Online suit-seller Indochino opened a permanent showroom in Toronto August 1, making clear that the ecommerce player’s executives believe that the company needs to have a brick-and-mortar presence in order to push sales to the next level.
The company opened its only other permanent showroom, in East Vancouver near the Port of Vancouver, in June.
“Vancouver has a showroom because we’re based here,” Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko told Business in Vancouver in an interview. “We were in Toronto for most of the month of June with our traveling tailor [pop-up store] and it was very successful so we’re opening a permanent showroom in the same location.”
Indochino’s first traveling tailor pop-up store was in 2011, when it held a four-day opening on Georgia Street in Vancouver. It then had five pop-up stores in various cities in 2012, 12 pop-up stores in 2013 and is expected to have 25 pop-up stores this year.
Its 3,000-square-foot showroom at the corner of King and Spadina streets is twice the size of the company’s Vancouver showroom, which is connected to the company’s head office, where about 60 of the company’s 100-plus employees work. The Toronto showroom is also the company’s first stand-alone storefront.
Vucko said he plans to open more showrooms in major U.S. cities, such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco. He will then reflect on whether the next course of action should be to add more North American showrooms in progressively smaller markets or to open showrooms in major cities in Europe and Australia.
The strategy of opening brick-and-mortar showrooms mimics the strategy that Coastal Contacts founder Roger Hardy followed when he first opened a temporary Clearly Contacts-branded store on Robson Street in Vancouver in 2013 and soon afterward opened a permanent store on Robson Street and then one in Kitsilano.
At both the Clearly Contacts stores and the Indochino showroom, customers can see and touch merchandise, which is available for sale online.
The Indochino showroom differs from the Clearly Contacts store in that customers do not simply walk in off the street. Instead, they book half-hour appointments to get measured, receive styling advice and view products.
Indochino customers are only able to view their online measurements once they have ordered a suit. After that order is complete, they are allowed to alter measurements if they like.
Vucko explained that Indochino does not allow its measurements to be altered before the first suit is ordered because men frequently would think that the measurements are wrong, particularly for waist sizes.
“We’re hesitant to allow people to get in there and meddle with the measurements because there is such a thing as vanity sizing,” Vucko said. “There is a few inches difference between a size and the actual measurement. I’m generally a 32 or a 33 [waist size for pants] but my actual waist measurement is 34 inches or 35 inches.”
Indochino’s sales are in the tens of millions of dollars annually.
@GlenKorstrom
