How to Find a Good Tailor

If you’ve read our style articles over the years, you’ll notice a recurring piece of advice: get everything adjusted to a custom fit!

Fit will make or break any look. But for the man who’s just starting to upgrade his wardrobe, and doesn’t have a reliable tailor on call already, how can you tell a good shop from a bad one?

There are a few key things to look for, so here’s the rundown for picking out a tailor that you can build a lasting relationship with!

How to Find a Tailor

Before we worry about the quality of your tailor, how do you even find one? It’s not always as easy as finding a good restaurant or a big box retailer.

Google

Where do you go to find anything these days? Whether they have a website or not (and many tailors/alterations shops don’t), most businesses are listed on Google. As long as that business’s information is out there somewhere, Google’s going to find it eventually.

This will be your handiest way to find a location, contact information, and website (if any) of your local tailors. Just type in “(your location) tailor” and also “(your location) clothing alterations” and you’re bound to find a handful of options.

The big disadvantage is that Google is still not 100% up-to-date on business listings. Depending on where you live and the information that users have submitted in your area, there may well be some long-standing tailoring businesses that the search engine hasn’t located or identified yet.

Phone Book

While phone books are becoming increasingly irrelevant (except for showing off your superhuman strength!), they can still be especially handy for locally-owned mom-and-pop shops.

Most phone books include tailors as a category in their business listings. You can also check under “alterations.”

The hardest part may be simply finding an up-to-date phone book in this day and age. If you haven’t received one at your doorstep lately (or if you left it to rot like everyone else), use phone book websites instead. Most of the old standards are still there: yellowpages.com, yellowbook.com, etc.

This is probably actually the most comprehensive listing you’re going to get — many old-fashioned tailoring shops don’t have websites, but they’ve been providing their contact information to phone directories for decades.

Make Some Calls

It might sound like an extraneous step, but call your possible options and ask a few simple questions. An easy test run is to ask about a specific type of alteration — taking a shirt’s waist in, say, or shortening jacket sleeves. You can ask about the price while you’re at it.

This is testing a couple things for you. On the surface it’s actually providing useful information, of course — whether they can do the sort of alteration you need, and how much it’s likely to cost you. But you’re also checking the tailor’s communication and customer service skills. If the phone conversation is aggressive and irritable, or if the language skills are hard to understand, you should think about how much you want to deal with this business every time you need work done.

And Finally — Consider the Price

This is actually a fairly minor consideration, and it shouldn’t be your primary motivation. Good tailoring is worth paying more for, and bad tailoring is a waste of money entirely.

But it is worth doing at least a bit of comparison shopping. If a tailor is charging four or five times as much as the other options in the city, it’s worth asking yourself what he or she offers that justifies the price.

That said, a tailor who satisfies both your clothing needs and your shopping expectations is a rare treasure. If you find one, don’t let the price stop you unless it’s truly outrageous.