Pivot Point

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♪♪

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Welcome to the Pivot Point, where we talk about all things pivot, all things business, and all things Vegas. I'm your host, Bardea. Let's get the ball rolling. Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of The Pivot Point. I have with me a very distinguished gentleman today. He has years of experience, I think almost over a decade now, in business operations at Stitched. His name is Sam Glazer. Thank you for coming here today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. So you also have a background in marketing and news media publications, but you've been running Stitched as a business operator for over a decade now, I think. Can you tell us about your career story?

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Yeah, absolutely. So I went to UC Berkeley, graduated with a business degree and started my career as a brand manager for a mid-sized leather goods company. The appeal to me out of Cal was that they made all of Nike's small leather goods. So that's not footwear, that's belts, wallets, bags, those types of things. We also had our own brand called Will that was in Nordstrom and Fred Siegel and some really great stores like that, but no one had really heard of it. So it was a really great brand management opportunity to take something that already was a great product and help tell the story. One of my top retail accounts a couple years in offered me a buying job and I had spent enough time on the brand wholesale supply production side to know that retail buying was kind of where it's at. in 2010 and I started learning the buying retail side of fashion. During that time I was asked to cover nightlife and fashion for Las Vegas Weekly and so I always had this sort of, this portion of my career that was buying as my career and writing on the side which was sort of really the way that I, it was kind of an intellectual outlet. Yeah. It was also a really cool way to be meeting people and expanding my network early on.

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I want to get into the nightlife and writing a little bit later. Yeah. But I definitely want to talk about Stitch. Like, what is Stitch all about? You have such a cool store.

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Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so just to wrap, I'll wrap that up and it gets right into Stitch. But I, as a writer for the weekly I interviewed Avin Springall. He was the founder of stitched and we became fast friends Very quickly. I knew that I wanted to be his buyer and that opportunity presented itself about a year in So Avin Springall, he's actually a lead business school grad And I'll wish he could be here, but as I recently moved to Nashville So sorry bring me back to the second question. Um, just what is it about?

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Yeah.

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So, Amon's vision when the Cosmopolitan was being built, he was actually ensuring the construction of the resort. His vision was to bring a British style haberdashery stateside.

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Wow.

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You know, at that point in, in the US fashion history, most custom clothing consumers had a guy. Maybe he came to your office once or twice a year, took some measurements and sent you the finished product a few months later. We wanted to add an experiential element. Experiential retail is pretty buzzy these days. We were early to that party. We knew that in order to be internet resistant and to really be a win in the age of Zara and H&M, we had to give men a reason to shop. And so part of it is obvious, sort of being able to touch fabrics when you're choosing what you want your custom suit to look like. But the other part, we really built a lounge that overlooks the strip. We call it our Scotch Locker Lounge. Our celebrities and top clients get their own locker as an amenity for when they're shopping or even when they're not shopping. Our best customers might come watch football three times for every one time they shop, and we love that. How cool that we've made a store where men will want to come hang out with us. We will have celebrities and athletes just come kind of relax incognito with a hat and under armor on, and we've really created a place where guys are comfortable and that's pretty special. And we also train our sales staff to be stylists and we call them life stylists. They're expected to know Vegas and be able to be a conduit for our tourist driven business. 90% or so of our businesses are tourists. And it's not a pushy environment. You come in and the idea is to help you get an education. Oh, I didn't realize you could wear a pattern with a pattern. Well, as long as they're really differing in size, it works. We want people to leave with a feeling of, oh, I really know what I'm going to wear next. And so it's not a pushy sales environment. It's more of a wardrobeing, developing ensembles together, helping men get a clearer picture of their own personal style. Right. So we opened with the resort 12, 13 years ago. We just, we recently signed another 10 year lease. So we're all doubling down on Cosmo. And we've grown a lot. We're doing 8X what we did in year one in revenue. And we've had our most significant profit, profitability, our most profitable years in over the last two. So we had a pretty strong COVID recovery. We're really grateful that business is stronger than ever.

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That's awesome. I mean, the whole reason I love shopping was the in-store experience. And in this digital world where you can just buy anything online, it'll just come to you, subscription services, stylists, even online, just bring stuff to you. I love that your store really emphasizes the experience. And when I, I went only a few times, because unfortunately I don't go too much of the strip, but I love just walking in and feeling just a very powerful, very calm atmosphere. And so what do you want your customers to feel when they put on a custom suit? How do you want them to walk out the door?

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How do you want them to feel when they wear your clothes? Yeah, that's a really great question. I think it's about confidence and empowerment if I really had to distill it. But beyond that, we're in the brand business. We had a very prominent local aesthetics surgeon pull me aside, it's out and about the other week and tell me how significantly we've contributed to the brand of his Of his plastic surgeon Wow business and you know and then the short version of that story was most people are really scared when a doctor walks in and wearing a lab coat and You know really sort of sterile white coats and the white coat syndrome is real. And so instead, he wears three-piece suits every day and he is stitched up to the tip top and people see him as their sort of personal style consultant and he just couldn't sing the praises enough about how we've made him feel, how we've made his customers feel, and how we've become such an integral part of his personal and business brand. That's incredible. I mean, that's so unexpected. I was going to ask, like, you know, what kind of impact did you hope to have with your company? But this seems sort of like completely unrelated, but it seems definitely like you have an impact on his life, even though he's in medicine, completely different from menswear. But what you wear to your profession is such an interesting topic. So that's exactly what he was doing. He was trying to show up and be there for his patients Yeah, exactly right and and we're delighted for stories like that. Yeah, you know talking about impact a little bit more You know, we've been really committed to giving back to the Las Vegas community we donate over 50 Suit packages a year to nonprofits and really the only condition is that the money has to stay in Nevada, in Southern Nevada. We've done athletic and academic scholarships. We've helped people get UNLV educations from our own staff. And we're really committed to... Most of our marketing efforts have been shifted over toward suit donations, just because we really we feel like that's the right way to to make an impact. Did you know you always wanted to be in this field? No, you know my my internship was for a big ad agency in New York City and I bought my degrees business and I never I knew I was going to do something with brand management, product management, entrepreneurship. I was tangentially interested in fashion from just having an older sister. I mean, when I look back on my product awareness, it was knowing what conditioner was years before any guy normally would, because from having a big sister. And I can remember standing in the toothpaste aisle and spending, having my mom need to drag me out of there because I wanted to read every single package. So I've always been really personally fascinated in product development, product marketing, how brands differentiate themselves. And so while fashion wasn't the plan, it was pretty logical for me. It was relevant for me.

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From when you started to now, do you think the leader that you are has changed?

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Certainly, yeah. I mean, for context, I'm in my late 30s and I'm in... You don't look like it, but...

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Oh, thanks.

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And so over, you know, I've kind of broken the millennial mold I've had. I've really had three jobs. And this most recent one, I've been there for over a decade. And so, and even in my first job, the reason I went into fashion in the first place was I had an offer to become a brand manager. They basically teased my 22-year-old ego and offered me a management position really before I had earned it. And so I've sort of, so even from the very beginning I was kind of a number two, number three in the company, and that's been the case. And so from the beginning I had to manage people that were older than I was. And so it was, there's always sort of been this, there's been humility required to get that, to achieve that, and that was harder in my young 20s. In my young 20s I was certainly more brash, definitely thought I knew everything and saw myself as this change catalyst who could put the world on my shoulders. I think over time I've sort of grown into and relaxed into a more mature leader and the humilities come a lot more naturally. The main thing that's different now is that I want to be behind the scenes. I'm comfortable being the business guy. I'm happy that our stylists get a lot of the shine and get to work with the celebrities and get the Instagram photos, and I don't need any of that. What I want is to help drive profitability. I want to make it easy for the partners to expand and coffin in that.

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So were you mostly in the store working with these clients and like measuring them for suits, or and now you're more on the business side?

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You know, I came in as the buyer, and so I was always kind of the computer nerd, not the face forward guy. Right. You know, my skill set is in harvesting data and making sense of it, but it's a really unique job of a fashion buyer. We get to juggle the analytical and the creative. So on one moment I'm building and analyzing spreadsheets and on the next using that to inform buys. For example, oh maybe denim is selling through at a really high rate with high profitability and now I get to pick out the actual genes. And so being able to flip the switch from analytical, data-driven to creative, tactile, picking out products is a really cool juxtaposition that I think's what's behind my decade-plus interest in this company as I've grown from sort of buyer to partner, operating partner in the business.

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And just so I get a sense of the products, I think it's a really cool idea to be able to go in and just pick, feel the fabrics, feel the color, pick up the colors, assemble your suit. So you offer that in a custom suit regard, in addition to being an authorized retailer for like Tom Ford and Gucci?

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Yeah, exactly. You have your own suits as well. When we started, we thought it was gonna be an entirely custom business, but very quickly learned people want to wear stuff tonight They can't we can't wait for a custom clothing to be delivered when you're in Vegas right you want to stunt at the restaurant or club that night and so we started making our own collection and Then from there we started and that's the we call that the stitch collection our logos the four X's that have You know start been been growing in prominence over the last decade. But then we started adding our favorite brands. That includes Tom Ford and Gucci. Cartier was added recently on the eyewear side. That was a really good get for us. And then also we realized that there was, early on there was this reputation of, oh Stitch is so cool, look at all their celebrities, but it's too expensive for me. You know, I heard that a lot, especially when I was buying in my mid-20s for them. And we were committed to making it more attainable. And so we added a world-class denim offering. We've become, Paige Denim's really popular. We've become one of their top doors. Same for Joe's, Hudson, Frame. Some of these really great brands have started using us as kind of one of their image accounts so we get the coolest, newest stuff from them. And all of a sudden we're like selling thousands of pairs of denim a year. We've really become a big denim account. That speaks to how the suit market's evolved. It's no longer required uniforming for corporate America. It's now a personal aesthetic. It's a form of self-expression. And so what we've seen is the supermarkets evolved into kind of a sport coat jeans type of look and consequently we've really capitalized on having a big dental market. But we also now have a really good offering of under $200 things that people can come in and afford even if they're not a custom clothing consumer yet.

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That's interesting. So I was going to ask, like, what are the trends? But I guess you've touched on it. Like you said, how there are three-piece suits. When I imagine a suit, I imagine a three-piece suit. Everything matches together.

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But now people are looking more towards casual types of suits, sporty types of suits. Yeah, I can speak to that for a moment. So yes, for the entirety of the time I've been there, there's been this casualization trend where it's not just sport coat and jeans, it's also now you're allowed to wear T-shirts with your suits, you're allowed to wear sneakers with your suits. And this whole idea of being allowed to do anything has kind of gone out the window. We're at a time where men are allowed to express themselves with clothing in a way that 10, 20, as recently as 10 or 20 years ago, it was sort of seen as maybe flamboyant or other disparaging, men who dressed up could hear it from their friends and we're just not there anymore. Now men are really accepted for any level of dressing up. So that's been really wonderful as a buyer. It lets us buy pink suits and bright exploding florals and such. So, and by the way, the pandemic really made comfort

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even more prominent.

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We've been seeing, we saw stretchy jeans happen a long time ago. Once you started wearing stretchy jeans, you couldn't really wear rigid jeans anymore We saw the same thing happen in dress shirts once Once stretchy dress shirts became a thing There was no turning back. I've mentioned my founder partner even a few times He's got a closet full of custom shirts, he doesn't wear anymore because one stretch started happening Everything else just felt rigid and constricting, you know, no disrespect to our wonderful Customers makers, but even they have started and offering stretchy fabrics. So that's been a massive fabric trend that Again years ago if we were talking trends, I probably wouldn't have even Spent much time on fabric, but the fabric the stretchy fabric trend is so important that I cannot mention it and part of that is, and so now it was stretchy jeans, then it was stretchy dress shirts. And then, and so we were, I was just calling for stretchy suits, stretchy jackets, stretchy dress pants. And I was buying every bit of it I could find in the market and it was not very good. It's finally good. COVID really helped, helped the world knew there was a market for it. And now we're seeing the rise of the knit jacket, the knit suit. And in fact, I'm wearing one and it looks like a fancy custom suit and it is a custom suit but it's this stretchy knit that you could exercise in if you wanted to. So that's happening a lot too. And we didn't even talk about colors and patterns and that's because all that other, all the textiles stuff is so interesting. And you also offer a lot of accessories, right? How do you see the trends in accessories? Like, accessorizing I feel like is a bit underestimated sometimes. Maybe, like you have a handkerchief or like a cool little, like, maybe rings or something like that. Are people sort of turning more towards simple sort of silhouettes? So, the tie, much like the suit, has really decreased in necessity as it pertains to corporate The corporate uniform now ties are a form of self-expression you wear it because you want to But we've really seen pocket squares become much much more Important than neckties as far as a suiting market because people are wearing people aren't even buttoning their shirts anymore. They're wearing open Call and they're wearing a dress shirt unbuttoned or they're wearing a t-shirt with a pocket square in Terms of other accessories we have a very very strong eyewear business in Las Vegas at Cosmo You know without going into details, it's a it's a six-figure category for us and Everyone wants a pair of Gucci's we've actually started carrying women's too and that's inside your store inside of our store yeah so we now carry men's and women's Tom Ford and Gucci and Cartier and it's selling quite well you know we've and then the I'm gonna answer your question and tie it into our last question too we the other huge trend that we've seen is called athleisure and it's kind of this lululemon type of vibe where, you know, now you're seeing, but it still evolves from stretch and really everything's kind of, you can really tie a lot of what's going on, a lot of the trends from the last couple of years to stretch, but athleisure has become really important. And consequently for us, we're making tons of stitch hats, tons of stitch hoodies, hoodies in lightweight and heavyweight, doing these great like laser cut velvet appliques and just you know it's kind of about texture but still not a suit store not being afraid to make hoodies is pretty interesting. It is absolutely so I got a fun question for you my fun question of the day tell me a little bit about DJ Glaze and just kind of ties back into your nightlife and the connections you made. Yeah, well Glaze was my nickname, you know, long before Vegas. It was never DJ Glaze, it was just Glaze. I had ambitions of production that never came to fruition, but I had the poor shame to not call myself DJ. Right. I wanted to, but I, you know, from covering nightlife people and was sort of casually saying you know what's happening in LA and San Francisco New York is this and again we're talking 11 years ago right is this like indie house new disco tropical house type of thing and no one's doing this vibey stuff in Vegas. And my friend casually said, well, do you want to do that? And I said, well, I'd love to, but I don't know how to DJ. And they was sort of like, all right, well, you know, let me know when you do. I had another friend who owned a bar and I started teaching myself to spin after work in a giant empty bar. It was surreal, but, you know, got enough skill to be proficient. Yeah, and made my way around town This was the time when I was still a buyer was my career Wow I was a journalist on the side and then I had joked the DJing became kind of a hobby that got out of hand by Night, yeah, right, but it was it was always sort of it's actually a similar skill set of buying where you're just harvesting a ton of data on one hand music on one hand clothing and then making on one hand, clothing, and then making, you know, curating for a curating experience with customer sensibilities in mind. What jeans is the customer going to like? What songs is the customer going to like?

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And so it's kind of that marketing empathy, that skill set of being able to predict consumer behavior. That's amazing. I've secretly always wanted to learn myself how to be a DJ or just mix stuff just just a little pro side project But it's so interesting that you mentioned that because being a DJ I always thought you had to make it for a bunch of people everybody in the room has to go along with this vibe and you're sort of riding those waves with a bunch of people and I think it does really Prepare you for something like menswear. I think it's somehow it prepares you for curating an experience for sure Mm-hmm. Yeah and being able to predict what people are gonna want. Yeah, exactly. Did you produce any of your own songs?

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I never got that far.

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Oh man.

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It was,

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I wish that some of the tools, the AI tools from today existed back then. Oh my god. I probably would have dove into it, but no I didn't. I think the nature of it being sort of number three on my priority list, meant it kind of got my back burner energy unfortunately. But it was a fun time. I had a residency at Marquis No, I got around a lot of the nightclubs and on the strip and downtown and it was a it was fun But it was it was really just fun to party with my friends in my 20s It was it was always I always sort of had this Intellectual barrier to it. That was like wait a second I didn't go to Berkeley to DJ no disrespect to DJ There's so much further along than I was ever, and I've now respected what sonic engineers they are. But at the time, I had this sort of mental barrier to really diving into it.

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Yeah, you never really realized something like that. I even saw Steve Aoki talking about it recently. And just, it's a whole profession, to be honest.

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Oh yeah, I mean now that they're making kind of athlete entertainment Hollywood money and sort of

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You know, you can't you can't knock the career at all exactly. Yeah, so That's that's awesome. So taking it back to a little bit Talking about to let's say you're talking to a brand new student what would what advice would you give to an entrepreneur who wants to follow in your footsteps and Pursue a career perhaps in the fashion industry?

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That's a good question. And that, and I've had people as young as grade school ask me how to get into it, and they were showing me all these beautiful sketches on their phone. I think the best advice is what can you do differently? I really believe in differentiation is the key So it's about not just what can you do, but what can you do differently? Part of that is I've seen brand I've seen amazing brands come up because they're really good at something One of my favorite old brands was great at dress shirts and all of a sudden they Have this ambition of why I don't want to just be a shirt brand. I want to be a collection. So they went from making quality great shirts to quality great shirts and crap everything else. Crap leather, crap jeans, crap whatever. And all of a sudden they went from being a great shirt brand to a crappy afterthought collection. And I think that's a really common trap. And so tying it back to the advice, my advice is to do one thing well, find the thing that you can do differently, better than the market and do that and be okay with doing that. You know, I have ambition, I have brand building ambitions myself, I have a bomber jacket brand I'm working on and I have ambitions to make sport coats too and I'm content keeping them separate. I'd rather have two separate brands that are good at their own thing than combine them. And so that's my advice. Be OK doing one thing the best and focus on it. Right. I think the idea that my mind goes to when thinking about starting, perhaps, in this industry, my mind goes to Alexander McQueen. And it's interesting how your company was actually meant to bring sort of British energy to the States. I didn't know that, and that's really cool. But I think about what McQueen did, and he started to, you know, make the dresses himself, tailor the suits himself. He started in tailoring, I believe. But I do think that starting to make your own clothes could be a really cool idea. Have you ever done anything like that? Me personally? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. My pandemic project was getting this bomber jacket brand off the ground. We've sold through once and we're getting ready to release our second run of it. That's awesome. Yeah, thanks. I was gonna ask what new developments can we expect from you? Yeah, well, so my own sort of side projects, and by the way, those side projects are all you know, very much I have an advantage and a privilege having a stitched, having stitched as a platform and having support of my founder, President Amon to chase my side project ambitions and leverage the platform that is stitched. So I want to just acknowledge that advantage that I'm grateful for. Refocusing on stitch developments, we're getting really good at women's custom clothing. And so that's like a, that's a huge market. Every woman I talk to laments the modest to non-existent offering in the custom suits for women world. And we do it really well. And we get the experience right too. That's awesome, I can't. With the champagne and a relaxed environment and female stylists. So women's really interesting we also have some some expansion ambitions that I don't want to jinx before we have right before we set any releases but hopefully by the time this airs well we'll be

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close I can't I can't wait for that so just just wrapping up here where can people find you if they're interested in your stores or online social media yes

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start with following us on instagram at stitched life don't forget the second T-S-T-I-T-C-H-E-D Life. Personally, I'm at Sammy Glazer, G-L-A-S-E-R. But yeah, the Stitched Instagram is much more interesting than my personal one. I encourage everyone, you can always find them

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in their stores at Cosmopolitan, and there's a pop-up store in Tivoli Village now. And yeah, so thank you so much for being here today, Sam. I had a great time. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me. And you can always find us wherever you find your podcasts, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just search for The Pivot Point. Thank you so much.

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Thank you all for listening to The Pivot Point. You can follow us Thank you all for listening to The Pivot Point. You can follow us

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at Pivot Point UNLV on Twitter, all one word, and hope you enjoyed the show.