In 2012 Charles Tyrwhitt (CT) launched an Australian website selling men’s English-style cotton business shirts (Loadman, 2013) with the promise to ‘make it easy for men to dress well’ (Charles Tyrwhitt Shirts Ltd., 2017) and save money buying proper quality shirts in multiples of four. The launch followed the Australian arrival of two fellow tennants from London’s Jermyn Street, the famed home of English shirtmakers for 200 years. Thomas Pink and TW Lewin both opened Australian stores in 2012 (Loadman, 2013). CT offered a web-based shopping experience tailored to men’s apparent dislike of shopping drawing on the infrastructure of a traditional mail-order business. Since 1986 CT has sold over 34 million made-to-measure shirts off the shelf (Confessions of a shirtmaker, 2017) in its principal markets in the UK, USA, Germany and now Australia.
II. Business model
CT runs a traditional high/low retail strategy (Kaufmann, Smith, & Ortmeyer, 1994) also drescribed as ‘was/now’ (ACCC 2016) where new season stock is quickly discounted and sold cheaply driving sales and moving stock. Their Australian arrival was accompanied by a huge direct marketing and newspaper insert brochure campaign that also sold Jermyn Street in seeming equal measure to CT itself.