Reminiscing: One Year!

Guest Blog by Phil Williamson, Altus Menswear Vice President and Director of Marketing (and part-time TALL model):

On the one year anniversary of launching our website, I thought I would share a nostalgic look back at the meandering journey that led to us starting Altus.

It was 2011 when Andrea and I came up with the idea of starting a clothing company for tall men like our son Carter. The idea was born out of our collective frustration with finding anything that remotely fit his (as his sister likes to say) “freakishly tall” body.

My wife and "freakishly tall" son on his college campus.

Being chronically risk adverse, the idea of sinking money into a business that I knew virtually nothing about – with two kids in college - during the great recession - was petrifying.  And, in retrospect, my apprehensions were well warranted. It took two years of bouncing around the harbor like a drunken sailor before we actually began our voyage and had product to sell.

But we knew that the idea was a good one. The big and tall stores were clearly skewed toward the “big” guys and the established retailers were not serving tall and extra-tall, thin and athletically built men at all.

Our vision was to fill this void with stylish, American-made, high-quality, (preferably organic) knits that would keep their size and shape and to provide vertically gifted guys with well fitting casualwear that compliment their impressive physiques, allowing them to stand out in a crowd for all the right reasons!

Initially, we thought we were going to be resellers. But after attending a few trade shows, I figured out what everyone else at the shows already knew - I had no idea what I was doing there. It was immediately apparent that we were too small and inexperienced to be taken seriously by the wholesalers. Conversely, the quality and style of clothes that were available were not what we had envisioned – mostly cheap synthetics from Asia that nobody under 40 (that didn’t play golf) would be caught dead in.

Next, we had the harebrained idea that we would manufacture our clothes in our family room. After all, Andrea is quite a good seamstress and had sewn my dress shirts throughout our marriage. So we bought rolls of fabric, a serger and top-stitcher (cover-stitch) machine and set up shop. Now we were spending money like drunken sailors!

Well, as it turns out, industrial equipment is a lot different than consumer sewing machines. After a maddening (and slightly comical) few days of trying to thread the "serger" (overlock), we decided to leave the heavy lifting to the professionals. We eventually lined up a great team; a pattern maker (in Seattle), domestic fabric manufacturers (in Los Angeles) and an awesome local sewing contractor (in Auburn, WA). Andrea’s cousin is a very talented (and generous) marketing professional who saved us from ourselves and a photographer friend was super patient with us and managed to make our clothes look great on even the goofiest looking model (me).

A year ago this month, we received our first shipment of product. It was a long, often humbling education in starting a business, but also very rewarding. Especially for Carter and me since we get to keep the prototypes! Now, we have both have closets full of clothes that actually fit!

Over the past year we have sold our clothes in over half the states in the nation as well a bunch of other countries. We have a lot of ideas for new products, styles and fits for year two and look forward to expanding and refining our line of clothes. We welcome your feedback and suggestions to assure Altus is providing the clothes you want!

This blog's guest author, Phil, going off to work in his new Altus shirt!

In the meantime, let us know if you are interested in buying a (hardly used) serger or top-stitcher. J