Men's Wearhouse Founder: Brick-and-Mortar Is Out of Style

Throughout his 50-year career in menswear, George Zimmer has seen, selected and sold pretty much every variety of sport coat, from single-breasted to double, corduroy to cashmere, houndstooth to plaids to pinstripes. But despite the millions of jackets he’s looked at, there’s one he can never forget. It’s a 100% polyester number. Big lapels. In canary yellow. The time was the early 1970s and Zimmer—a recent college grad wholesaling the suits that his father manufactured in Connecticut—had just steered his Buick Electra into the lot of a Houston chain called Foley’s. (That company ceased to exist in 2006.) Passing over the trousers, vests and blazers that Zimmer had pulled from the backseat, the buyer took an instant liking to the yellow sport coat—and ordered 400 of them. Zimmer was stupefied. He was also certain that these “garish… insults to men’s fashion” would never sell. To Attract Gen Z Shoppers, Macy’s Expands Its Private Brands And they didn’t. Two weeks later, the buyer called Zimmer to his warehouse and insisted that he take the sport coats back. For good measure, the man had slashed them all with a box cutter. “Now you’ve got to take them back,” the Foley’s guy scoffed. “They’re damaged.” It was a seminal day for Zimmer. A valued buyer had cheated him. His father, over the phone, excoriated him. The young salesman drove the long way home. His anger ran hotter than the Buick’s V8. But then Zimmer had an idea. He knew that the garment business was rife with bilkers like the Foley’s buyer. He had also seen firsthand that shopping in stuffy men’s stores was often a lousy experience. And he knew that he’d never change the business if he kept selling duds out of a Buick. “I’m going to open up my own men’s clothing store,” Zimmer thought. Apparel’s original influencer As millions of shoppers know, Zimmer did. In 1973, he cut the ribbon on Men’s Wearhouse, a brand that would eventually grow to some 450 stores and book revenues of $1.2 billion. Zimmer’s equally visible legacy are the TV spots that he starred in, his sandpapery baritone assuring the men of America: “You’re going to like the way you look—I guarantee it.” Those commercials (and Zimmer’s encounter with the unscrupulous buyer for Foley’s) are among the myriad yarns that fill the pages of I Guarantee It: The Untold Story Behind the Founder of Men’s Wearhouse, published late last year. Business autobiographies like this are, of course, what one expects to see when a highly regarded executive slips into retirement with a hefty nest egg and stories he can tell without fear of consequences. (Following a dispute with the board, Men’s Wearhouse gave Zimmer his walking papers in 2013—a move that Jimmy Kimmel likened to firing Santa Claus.) Zimmer's book is part biography, part user manual for how to build a brand. But Zimmer, now 73, has hardly settled into his BarcaLounger. He’s busy with Generation Tux, an 8-year-old business that rents formalwear entirely over the internet. And he’s also got a lot of wisdom to share—about advertising and branding, about the clothes men are wearing, and especially about future of the brick-and-mortar retail. These days, Zimmer is “grateful and thankful” to be out of operating stores, he told Adweek. “I think it’s a nightmare now.” But more on that later. A face on the brand Even if you’ve never set foot in a Men’s Wearhouse, odds are you’ve seen or heard about Zimmer’s TV spots. He began doing them in 1985, a function of cost as much as anything. “I work cheap,” he said, joking (but not entirely). The other reason was that Zimmer saw how much more effective a pitch could be if the president of the company was making it. Few executives were willing to step in front of the camera in the early 1980s. Fifty years ago, only a handful of executives were willing to step in front of a TV camera. Victor Kiam talked up his Remington electric razors. Frank Purdue did deadpan deliveries for his Purdue Farms chicken. Later, an avuncular Dave Thomas became the familiar face of his burger chain, Wendy’s. But the man who truly moved the needle was Lee Iacocca, the CEO who secured a $1.5 billion loan from Congress in 1980 and used it to rebuild the Chrysler Corporation. With the hard sell of convincing the public that cars from Detroit were no longer low-quality gunboats, Iacocca strode confidently among Chrysler’s new offerings on TV, telling millions of viewers: “If you can find a better car, buy it.” Iacocca inspired Zimmer, who’d already started a revolution of his own in the menswear category. Men really do hate shopping Zimmer built his Men’s Wearhouse stores in strip developments to spare average guys the misery of going to the mall. He insisted on friendly floor staff. He made a point of hiring women and people of color. Zimmer also offered value across the board, scuttling the age-old retail model of jacking up prices and then luring shoppers with steep “discounts.” Opening an early Men's Wearhouse. In time, there would be hundreds of them. But when Zimmer proposed being the literal face of his company, his colleagues balked. “My operating partners questioned why I was doing this,” Zimmer remembered. “I said, ‘Because I am going to be the most credible spokesperson, as the owner, that there could be.’” To close his spots, Zimmer said, he’d already come up with the “I guarantee it” line on his own. But something was missing. “I’d hired a very clever and sophisticated advertising guy named Greg Wilson,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m perceived as a salesman, and I’d like to be perceived more as a CEO.’ [Wilson] came back and said, ‘Add the line: You’re gonna like the way you look.’” The two-sentence slogan became Zimmer’s trademark, encouraging millions of men to come into his stores. Zimmer also made sure they were treated well once they got there. “A good experience in the store—believe it or not, that was the last thing that anybody in retail management worried about,” he said. Does anyone wear a tie anymore? But times have changed since Zimmer was a regular on TV, and he admits it. The business of marketing, he said, “has evolved from guys like me and Iacocca [talking] to celebrities talking.” And yet Zimmer doesn’t lament the prevailing trend of hiring stars and influencers to front brands. “It’s the way it goes,” he said. “I don’t think that you can live your life looking backwards.” In fact, Zimmer recently gave his son the job of scouting out potential influencers who can put an attractive face on Generation Tux. He ultimately wants to assemble a stable of them. “We live in a celebrity culture,” he said. Another thing that Zimmer has seen changing—and quickly—is the attire that men are wearing, especially to work. While the pandemic may have dealt a mortal blow to the tradition of men dressing up for the office, Zimmer sees it as a longer process. Men, he said, “have been dressing down for 80 or 90 years, [and] the per-capita sale of suits has been dropping steadily.” Even when Men’s Wearhouse was at its peak, selling one out of every five suits in America, overall sales of suits were still slipping. It’s one of several reasons why Zimmer seems relieved he no longer has to worry about the chain he created. In Men's Wearhouse's peak years, Zrimmer was a high-flying CEO. Joining the torrent of retailers including J. Crew and Brooks Brothers, Tailored Brands—owner of Men’s Wearhouse—filed for Chapter 11 in the summer of 2020, announcing plans to shutter 500 stores and let 20% of its corporate workforce go. “Unfortunately, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and its significant impact on our business, further actions are needed to help us strengthen our financial position so we can navigate our current realities,” CEO Dinesh Lathi said at the time. Tailored emerged from Chapter 11 in December 2020, having shed $686 million of debt. But just three months later it was looking for an emergency loan of $75 million, citing “unanticipated declines in business.” As of March 2022, the company stated that it was “outperform[ing] its revenue and profit targets for each quarter.” Sweatpants and hoodies from now on But now that the pandemic is mostly in the rearview mirror, the pressing question is: Are the changes that it brought to apparel retailing permanent? Is dressing up really gone for good? “I believe it is, yeah,” Zimmer said. “Remote working is just going to get larger and larger every year.” With it will come a demand for jeans and polo shirts, perhaps, but not for suits and ties—and certainly not suits and ties sold on main street. “The high-end stores in New York will be one of the last places to survive, because everything is going to move online,” Zimmer predicted. “It’s going to be very hard to have chains of high-end stores.” Even as men leave their suits hanging in the closet, however, Zimmer does see one place where dressing up will continue to flourish—special events like proms and balls and weddings. And with Generation Tux, this just so happens to be the business that Zimmer is now in. Generation Tux, Zimmer's new venture, is entirely online. Generation Tux customers can choose from some 25 styles of wool suits and tuxedos. After entering their height, weight and jeans size, the Louisville-based warehouse will ship your selection—dry cleaned, pressed and boxed—for $149. The tuxes arrive 14 days before the special event, and customers get three days to return them. Wedding sites The Knot and Wedding Wire both give the company 4.8/5 stars based on hundreds of reviews. In a sense, the tux-rental business isn’t new to Zimmer at all. He added it to Men’s Wearhouse back in 1999. By the time he left the company, tux rentals made up 15% of revenues. “I used to say that my tuxedo business was fantastic,” Zimer said. “[It’s] too bad I had a thousand men’s clothing stores to weigh me down.” Birkenstock Embraces Its Reputation for Unstylish Footwear

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Men's Wearhouse Founder Says Brick-and-Mortar's Days Are Numbered. He (Pretty Much) Guarantees It.

George Zimmer shares some wisdom culled from five decades in retail

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara