How to Open a Successful Clothing Store

All images by Alexis Noelle Barnett.

As a store director, Justin Dean is the stylish man behind-the-scenes at Gentry, one of Brooklyn's premier menswear boutiques. The independent shop's developed a good reputation for its mix of drool-worthy brands like Our Legacy and Engineered Garments with high-end designers like Junya Watanabe and Robert Geller. Their online store has become a go-to for guys who aren't quite sure how to mix in designer pieces with everything else in their closet, thanks to product images and editorials that feature wardrobe staples like Air Force 1 sneakers and crisp white tees paired with the pricey garms Gentry has on offer.

Of course, Dean's responsibilities vary from merchandising the shop to buying every single piece that sits on the racks. If you've ever wanted to be a buyer for a store or have dreams of opening an independent boutique of your own, then you should definitely pay attention to the following nuggets of advice. We stopped by Gentry's recently re-opened, redesigned Williamsburg shop before the "new store smell" had faded from the walls to ask Justin Dean what exactly it takes to run one of the best independent men's shops on the Internet and in real life. Check out How to Open a Successful Clothing Store.

“Engineered Garments and Our Legacy is sort of like to me, part of the DNA of who we are, mixing a sort of traditionally heritage aesthetic with a sort of more modern aesthetic. So as a buyer I'm always trying to blend those elements. Over several seasons with Engineered Garments, or Our Legacy, or Orslow, there's not a huge change over seasons in styles and size of those collections. They're very consistent, but they change fabrics from season to season, and they change color, so you get that familiarity, but you also get that sense of newness so it creates the excitement. As a buyer, I know I can rely on those brands to be commercially viable for us, and you can really build a successful business around brands like that.”

“I think you have to have a really good sense of a balance of the aesthetic responsibility and then the commercial responsibility. There's what you may like personally as a creative person, but then you have to know both your local customer and your online customer. That balance of creative and business can take time to understand. With Gentry, we've been here for two years, and by now we know the Engineered Garments Bedford Jacket is going to do very well for us every season, we know the Our Legacy '40s Shirt is going to do very well, the Orslow jeans are gonna sell out. Those take time to understand, but you always have to layer in an interesting aesthetic around it and more interesting pieces that appeal to the more fashion-forward customer, too.”

“I took over from a previous buyer and we had a lot of brands, and a lot, a lot of different styles. After two seasons I could analyze selling reports and see what was working. You cut away the fat and you go into what's working well, but every season has its own challenges because the designers are giving you the paint and then you have to make something with it. You don't quite ever know if you got it right, but you can analyze selling reports and know which styles and colors do well for you and hopefully go from there. "

“The hardest thing about my job is going into a showroom and seeing a collection and I'm so inspired by—the creativity and the more forward styles. I get checked really quick when I come back to the store and see what's selling are very basic items, and there's nothing wrong with that, it's just you can get carried away going to deep with the more forward pieces, and you could really only last a couple of seasons that way as a store.”

“If someone's coming from more of a Uniqlo or an Old Navy sort of mindset it can be hard to understand why a coat is $800, but for me, it's like: You may buy ten coats from the Gap or Banana Republic, but if you're only gonna wear this one, then truly you'll end up spending less on the Barena coat, which will be classic and which will not fall apart. The craftsmanship is there, the buttons aren't going to pop off, and all of our customers who came in initially with those sort of price questions over the couple of years they've come to understand why. You can go into the history of COMME des GARÇONS and explain their process and why this blazer is $3,000, but a lot of it is in the touch and the feel of the garment—it's very apparent. There's only so much I can tell you: 'Oh, its made in Japan. Oh, it took this long to produce.' The customer has to put it on and feel it and look amazing, so that value has to be self-evident.”

“Product knowledge is huge because I'm in the store so much, and as the buyer, the clients know that I stand behind what's in the store and that I'm wearing what's in the store, and I've spent a couple of years with our clients explaining it. They know that I'm not here to sell them, they know that I'm here to share what we thought was really beautiful from the season, but it does take time to build that confidence.”

“I don't have days off because emails are coming in, especially if you're the buyer, you're communicating with people in Japan, Italy, California, it really never stops. There are days where I interact with 30 of our clients and that's an intensive, draining process. I take out the trash at the end of the day, handle cash, and in building a new store, there's so much manual labor that goes into that: You literally pour your sweat and blood into the foundation of the store. There can be 15-18 hour days.”

“I've felt that there may be a Gentry house line at some point, but I think that our identity is we carry really amazing collections, and until we can produce something of that quality that can sit with a Sunspel T-shirt, an Orslow jean, or an adidas sneaker, then we should stay in that lane, but I think we will grow, hopefully into producing our own garments that could sit next to those things. There are higher margins in producing your own in-house brand, it's easier than doing what I do I think. It's more profitable, but I really love the multi-brand aspect of our store, and I think that's a huge part of who we are. "

“We sort of just started styling the website the way that we wear the pieces, so that's a very simple and fun creative process of showing how things can mix together—the mix of high and low and things not being over-styled. I think that can be the tendency with any of us in fashion, we wanna wild out a little bit and look crazy but really, we like to mix a white T-shirt with a really fun pant. I think when you come into the store, things are on a rack and we sort of merchandise it by brand and on the website I like mixing things together where you're not quite sure what you're looking at. So that's the difference between online and in-store.”

“I think other independent online shops just don't have fun with it. It's a lot of work and it's a lot of back of house: It's measuring garments, it's writing copy, it's all of these things, but we have fun with the styling. For me, the trick is to show what the end result would be: 'If you buy this garment, this is how you can wear it.' I think with most websites, they're just trying to show literally what this T-shirt looks like, and we want to give a sense of head-to-toe, how this fits into the larger context, and I think that's been really what set us apart from other webstores. I think it's important to find consistency with the photography and the model so that when people see your model or see your shots then they instantly know that that's you and I think that's really good to solidify your perspective.”

“With us and Four Pins, Jon Moy really seems like he writes about what he is genuinely attracted to, what inspires him, and for us that's been the trick. We just have to really express what inspires us, and so that's been a very natural process. Tumblr picks up on our product shots, which we try and put up without any fanfare. We're not Instagramming our product shots. We really tried to have our online presence grow organically, that was really important to us. We don't have a social media budget; we don't have an advertising budget; we just focused on the creative and being as honest as possible about what we like. So it's cheesy, but that honesty of who you are as a store and as people and expressing why you bought this piece for the shop and you genuinely wanting to share it with people goes a long way.”

“Traveling to fashion weeks and market weeks isn't all about dressing up, but it is a lot of fun. It's fun to hang out with your close friends in the industry and it's really inspiring. There's nothing bad about those trips at all, it's a wonderful perk. You get to see a market that may not have anything to do with your store, it's a very small portion of what's at Pitti Uomo that connects to what we do. So to see that European, more mass market business I think is important to put your store in a larger context. Oh, and you have to touch the product. It connects to what we do with online versus in-store. You may see something online and you may be inspired by it, but you have to come into the store, try it on, and touch it. So the showroom experience abroad when you're there with the designer—it's huge. Not just because they tell you what inspired them, but you're trying on the garments and seeing how it works with what you have on that day. That sort of all ties into the store experience and then as a buyer back into the store, I can translate, I can sort of be the connective tissue between the designer and the guy on the street. ”