I Have No Idea What I’m Doing, but it Seems to Be Working: Recapping Year 1 of Building a Menswear Store
The date was December 13, 2024. I was walking North on Fairfax Street, headed to my nearly ready to open store on Cameron Street thinking about the previous few months. They were some of the busiest months in my life. I had just married my beautiful wife in September. As we honeymooned in the Grand Canyon, I was not so subtly worrying about whether a shelving shipment would arrive on time. Just before the wedding, I got news from the Alexandria code department that the space I had been building out was not certified for retail use. Though, as we found out, some cleverly placed drywall in the attic (where no customers would ever go anyway) would bring the place up to compliance…after an arduous and opaque review, approval, and inspection process, of course. My sign installation permit had only just been approved after I earlier found out my contractor neglected to inform me that he was not licensed for commercial work in Alexandria. Very expensive high-end menswear inventory was being delivered all the while, just to be kept under a tarp in the middle of the soon to be store. This place had to open before Christmas or Old House Provisions would’ve been doomed from the start.
Still walking North on Fairfax, I approached Prince Street not knowing at the time that the building just to my right had once been the place of business of a shoemaker and his factory (Frederick Paff and his Potomac Shoe Company), the vocation to which I was and still am aspiring toward. In that moment, I got a buzz on my phone – the preview read “Your Alexandria Business License has been Approved” The relief was immense. I had a grand opening event planned for the following day, and I was absolutely, positively, without question *wink* not going to go forward with that if my license approval didn’t come through.
So that was the moment that I officially became a haberdasher/shoemaker (I had essentially no prior retail experience, by the way). The following months would determine whether I’d be a lousy one or the one the DC area has desperately needed for years.
The start was a bit rocky. Despite a strong showing at the grand opening and plenty very supportive women shopping for last minute Christmas gifts for their husbands, six open days before Christmas can only do so much to soften the blow to retail sales that occur naturally in January and February. Days and even some weeks would go by where I wouldn’t see a single person walk into the shop. My plan all along was to stock exclusive brands that people can’t find anywhere else so fans of those brands would have nowhere else to go but Old House Provisions. As I found out, sales would occur every now and then because someone was searching for Ring Jacket, Edward Green, or one of the others, but it was nowhere near enough in and of itself to sustain the business, even though I was running it all by myself with no pay. My marketing folks at the time had also proved themselves to be more than useless.
The silver linings at this time were that everyone that made the trip up the stairs to my second-floor store was absolutely floored by how incredible it was, and my marketing folks were so bad that it was obvious I needed to cut my losses sooner rather than later.
Fast forwarding a few months, traffic and sales began to pick-up. I could sense the awareness starting to snowball. I went away for most of June for trade shows to buy inventory that will arrive next Spring. Fortunately, I have the best mom in the world who kept the shop open during that time, charmed every visitor, and only occasionally needed to hop on impromptu FaceTime calls with me to help answer customers questions.
While the sales were much better than Q1, I was still a far cry away from owning a business that could support a salaried employee or myself. God bless my nurse wife who has been picking up the bills for the past year. For the time being, it looked like I would remain mostly a haberdasher to the detriment of finding any time for my true passion, making bespoke shoes in the workshop at the rear of my store. But who knows, I had a lot of events and trunk shows planned for the fall, so as long as I didn’t collapse from overwork, sales prospects were optimistic.
As I write this one day before it’s due to the Editor at the Stylebook, the past few weeks have been by leaps and bounds the most successful in the progression of Old House Provisions. The timing is particularly serendipitous because the opportunity arose in mid-October to hire my first employee and close friend, Chris Kidd, who is the new Director of Sales & Business Development here. His arrival came concurrently with some highly sought after trunk shows, and I’m sure the bump in sales was significantly amplified by his presence.
If the recent success wasn’t enough to make me optimistic for the future of Old House Provisions, Chris is uniquely experienced to ensure it. Chris is an expert in made-to-measure tailoring, which enables us to sell garments before paying the vendor for them - a cashflow panacea for any retail business. He’s already able to fit our clients into custom made suits, shirts and trousers from highly exclusive brands like J.Mueser, Oxxford Clothes, 100Hands, and Rota Pantaloni with many more to be added to his repertoire down the line.
In addition to that, online sales have been steadily increasing thanks to an ads whiz I met at a trade show last summer and Tyler Hooks generously teaching me how to take product photos that don’t look terrible (Tyler is also the photographer of the photos used in this article).
I don’t want to speak too soon, but it seems like I might break the pattern of menswear stores opening and closing within a few years in Old Town. It’s difficult to make something new and unique because no one even knows to look for it, but once people find out about it, the wheels start turning. And that’s what it feels like now, after months of manual cranking, the wheels are beginning to spin on their own, at least a little. While it would be false modesty not to take credit for this, the enthusiastic support of the Old Town community is not lost on me at all. Yes, I’m the one hammering the nail, but you are the one providing a steady stream of nails for me to hammer.
To say thank you and celebrate the beauty that is a small-town boutique business, which is nothing without its customers, we’ll be throwing a 1-year anniversary party on the evening of either December 12 or 13 (TBD). If you’d like to keep up to date about this and the other news at Old House Provisions, reach out to me at Drew@OldHouseProvisions.com and follow me on Instagram @OldHouseProvisions.
