Springfield clothier fits stars, athletes

That’s when Springfield entrepreneur Gary Floyd steps in, working most often with up-and-coming businessmen.

“Even though his career has moved forward, his closet hasn’t. As his responsibilities change, he’s still dressing the same way he did when he was a kid. I take his closet and I give it a promotion so the clothes he wears fit the career path he’s chosen and the promotions he’s received,” said Floyd, owner of G Floyd Custom Clothiers, 1835 E. Republic Road.

Floyd, who launched his business in Chicago in 2002 and brought his services to Springfield in March, said he doesn’t have a typical customer. He primarily works with men, but does provide some services to women, such as formal gowns, or custom jeans that are worn by men or women.

“They vary through our price points and all ranges and sizes,” Floyd said of his clientele.

“I try to find the guy that is open to looking at a new way to buy his clothes, that isn’t stuck in a rut. If a guy is a traditionalist and it makes him uncomfortable, I realize I can’t work for everybody and I move on to another client,” he said.

The price points, Floyd said, are from $795 to around $2,200 for a suit.

Floyd declined to share revenues but estimates about 78 local men – and women – buy from him consistently, with a total of 500 clients across the country.

He spends much of his time traveling outside of the Springfield area to fit his customers, who include local businessmen Michael B. Willhoit of Willhoit Enterprises, real estate broker Jim Hutcheson, Gary Metzger of Liberty Bank, Dr. Tom Prater and Richard Ollis of Ollis & Company Insurors.

His book of business includes celebrities as well, such as actor Nicolas Cage, former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Tony Gonzalez.

“I’m starting to make the rounds in the NBA to work with the teams,” Floyd said. “There’s a new dress code the NBA invoked that guys have to start looking like they belong in a professional environment to play basketball, so I started working with the Seattle Supersonics, the Denver Nuggets and the Dallas Mavericks already.”

Del Phillips, associate superintendent for Springfield Public Schools, has been measured by Floyd and expects to receive his first suit in January.

Off-the-rack suits, Phillips said, often don’t fit him correctly.

“If we lift weights or work out, a lot of times our measurements are where the clothes off the rack don’t fit well. Your shoulder-to-waist ratio, the way your pants fit through the hips and through the thighs, you can’t take a suit off the rack and make it work for a body type that really is more athletic,” Phillips said.

Floyd offers two lines of suits.

“I took a lower-end suit that’s called made-to-measure. They modify a stock pattern but it’s still a custom garment and gives you a great fit. It’s for the guy who isn’t making $200,000 a year. I try to go down to the lower price point so we give everyone a chance to look great,” he said.

His best-quality garment is called a grade-six bench-made suit.

“(Bench-made) means that a tailor leans over a bench, literally cuts out a physical pattern, and builds that suit for you from scratch,” he said.

Measuring for a custom garment is a meticulous process. Floyd takes 35 measurements just for a suit coat, builds a pattern and sends it to a tailoring house.

“A master tailor looks at my pattern, then he releases it to the floor if he thinks it looks right. That literally becomes a paper pattern. They lay it on top of the fabric. They cut each piece of the garment out that belongs to the suit from that pattern, and then assembly begins,” Floyd said.

To assemble one bench-made suit, 65 separate pattern pieces are cut and joined together by 5,000 individual handstitches. It’s not a quick process.

“It will be four to five weeks from the time I enter it into the system,” Floyd said. Once Floyd receives the client’s finished garment, a final fitting is scheduled to make any additional adjustments needed.

“We clean that thing up so it looks like cream that’s been poured over the body,” Floyd said. “The real trick in clothing is to let the suit take the shape of the body, not the body the shape of the suit.”

Floyd wasn’t always a clothier. He worked in sales and marketing for about 25 years, primarily in data and communications. When his last employer, an upstart software company in Springfield, Edweb, closed, he decided to go back to school. He earned a bachelor of science in entrepreneurial science from Drury University in 2004.

“Clothing had always been my passion, and I wanted to be the very best clothier that a guy could possibly have because I wanted to really understand how to fit people, how to accessorize, how to make them look distinctively different, and take a man’s closet and make it look unpredictable,” Floyd said.

Floyd has arrangements with 30 companies to manufacturer custom clothing for him. He purchases fabric and buttons and sends it to the manufacturers, all based in the United States.

Floyd, who runs his business without any employees, said that entrepreneurs are a different type of human being.

“They’re willing to take maximum risk for maximum reward. That’s why I’m not an employee,” he said. “I decided I didn’t want any other company to walk in and hand me a pink slip.”

Floyd is willing to take a risk to expand G Floyd Custom Clothiers into the Kansas City suburb of Leawood, Kan. “I’d like to have something up there no later than April 2006,” he said, adding that he will continue to serve clients in the Springfield area.[[In-content Ad]]