Key takeaways:
- As fashion goes ever more mass, designers across the price spectrum are building sizable made-to-order businesses, with designers like Prabal Gurung and Antonio Berardi attributing 20 to 25 per cent of sales to made-to-order.
- Designers have found ways to control costs by outsourcing parts of the process and relying on some automation.
- Similar to haute couture, many designers say made-to-order services are a valve for creativity, allowing them to develop ideas that may later be incorporated into ready-to-wear.
With its trademark white, puff-sleeved blouses and ruched gingham dresses, Olivia Rose epitomises the modern-day Jane Birkin aesthetic that has become popular on Instagram. But what sets the Edinburgh-based label apart from visually similar peers like With Jéan and Rouje is that each piece is made upon purchase.
From fast-fashion giants to the rise of indie brands with Instagram storefronts and Chinese factories, fashion is moving more rapidly than ever. Simultaneously, labels across the price spectrum are finding success with made-to-order, positioning it as a slower, higher-quality alternative to mass retail and off-the-rack designer clothes.
In the past decade, as prices for ready-to-wear have gone up and quality has arguably gone down, haute couture and bespoke tailoring have witnessed a renaissance. Although it is not the most scalable of business models, it is a sustainable one. Today, established designers like Emilia Wickstead and Jenny Packham offer made-to-measure services in addition to ready-to-wear, while digitally native brands Olivia Rose and Maison Cleo operate on a fully custom model as a way to avoid excess inventory and provide the personalisation customers crave.
“We are in the early stages of one of the largest sector-driven opportunities of our lifetime,” says Lisa Morales-Hellebo, co-founder of Refashiond, a venture capital firm that invests in companies attempting to reinvent the supply chain.
The absence of excess inventory is a significant benefit for businesses that offer made-to-measure. Prices are usually much higher, and the profit margins can also be significant. At New York-based Prabal Gurung, made-to-order accounts for 25 per cent of the business and margins are “healthy”, according to Olivia Ong, the brand’s VP of global sales and merchandising. Prices take into account fabric, timeline, pattern, sketches, fittings, hours of sewing, and embroidery.
Made-to-order pieces at Roland Mouret run from between £6,000 to £50,000, or at least triple the prices of his ready-to-wear. Mouret says these take into account the cost of materials — unique fabrics tend to have higher costs since they aren’t bought in bulk — and also his time and presence.
While customers can buy designs made entirely from scratch, designers with ready-to-wear lines say most clients desire variations of the clothes that were previously shown on the runway. “[Requests are] never too far from the creativity of the collection,” says Mouret. This is echoed by London-based Antonio Berardi, where made-to-order makes up 20 to 25 per cent of the business. This keeps costs down further since most fabrics will already be on hand, and less time is needed to tweak a piece.
While made-to-order brands historically had to build their own workshops and carry overheads, many more customisation services are now available off-the-shelf and accessible to customers worldwide. Instead of having one central workshop, for instance, San Francisco-based Milaner produces its custom capsule collections in partnership with heritage factories in Spain, Italy and France.
Morales-Hellebo sees a future where clients can virtually try on a garment with augmented reality and then have the garment produced via sewbots, digital weaving, knitting machines or on-demand cut-and-sew. For example, New York’s Lab 141 licenses its patented fit-garment technology to help luxury brands produce made-to-order clothing in 48 hours. It built a laser cutter with Lectra that takes a customer’s measurements, which are then transformed into a pattern with the help of an algorithm, says Morales-Hellebo. The laser cutter’s robotic arms then assemble clothing using a bonding agent instead of stitching.
The venture capitalist argues that rather than taking the romance out of craft, technology and limited automation will encourage customers to see customisation as a given. “If you look at things like personalisation and customisation, there is so much upside,” Morales-Hellebo says, citing lower returns and higher brand loyalty and efficiency.
Made-to-order is not easily scalable. It also can’t compete with clothes available via same-day delivery. “The sales cycle in made-to-order can be understandably more difficult to plan for, and given the inherent nature of the work, it can make for more erratic cash flow and demands on labour,” says Doug Stephens, founder of Retail Prophet, a retail-focused consultancy firm that works with LVMH and L'Oréal.
“Because I hand-make everything myself, I can only make a limited amount in a certain time frame,” says Olivia Rose Havelock of Olivia Rose. “A lot of people can miss out on ordering when they want because I can be fully booked with orders sometimes for weeks.”
Even larger brands like Roland Mouret require a three-month lead time to procure fabric, assign a pattern cutter and a seamstress. Prabal Gurung also asks for eight to 12 weeks for the team to “dedicate adequate resources — design, production, pattern-making, customer service — without sacrificing the schedule of the ready-to-wear business,” says Ong. Jenny Packham has a “made-to-size” service that allows customers to make small changes to off-the-rack pieces that has a quick turnaround time: it can offer re-orders to stockists within a season. (About 10 per cent of its business is made-to-order.) But purely bespoke fittings require “as many fittings as needed”, she says.
That’s why many made-to-order brands primarily deal with evening and bridal wear, where demand is relatively controlled. Ong says that most “custom projects are not aligned with any season in particular, so they really are one-off sourcing missions”.
Still, Ong says the “the non-tangible advantages outweigh the tangible ones”. The close connection formed between the designer and the customer is “invaluable” to the business. “With ready-to-wear, the dress leaves the door, and we don't usually get a chance for that immediate feedback: how the dress made the woman feel, what she was wearing it for, what made her buy it. With our atelier business, we work diligently to partner as closely as possible with the client to make her look precisely the way she wants. It really is a labour of love.”
Packham finds the extra effort to be worth the creative inspiration that custom pieces provide. “From a design perspective, being chosen to make an important piece for a customer is an opportunity to experiment with new techniques and create something entirely new and beautiful,” she says. “The creation of such a piece always sends the creative sparks flying throughout the studio and will influence the collections.”
“[Made-to-measure] offers a moment of communication and sharing information. You learn the way your customer lives and how they use your clothes,” says Mouret. “It’s that one-on-one moment with a designer, something that was a luxury in the ’30s or ’40s. It’s the notion of haute couture, but at the price of bespoke. You deliver something high-street and contemporary fashion can’t.”
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