Bespoke tailor Prince & Baron looks to ecommerce

Amid an increasingly crowded local menswear market, Prince & Baron is setting its sights on ecommerce.

The custom menswear company, which sells American-made suits and shirts, opened a showroom in Center City this summer, but the team is now ready to take customers online. That’s because it now has a big enough library of customers’ measurements to auto-correct measurements that customers input online, said CEO and Wharton MBA Stephanie Mou. Ecommerce is “crucial” to the company’s growth, she wrote in an email.

Prince & Baron is now pushing online sales and has hired developers to improve its site, Mou said. The company also acquired an Asheboro, N.C.-based manufacturer whose owner was retiring.

At Prince & Baron, shirts start at $149, suits at $889 and pants at $189. The shop at 1500 Walnut Street serves lawyers, consultants and executives, and a Center City boutique (Mou declined to disclose which one, citing final contract revisions) will start selling some ready-to-wear Prince & Baron pieces in the fall.

Menswear is a growing industry in Philly, as Philly Mag reported multiple times. It’s a mixed bag of ecommerce, brick and mortar and those who do both.

Further west of Prince & Baron is another bespoke, American-made menswear shop called Commonwealth Proper, whose price point is significantly higher, with suits starting at $1950 (and shirts at $195). But Commonwealth Proper doesn’t offer a straight ecommerce option for their custom-made suits — they require that you make an appointment and get fitted, or get measurements from a tailor or a store in another location or a body scanner. Once those measurements are on file, customers can use an ecommerce option.

Mou, 30, was formerly a marketing manager at Coca-Cola. The Center City resident leads a staff of two others.