Knot Standard’s technological approach to 21st century bespoke tailor
NEW YORK CITY: At the heart of Knot Standard’s unique approach to custom clothing is the simple idea of making it easy and accessible for every man. By marrying technology with fashion in a way never done before, Knot Standard is revolutionizing the idea of ‘clothes shopping’ itself. Rather than choosing an off-the-rack suit or from a narrow selection of options through an online retailer, Knot Standard helps customers create something totally new and distinctive.
The process, however, hasn’t been simple. When Knot Standard started in 2010, there was no readily available software solution for helping clients create custom clothing. Typical online retailers offer off-the-rack clothes with only a few options (size, color) and most readily available software could do little more than that.
Moreover, most customers have little or no idea in the beginning how to create their own customized clothes. In fact, two-thirds of Knot Standard customers have never ordered a piece of custom clothing before.
But Knot Standard had a vision, the dream of a website where customers could one day choose from a wide array of options, could customize men’s suits and clothes according to fabric choices, to cut and style, to details.
On average, a new customer orders only two customizations the first time. That number jumps to five, however, on the second order and nine by the time they have been wearing customized clothing for a year. In order to make the process accessible to everyone, the Knot Standard team had to customized the company’s software solution as well.
Revolutionizing online shopping
“We had to rewrite the entire idea of what shopping online is. Rather than help someone to buy something, we had to create a place where they could create the clothes they wanted to wear,” explains Adam Namejko, Knot Standard Chief Technology Officer. “It really was truly a framework of something totally new. Start with the idea of the word ‘jacket’ or ‘suit’ and take each individual aspect of that and build on it.”
In other words, Knot Standard is a customized company from the ground up. In every aspect of its systems and processes, the technology has been built from nearly scratch to satisfy the single unifying goal of making it easy for customers to get their perfect suit every time.
“We write all the code. We know intimately not only the art of tailoring and how suits are constructed, we also know all the technology and all the moving parts on the back end. All our systems are systems that were developed especially for the creation of custom suits,” notes Namejko.
Making it easy for the customer
Knot Standard makes custom clothing attainable by offering four different methods of getting measured online: Tape measure, use a webcam to create a 3D image of your body, visit a local tailor or match-a-suit you already own.
