For the man with demanding tastes and an unforgiving budget, fashion awareness can become a burden.
Typically, such a man has a well-defined and positive image of himself. He can leaf through the pages of fashion magazines and know exactly where he belongs.
Excellent suits seem to have his name on them. Top-quality shirts, slacks, sportcoats and accessories all reflect his persona, his flair, his way of presenting himself to the world.
Unfortunately, the price tags of those goods can send a shiver through his wallet and brutalize his ego. The garments in the magazines often come from stores that translate ”exclusivity” as ”intimidation.” At that kind of retail establishment, the question ”How much?” constitutes vulgarity, and the answer (if anyone on the staff sees fit to reply) can suck all the oxygen out of a room.
Cheap, cheap!
Yet something prevents a certain kind of style-conscious but financially inhibited man from braving the hurly-burly of the discount clothiers, where service may border on the rude, where designer-label suits might appear in strange patterns and unusual colors and where off-brands occasionally come in stiff, cold, seam-puckered fabrics that scream ”cheap!”
Unless he could submerge his pride or subvert his dandyism, the tasteful but prudent man has to shop carefully indeed and resign himself to frequent frustration.
”He was either paying the higher prices or not buying the clothes,”
said Jerry Kamhi, a menswear retailer who refers to our mythical customer`s plight in the past tense because he believes he now he has a solution for it. A few weeks ago, Kamhi opened the Urban American Club in the new shopping mall at 1800 N. Clybourn Ave. Active in the menswear business since he helped out his family as a teen, Kamhi (who was last seen as a founder and partner in Ringolevio) has had long experience in recognizing marketplace vacuums. Until the Urban American Club came along, Kamhi insists, his customers could do little but haunt the sales, break their budgets or compromise their image as high-style fashion plates with a continental flair.
Former Marshall Field & Co. executives Joe Cecil and George P. Kelly have been working the stylistically updated-traditional end of that customer pool since 1984, when they opened the first Mallards store at 50 E. Washington St. in the Loop. Since then, they have opened five more, including a casual wear boutique called Mallard Sport at 900 N. Michigan Ave.
The looks without the price
Both Mallards and the Urban American Club sell mostly private-label merchandise with a look, feel and level of quality that might compare favorably to name brands and designer products costing hundreds, even thousands, more.
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The Mallards look revolves around conservative cuts with a bit of color and flair. The Urban American Club supplies avant-garde, European-style fashion for those who don`t mind forgoing designer labels but who still require careful tailoring, fine fabrics, attentive service and pleasant surroundings.
The uninitiated might walk into any of the stores and assume he has entered the forbidding upper end of men`s retailing. But nowhere will he find a label out of the national magazine ads or the MTV commercials. And nearly all the prices remain resolutely below the $500 level, which seems to be the high bar that separates the money-is-an-object crowd from the rest of the fashion pack.
To reach the Urban American Club, customers follow a winding ramp to the second floor of a converted industrial building. At the threshold, dusty concrete gives way to gray-speckled carpeting, mahogany-stained shelves full of shirts, ties and accessories and plain pipe racks hung with suits. Towering above the racks, up there in the exposed ductwork and plumbing, examples of each suit are draped over plaster torsos and dramatically lit by baby spotlights.
It looks like Armani
One might suppose he had reached the Land of Hugo Boss, Armani, Uomo, et al., until he spots price tags of $350 to $525 for suits, $130 to $135 for slacks. The labels say only ”Urban American Club,” though the clothing is from a variety of manufacturers.
The original Mallards in the Loop perches inconspicuously above a Crate & Barrel at Washington Street and Wabash Avenue. The decor is open and bright with white walls and artistically arranged displays. Those sprightly touches reek of class and soften the austerity of the minimalist suit and sportcoat racks and the bare metal shelving units holding stacks of shirts and trousers. Both stores operate under similar credos.
Kamhi: ”The object is to produce a high-quality, high taste-level product, offer service to the customer and deliver it all at what I call a sensible price.”
Cecil: ”Mallards was founded on the premise that we were going to create an environment in which the customer could always find quality, day in and day out, at a fair price.”
Besides their off-Michigan locations, Cecil and Kamhi have found a number of other ways to cut costs. Both use factories, most of them in the U.S., that are prepared to execute relatively small orders, and they both maintain close relations with those suppliers. Almost no garments in either store bear labels from the Pacific Rim, where manufacturers tend to think exclusively in terms of mass production.
An interpreter
Both retailers have eliminated fashion headliners. ”I`ve become the designer, or merchandiser,” Kamhi said. ”I interpret products, rather than sketch and design from scratch. We`re not looking to reinvent the wheel here. We`re looking to do volume business and offer the consumer a genuine value for a fashion product. So I do interpretations and merchandising more than anything.”
That represents a considerable savings right away, Kamhi said. ”A good example is a beautifully made shirt with an Armani collar and silhouette, all cotton, that we`re retailing at $45. (Genuine) Armani shirts are a lot more. The designer royalty is usually between 7 and 10 percent. In addition, there are other costs usually passed on to the retailer, like the marketing costs. Everybody who buys Armani, Polo, Hugo Boss pays a premium for the marketing of that product, along with the royalties. There`s the advertising cost, the cost of the public relations staff, the offices. All the prestige gets passed on to the consumer.”
Clothing in the traditional vein has never been quite so designer-intensive, with the notable exceptions of Ralph Lauren, Alexander Julian, Joseph Abboud and a handful of others. Mallards can sell suits for $350 and less partly because of a consistent pricing policy, Cecil explained.
”Unlike many stores that do private-label selling, particularly department stores,” he said, ”we do not take the kind of excessive mark-ups that would give us the margin to run a sale once a month or every six weeks. The idea is that we put the merchandise out at a good price every day, and only at the end of the season do we have a clearance.
”So we only have two major sales a year, which is the way stores were 40 or 50 years ago. Phil Kelly, my partner, and I felt there was a market for value-priced merchandise where the customer could say with confidence that he was getting good value every day and did not have to wait for a sale.”
What the market will bear
Kamhi, riding more lightly on the flighty breezes of style, said he could not make such a commitment-at least not so soon. ”In fashion, there`s a different kind of value perception,” he said. ”Joe sells a more conservative product, and we sell fashion. How do you put a value on fashion? You look at a product and you say, `If the market will bear this, it`s a fair price.` ”
Soon after his grand opening, Kamhi noted that customers were snatching up a particular sport shirt and gladly paying the $115 required. ”It`s a yarn-dyed linen shirt, made in Italy for us, and it`s flying out of here,” he reported. ”It`s the perceived value of the fashion product. From a designer label, the least expensive shirt like that would probably be $180.”
Both Mallards and the Urban American Club strive to keep all prices in rough proportion to the price of their suits. At the big league boutiques, shirt prices can easily hit $200, but Kamhi offers nothing over $65. Cecil keeps shirts between $23.50 for a button-down to $40 for a spread-collar dress shirt.
Regulars come to know, and demand, the proper price-value range. Cecil found that out last winter. ”We had some beautiful handknit sweaters that were priced from $125 to $150,” he recalled. ”We sold some, but as a rule, customers were surprised to find sweaters that expensive in our stock. We have to be careful about giving customers too many surprises, because that makes them think those particular sweaters may be overpriced. They really weren`t, but they were out of our typical price range for sweaters. Sometimes we try an experiment, and it doesn`t work so well. You don`t expect a $150 sweater when your top suit price is $350. It just doesn`t seem right, somehow.”
At the sportswear store in the mall anchored by Bloomingdale`s, Mallards does relax its pricing policy a bit. ”There we may go from a $35 shetland wool sweater to a $150 handknit,” Cecil said. ”It seems to work, because it`s all sportswear. We can have a wider range of merchandise and we don`t have any comparisons in other classifications, where you have to maintain this price-value relationship.”
Enough is enough
Besides, Kamhi and Cecil both have noticed that their stores have qualities that attract those who could afford to shop anywhere. ”We had a fellow in the other day who is used to paying $1,200 a suit,” Kamhi said.
”He said, `No way. Not anymore.` ”
Advertising executive John Bredemann, 35, a Mallards regular, said he discovered the store ”as part of my ongoing quest for a decent suit at a reasonable price. I`m not the kind of guy who will shoot $500-$600 for a suit. If I can spend $250-$300, I`ll go back regularly.”
An informal survey of Mallards regulars revealed that many of them shopped there because something, besides relatively low prices, gave them a good feeling.
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Requesting anonymity, one regular, a lawyer, said two women approached him while he was shopping at Mallards a few days ago. One of them paused in front of him and said, ”I think you are the epitome of the well-dressed man.” The lawyer decided the woman must have been flirting. He would not expect the store would pay the kind of overhead required for such a subtle, but effective, promotional ploy. –