Suitsupply’s Fokke de Jong on Building a $1 Billion Business

Fokke de Jong always found the traditional business suit boring. So while he was studying law at the University of Amsterdam in 2000, he began designing his own suits in his dorm room and selling them out of the trunk of his car.

He named the company Suitsupply and after a few years selling online, opened his first store in Antwerp in 2007. De Jong made the jump across the pond in 2011 and at first, the American menswear industry didn’t pay much attention. That was until this Dutch upstart with his European aesthetic, lively and colorful stores and eye-popping marketing campaigns began to chisel away at their market share.

Today, Suitsupply operates more than 110 stores globally and 38 in the U.S., with more to come. Suits continue to represent the bulk of the business, which is now over $1 billion in sales, but elevated casualwear is also drawing fans.

Here, de Jong talks about how he built Suitsupply, the challenges he’s faced over the past quarter century — don’t mention womenswear — and his plans for the future.

WWD: How many stores do you have in the U.S. now?

Fokke de Jong: About 38. We opened a bunch of stores before COVID — we were expanding then — and of course, COVID was a big hit for our business. Everybody predicted the death of the suit. And we thought, “OK, our name is Suitsupply, so if nobody is going to wear suits anymore, we’re f—ked, so let’s double down.” And we really saw business come back pretty strongly. We also improved the collections and made our whole store experience a lot more personal. Since then, we’ve been busy not just opening new stores, but making the stores that we have bigger. And about two years ago, we started opening new stores again, which, of course, is a very slow process, but you’ll see stores opening again across the U.S. We’ve opened a store in Vegas. We’re opening Charlotte in a few weeks, we just opened Orlando, Salt Lake City is opening and Somerset in Troy, Mich.

WWD: It appears you believe there’s still lots of growth for you in the U.S. market.

F.d.J.:  We see still a lot of opportunities for us to grow in the United States. Suits are still our biggest category. But people generally come to us when there’s something special going on. It used to be a business meeting, but that’s only part of it. It’s now occasions and celebrations and tuxedos and weddings, bar mitzvahs, or some kind of hot date they need to dress up for. And when there’s something special going on, people want to have extra service. They want to make sure that there’s somebody there that they can depend on, that they can trust in dealing with these moments of high expectations. Our stores are very high touch.

WWD: How many stores do you have globally?

F.d.J.: We have about 111 stores right now in total. Our stores are located across Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Panama, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States. Looking ahead, we are continuing to expand our retail footprint, with new stores in Lyon (France) and Vienna (Austria). In addition, we are investing in expanding our existing stores. We recently doubled the footprint of our Miami Brickell location, and we are planning a significant expansion of our London Vigo Street store, located at 9 Sackville Street, growing from 700 square meters to nearly 2,000 square meters to further enhance the in-store experience. They’re like mini men’s department stores for the more elevated part of men’s fashion.

WWD: You said suits are still your biggest selling category. What else are you having success with?

F.d.J.: If you go to our bigger stores, you’ll see suit categories still very prevalent, but also what we call “elevated casual.” We are not in the business of athleisurewear or flip-flops or shorts, but everything you can wear a jacket with. Our knitwear category is very successful and our trousers. People also like buying trousers from us because we provide alteration services. We have tailors in all our stores that still do alterations…fast. If you buy a pair of trousers with us, 90 percent of the time we can do the alterations within 30 minutes. And we’re also making our stores bigger so they have more podium for adjacent categories.

WWD: How big were your stores before and how large are you making them?

F.d.J.: The older stores were 6,000 to 7,000 square feet and now we’re opening 20,000 square feet. But it’s needed because we like to serve people faster, we also want to make sure that we have enough back house space.

WWD: How have you elevated your service?

F.d.J.: What we try to do in the stores is make sure customers receive dedicated attention.  We learned in COVID that people don’t want to walk into a store and feel that the person that makes the loudest noise is going to get served first. That creates a lot of stress for customers and our stylists. So we went to almost like a three-star restaurant model, where you could have a reservation, or in our case, an appointment, and when you walk in, somebody’s ready for you. Of course, you don’t have to have an appointment, but if it’s busy, you might have to wait 10 or 15 minutes. So in most of our stores, we try to accommodate that by having a roof terrace, or having someone relax with a coffee or a drink. Then once you have your style adviser, we can serve you with dedicated attention for an hour, or an hour and a half. It’s actually a pretty luxury experience for our price point.

WWD: What is your average price point for an off-the-rack and a custom suit?

F.d.J.: Right now, our perennials are $599 and custom starts at $750.

WWD: Aside from the U.S. and Europe, what other regions do you operate in?

F.d.J.: We’re not that big in China and Asia yet. We have some shoots in Asia and the Middle East. We have a pretty good ground cover in the U.S., and a few other countries, like the one we’re from, where we might have a full-grown tree, but I would say that with a lot of the countries, there’s still quite an opportunity for us to grow.

WWD: When you started, you took unconventional locations for your stores, not on street level, on the sides of highways. Is that still the strategy?

F.d.J.: Destination has always been a part of our business model. We still do that. It’s obviously more valuable in cities like New York, where there’s a huge amount of scarcity, but in Texas, for instance, where space is less scarce, you would see us in a normal mall environment. We own a real estate company that buys and redevelops real estate where we can add value or contextualize an upcoming retail environment. A good example is this building [on Greene Street in SoHo]. We went into this building 10 years ago. It was at the edge of SoHo and there wasn’t really any retail here. Now, we’re in the center of it all. We’ve done similar things in cities like Boston and in many other places because it’s very beneficial for our P and L. As long as we keep providing good service and a great product for an attainable price, and don’t mess it up, people will come to us. It’s less necessary for us to be smack in the middle between all the usual suspects, because we have more space, the buildings are interesting, every floor has a different character. It’s a nice journey to explore.

WWD: But you don’t always choose destination locations.

F.d.J.: No. In London, we’re in the middle between Regent and Bond (streets) and that’s prime retail. But there were a lot of challenges with how the building was laid out and we needed to provide a lot of creativity on how to flow the retail environment. Our concept allows us to be a little more creative, but if you would look at our occupancy costs, they’re structurally lower than any of our peers.

WWD: What is it about Suitsupply that helped you come into the U.S. and take so much market share?

F.d.J.: I think there are a few things. We bring a European aesthetic and quality to the market which was just not there — or not there at this price point. Whether it’s the fabrics or the construction, it’s something you subconsciously feel when you have our product on because it just fits better, it feels better, it drapes better. So it starts with the quality but it’s also the way we merchandise it. We made a big mistake venturing into womenswear, which we thought was very aligned and very adjacent to our business. But it turned out to be a very different dynamic, a very different business, and it proved to be a big distraction. But aside from the women’s venture, we’ve always been very focused on trying to do this one thing really, really well.

WWD: In addition to off-the-rack, how big a business do you do in custom clothing?

F.d.J.: We make 600,000 custom items a year. We are by far the biggest custom producer in the world — and all these items have to come back within two or three weeks. Then you have to come in and get fit again, by appointment. We do that 600,000 times a year, and to do that well is extremely complicated. If you compare that to a retail experience where you just go in and somebody has to get the handbag in the right color for you, it’s a very different execution. It’s extremely hard, and that’s why focus is so important for us. It’s something we work on every day. We have intensive training programs, I’m flying with my team every few months and visiting our stores. We are constantly looking to maintain and elevate that service experience, and seeing how we can remove friction points.  

WWD: Where do you make everything?

F.d.J.: All our fabrics are Italian. Our production is in China, Portugal, Morocco — a bunch of locations, but Asia is still a large part.

WWD: Have you have been impacted by the tariffs?

F.d.J.: No, we smuggled everything (laughing). Of course. But we had seen the writing on the wall during the previous Trump administration, so we anticipated that and set up production outside of China and we just had to ramp that up quicker than we had anticipated. But it was not like we suddenly had to scramble. So for us, it was more of an anticipated financial transition.

WWD: Do you have a designer or do you use a design team?

F.d.J.: We have a design team. It’s not like we need to have Tom Ford on top and then have everything trickle down. For us, it’s a more symbiotic process where we have design coming up with collections, and then a whole network of people in the stores and key opinion leaders that are not just trying to sell, but are also trained to represent the brand and get feedback on the collections. There’s a very strong bottom-up feedback cycle that works, and is really important for us as a direct-to-consumer business. If you sell your collection into a department store, by the time you get feedback, there’s a latency of almost 12 months. We have a way faster feedback cycle.

WWD: Are you using AI to help in your design process?

F.d.J.: The whole AI thing is something where we see a lot of benefits. Over the last few years, we started using it to make sure all the systems feed into one central database with a coherent structure that goes from customer interactions to the website to how people shop, to which items they touch. In our office in Amsterdam, we have about 150 engineers working, which is quite a large tech organization for a fashion retailer, but it allows us to collect a lot of signals and helps us to better predict trends, design collections, know what to accelerate, what to slow down. We used to have a team of 15 people across all categories that were just busy with demand planning. Now we’re getting demand planning out of AI. If you look at how our merchandising strategy works, we have hardly any leftover product or product that we have to discount. So you don’t ever see Suitsupply going on sale. Of course, we always have a tiny bit of stuff that we need to discount, and there are a few physical outlets in the world that deal with that, but you would never see our main stores being part of any sale cycle, which is the biggest proof point of how our merchandising and planning  works.

WWD: How often does the collection change?

F.d.J.: We have a very strong core collection, but if you don’t have one or two fashion items, you’re don’t have a business. We have very strong, never-out-of-stock programs that serve as our anchor, but there are always iterations on that and different drops during the season.

WWD: Would you ever consider wholesaling?

F.d.J.: There’s a very specific niche in the market for that model, but not for our kind of product. The problem with wholesaling is you don’t just give people some product. You also have the whole experience that really makes the brand. The same signals and planning that feeds the ecosystem would be impossible to replicate it in a wholesale model, and our whole margin structure is not designed for that.

WWD: You mentioned your elevated casual product is becoming more important. So how much of your business is still suits?

F.d.J.: It’s still approximately 50 percent of our business — and we love it. And we offer adjacent product. If someone buys a suit, they sometimes want to have trousers or knitwear. Our knits are designed to wear under a jacket, but I would say 80 percent of people just buy our knits because they love them. So those adjacent categories have grown to be strong categories on their own. But we always have to be very recognizable and have nothing that is not naturally connected to the aesthetic of the brand.

WWD: Who is your customer?

F.d.H.: It’s a young guy, it’s an old guy. In New York, you see a younger person, but we also have a store in Greenwich [Conn.], where you see an older person. It’s not so much age, it’s people who have come to appreciate and value our more elevated aesthetic. We probably stepped in at the right time in the U.S. market when men started to dress better. Social media helped and also people traveling more.

WWD: When streetwear became all the rage, did it impact your business?

F.d.J.: Funny enough, we’ve never really seen any drop-off. Moments for people to dress up have not changed. You don’t go to your wedding in streetwear.

WWD: Your advertising has been called controversial in the past. Are you still pushing boundaries in your marketing?

F.d.J.: I think we’ve had some interesting advertising that some people respond to. When we came out of COVID, we did this whole campaign that showed people with a lot of saliva kissing each other again. That was relevant at the moment. Our mantra is: “Don’t just fit in, find your own perfect fit.” It may sound a little fluffy but if you look at a lot of the brands in this space, they’re always very conformity driven. We’ve always been a little bit non-conformity driven, which has been useful for us because it gives us a bit more energy. It sets us apart. It connects to the kind of people we attract as customers, to the people that work for us. It ties into our location strategy, our collection strategy. We don’t do controversial campaigns to be controversial. Recently, we looked at these ‘80s campaigns of girls on cars and we said, “Let’s do a guys on cars campaign.” So we did a campaign with guys making love to their cars. It’s fun.

WWD: You started Suitsupply 25 years ago now. How big a business is it today?

F.d.J.: It’s about $1 billion.

WWD: Impressive. So what’s your plan for the future? Would you go public, sell the business?

F.d.J.: I enjoy running this business a lot. It’s not always fun, but it is most of the time. We’re constantly figuring out ways to be better. The business is different in size than 10 years ago, so my role is not the same, but that’s nice, who wants to do the same s—t all the time? We’re not fundamentally against being public or opening the cap table if that was the good thing to do for the business to make it grow faster or better. But until now, we’ve been able to build a healthy, cash-generated business that funds its own growth. So for that reason, we’ve never sought to bring it into the public domain. I think that would also add a lot of hassle and complexity. There are some good success stories of luxury businesses, especially in Europe, that are public and but are also still controlled by the owners or families. I think to be consistent as a business, and to build it, you have to have some kind of family ownership that anchors the business. Especially in fashion, it’s so easy for people to get distracted by the flavor of the week. It’s actually harder to go from $100 million to $300 million than it is to go from $600 million to $1 billion because you get to work with more-talented people and do more stuff. So why would I want to sell the business? I hope I can still do this for quite some time.

WWD: Beyond Suitsupply, what other companies or CEOs do you admire?

F.d.J.: I’ve always liked the Lululemon founding story. I don’t want to refer to where they are now, but I always found the way they built the brand from the ground up and developed a store-centered community very powerful and it inspired us to do our talent development program. And also, Elon Musk and what he has been doing, constantly deleting stuff that is not working, and then adding it back. For us, that helps cut out clutter and things that can slow you down in how you design and look at processes. I think that’s extremely powerful and a lesson every entrepreneur has to think about.

WWD: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your career?

F.d.J.: COVID was a huge challenge. We had geared the company up for a lot of growth and had a pretty leveraged balance sheet, and 80 percent of the revenue fell away. We had to make a very quick decision to furlough everybody — people who had been working in the business for seven or eight years, tailors. Those were tough decisions.

WWD: And finally, if you could redo one mistake you made, what would it be? Going into womenswear?

F.d.J.: Absolutely. It might have cost us maybe only 10 million bucks in write-offs, but the design team wanted to work more on the women’s side, because it was a new project, and the online team was excited. Then suddenly I saw my men’s sales dropping because the collection was not that sharp anymore. So it wasn’t the 10 million bucks that it cost, but the loss of momentum. That’s a hard thing to get back once you lose it. But we got it back.

By the Numbers

Year founded: 2000

Number of stores: 110

Number of stores in U.S.: 38

Number of custom garments produced annually: 600,000

Number of fabrics offered for custom: Over 700 Italian fabrics

Custom turnaround time: Two to three weeks

Average number of suits displayed per store:
Approximately 500, offering 75 different suit options across seven fits.

Average store size: 450 to 700 square meters

Turnaround time for in-store alterations: 30 minutes to three days.