It was a replica of the Thai police shirt,
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 7:30 am
This is actually a problem that I had had wearing slim fit shirts–the gaping between the buttons at the chest. I thought, “huh, that’s why these guys look so good in their shirts because they can wear closer fitting shirts, and they don’t look like they’re busting out of them because of the gaps between the buttons.” That was the seed of the idea. I brought the shirt back to New York and I showed it to one of my best friends who worked at Bloomingdale’s and he’d been buying men’s dress shirts for years. He had never seen this before and liked the idea. I worked with Bloomingdale’s almost immediately to develop a zipper shirt for their store line. We released the first zipper shirt.
but less fitted. We released the shirt to seven different Bloomingdale’s stores. We made about a thousand of them. It was a very poor selling project. Apparently, they had to sell about 50% of them at a deep discount. It sold so terribly that they did not reorder. The thing that came from that failure was I got to see why it was that the shirt didn’t sell. There were lots of different reasons. One of the things was that the manufacturer had used a cheap zipper. This is the way that you close the shirt, you can’t skimp on the zipper. You have to have a good zipper.
The other thing was that there was something wrong with the center plaque japan phone number list that didn’t keep it covering the zipper. When you zipped it up, you could see the zipper. The most important thing was that the item got lost in the entire collection of men’s stuff among their cashmere sweaters and their pants. Nobody was there to tell the story or put the shirt into context.
It has to be said that this was really kind of a side project for me. I had moved back to New York from Miami after I closed the restaurant and was working on this tech product and pushing that forward. In the meantime, that wasn’t making any money, so I was also working as a bartender and a DJ. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it, but I kept pushing it forward. One day I discovered this custom shirt maker called Seago custom shirts. I walked in and I met the owner. His name’s Carl Goldberg. I told him about the shirt and he thought it was interesting. Then I brought him a sample of the shirt and he agreed to make me a prototype. What I wanted to do is make a regular-looking button-down or button-up shirt with the zipper and see whether or not that worked. It’s a good idea to pause here and just say, in addition to Carl who had been in the shirt business for 30 years, and my friend at Bloomingdale’s who had also been in the shirt business for over a decade, neither of them had ever seen this before. It struck them as a good idea.
but less fitted. We released the shirt to seven different Bloomingdale’s stores. We made about a thousand of them. It was a very poor selling project. Apparently, they had to sell about 50% of them at a deep discount. It sold so terribly that they did not reorder. The thing that came from that failure was I got to see why it was that the shirt didn’t sell. There were lots of different reasons. One of the things was that the manufacturer had used a cheap zipper. This is the way that you close the shirt, you can’t skimp on the zipper. You have to have a good zipper.
The other thing was that there was something wrong with the center plaque japan phone number list that didn’t keep it covering the zipper. When you zipped it up, you could see the zipper. The most important thing was that the item got lost in the entire collection of men’s stuff among their cashmere sweaters and their pants. Nobody was there to tell the story or put the shirt into context.
It has to be said that this was really kind of a side project for me. I had moved back to New York from Miami after I closed the restaurant and was working on this tech product and pushing that forward. In the meantime, that wasn’t making any money, so I was also working as a bartender and a DJ. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it, but I kept pushing it forward. One day I discovered this custom shirt maker called Seago custom shirts. I walked in and I met the owner. His name’s Carl Goldberg. I told him about the shirt and he thought it was interesting. Then I brought him a sample of the shirt and he agreed to make me a prototype. What I wanted to do is make a regular-looking button-down or button-up shirt with the zipper and see whether or not that worked. It’s a good idea to pause here and just say, in addition to Carl who had been in the shirt business for 30 years, and my friend at Bloomingdale’s who had also been in the shirt business for over a decade, neither of them had ever seen this before. It struck them as a good idea.