interviews on the 31st August 2021

You’re one of a kind, so why shouldn't your clothes be? Forget everything you thought you knew about sizes and fit, Tailor Store do true made to measure. No shady business, just really good custom-tailored clothes. Their tailors take pride in every step of the craft which includes cutting, sewing, and stitching garments with the utmost precision and care. Feel as good as you look knowing that your garment is made with sustainability in mind by well-compensated workers. Discover the true potential in custom clothing with unlimited design options. All their fabrics and designs are carefully selected to give you superior quality dress shirts at the best possible price.

In a recent episode of the MenswearStyle Podcast we interviewed Mats-Ola Ström, Co-Founder of Tailor Store about the story of when two friends decided to start their own bespoke clothing eCommerce business from Sri Lanka and Sweden in 2003. Our host Peter Brooker and Mats-Ola talked about the difficulties of operating a company from different countries, using machine learning to accurately take body measurements, the process of making a bespoke garment, fabric trends, and how the pandemic has impacted the demand of formalwear.

“I'm one of the founders and Tailor Store was originally founded in 2003, together with my long-time friend Magnus who went to Sri Lanka as an exchange student in his last year of university. He came back wearing a really nice shirt and told me he paid something like £5 for it from a street tailor. This is when we started discussing whether we could set up a business selling these types of garments. We are both tech nerds and we are familiar with programming, but we didn't know a lot about menswear. We decided we had nothing to lose, and we got in contact with some of his old bosses in Sri Lanka to help us probe the market and see if we could find a supplier. From there we built our first little tailor shop in the middle of the jungle."

"Our customers could order fully customised shirts to their measurements for almost no money. We started building a website during the autumn of 2003 and then accidentally published it and caught an order without doing any marketing or even letting anyone know we existed. This gave us the hunch that the business idea might actually work. In the last five years we have done a lot of improvements in the digital domain. We are using machine learning and years of customer measurement data to developed the algorithms for our app which will accurately take your measurements using photographs. It’s an in-house solution completely made by us. We take full responsibility for the measurements given to us by the customer. We are not satisfied until our clients are comfortable in the garments they’ve ordered.”

This is a shortened transcribed edit of episode 126 of the MenswearStyle Podcast with Mats-Ola Ström, Co-Founder of tailorstore.com. You can listen to the full version below or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast player.

We discuss Custom Made Clothing, Sri Lanka, and Bespoke Tailoring in this interview with Mats-Ola Ström of Tailor Store.