Proper Cloth has increased the fitting stations at its SoHo showroom from four to six, even though the redesigned space at 495 Broadway is only 10 percent larger — a capacity move founder Seph Skerritt says is central to how the made-to-measure brand operates profitably in physical retail.

The company has operated at 495 Broadway since 2016 and opened its first SoHo showroom in 2013, followed by units in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. A Fifth Avenue showroom in New York, open since 2021, also carries six fitting stations.

Skerritt launched Proper Cloth in 2008 as an online custom shirt business built on a proprietary fit-prediction algorithm and 3D visualization tools. The assortment has since expanded into tailored clothing, chinos, jeans and other casual categories. Skerritt described the company's origins as a "scrappy little business out of my basement" that spent the past decade building the infrastructure to support scale before answering customer demand for physical locations.

Why fitting capacity decides survival

The wave of online made-to-measure menswear brands that emerged several years ago — including Knot Standard and Indochino — has thinned, and Skerritt attributes part of the attrition to showroom economics. When those brands opened stores, he argued, the spaces were too small to move meaningful volume.

"If you can only service one or two customers at a time, it's hard to have an efficient operation if you can only touch eight customers a day," he said. Proper Cloth's answer is fewer, larger showrooms with more consultation room — a deliberate rejection of high-street retail logic.

Off-corridor real estate as strategy

Except for the D.C. location, Proper Cloth's showrooms sit above street level, invisible from the sidewalk. The company does not depend on walk-in traffic.

• Showrooms are located off prime shopping corridors, where rents are lower.
• Larger floorplates leave room for fittings and consultations.
• The quieter setting gives customers an "escape from the street," Skerritt said.

"It's worked well for us," he noted.

What is driving growth

Tailored clothing has grown substantially over the past four years and now accounts for 40 percent of total business, Skerritt said — a notable shift for a company that started in shirts. The core customer is an "affluent professional" man, 35 to 65, who "wants clothes to fit better."

Looking ahead, Proper Cloth is "actively looking" for additional showroom sites in major U.S. cities, with San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Boston, Philadelphia and Miami at the top of the list. The target is roughly 10 new locations over the next few years.

"The bulk of our business is still online, but showrooms allow us to transition our customer to online and vice versa," Skerritt said — a channel model where physical fittings feed the digital reorder engine rather than operating as standalone retail.