gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

I love the spitfire silhouette; it's very English and still one of the most beautiful aircraft ever crafted by human hands.

I happend on you on the internet....your ideas and drawings are amazing....and strike a chord with me right now being I just started my own business and money is tight.

I tried to add the Widget to my blog on Xanga but it did not work :(

Hugh, not sure I agree that accepting no new orders is good business. Understanding that bespoke tailoring is labor dependent, shouldn't English Cut have been working overtime on training people so they can expand? Training will take a while, but they should have started a while ago so they never really hit this point, don't you think?

Shipriya, we are taking new orders and we are working overtime hiring and training new tailors.

What we are not doing is taking orders from people who haven't bought from us before.... because our current customers are giving us so much business at the moment.

That is good news that things are going so well that the current customer base can sustain the business and the expected growth.

But I'd still argue that it is better to grow new customers as well. I see the issue with labor intensive companies/products, but seems a shame to leave money on the table. I wonder how these types of businesses make these trade-offs -- probably the way English Cut is doing it. Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Yes, in a perfect world we'd be taking on more customers, looking after existing customers better, growing our company faster, lowering our prices, while raising the bottom line at the same time.

This perfect world exists in business school textbooks, but nowhere else.

Love the new logo, classy and suave. Is there a reason why you use an airplane for a suit business?

Well... I wonder if outsourcing works in this business. After all, that's how tech companies manage to do most of the things you mention (more customers, looking after existing customers, lowering prices etc.) - by putting development in different places.

As long as the quality is the same, is this possible in the bespoke business?

"As long as quality is the same..." Easier said than done, I'm afraid.

There are only about 20 [if that] tailors qualified in the world to sew suits to our specifications... and they're all already very busy. We've got a nice handful of them, but they're working flat out for us at the moment.

We're training some new ones up, but it'll take a few years.

Meanwhile, we'll have to scale the business in other ways... shirts, ties etc.