Disclaimer: Suitsupply was kind enough to offer The Peak Lapel this suit free of charge for the purposes of this honest review.
As you no doubt are aware, we here at The Peak Lapel have been on the hunt for the best option in online custom, MTM suiting for the last several years. We’ve had ups and downs, favorites and least favorites. Indeed, when it comes off-the-rack suits the same applies. Yet a constant through this all was Suitsupply. They’ve long been known to offer a high quality garment at an affordable, though not cheap, price. This was all off-the-rack though. A few years back, they started offering a custom made program where you could design your suit how you like it, pick from a wide selection of fabrics, and then modify a stock size in only certain key ways to produce a garment that would fit better than straight up off-the-rack, but was by no means truly custom sized for you. Indeed, this was baffling to me for many years. All these resources, all this ability, yet a solid, but overall lackluster custom suit program.
Well, this has all just changed. It’s incredibly exciting, honestly, but Suitsupply has just released their new, improved, and honestly insanely great custom suit program. This is, quite honestly, everything I had hoped Suitsupply would have always done, but now that “dream” is a reality (save one or two things, which we’ll discuss below).
So, let’s walk through this all really quickly. For starters, you already know the quality of a Suitsupply garment. Is it the absolute highest quality garment ever made on planet Earth? No, of course not. But it is without question, and with only one or two real competitors, far far far superior to anything in this price range, and this is true by a long shot. For most people, my quite picky self included, the quality Suitsupply offers is everything you’d ever need and more. Half canvassed (or fully), beautiful details, great lapel rolls, precision stitching and lining. Overall, an excellent, excellent garment. But, again, won’t bore you with details we’ve discussed at length before and that you likely already know. Now, though, all of this comes to the custom line with a whole bunch of new options.
In-store, you can pick from a wide variety of fabric books, starting at just ~$449, and going up from there. Unlike many other places though, there are a lot of excellent options in the $450-$650 range. You could fill a closet with custom suits, never repeat, and never spend more than $650 if you would so choose. Then, you can walk through and customize just about every single detail of the suit. Lapels, pockets, lining, stitching, monograms, felt, cuffs, pleats, waistband, and so on. The only things you can’t do right now is an extra extended waistband, or coin pocket, but I am told these options are coming in future months. This is, in other words, just the beginning.
I went with a gorgeous stretchy fabric in a textured pinstripe. It’s perfect for summer, super comfortable, but also works year-round. I did butterfly lining, and tab waistband, and 2” cuffs, along with a waistcoat, and extra wide notch lapels. But this is all the sideshow to the new custom program, so let’s get back to that.
Once you select all your options, you then try on fitting garments. A Suitsupply associate will then pin up the garment, recording any and all changes to the fit that are needed, and updating them in a profile just for you, building your very own pattern for your suit. This is truly bordering on bespoke. While the suit is made thousands of miles away in a factory, the pattern is unique to you. It’s not just slight tweaks to an existing template like other offerings. It’s a pattern they make for you, and can adjust and refine as future orders are placed. In the past, if you wanted to do things like slim down the arms, or be very specific with rise measurements, you simply couldn’t. Now, everything is on the table for adjustments. It’s entirely customizable to your fit preferences, and anything that is physically possible, is possible within their new system. It’s amazing.
Once all the fitting is complete (I was helped by Andrew - an absolute boss; super knowledgeable and helpful!) the order is placed, and in a couple weeks (6-8 due to international delays right now, but coming down to 4 or less in the coming months as things open up, which is super quick turnaround!) it arrives in the store. You come back for a second fitting, they make any last minute tweaks — recording them in your profile for future orders — and they tailor it for free, and ship it to your door just a few days later.
The final product in my case was really excellent. It’s not perfect, but for a first at-bat for a new custom program, this is the closest anyone has ever come, pretty much. (The rise is a bit too low, the button stance a bit too low, etc.) But now, the hope is that any adjustments I just pass along and will be incorporated into future suits, so each one progressively gets better and better fitting. That is what this is all about.
And this is where things get really interesting: Any custom suit gets free tailoring for the life of the garment. This is an INSANELY good deal; I cannot even express this to you adequately. Consider the fact that an off-the-rack suit is in the $400-$600 already, and likely will be $50-$150 of tailoring. If you’re not a time crunch, it more than pays to get the custom suit and get all that tailoring done for free! And then in a year if you lose or gain some weight, or decide you want things slimmer or a bit looser, etc., you can go back to any Suitsupply location and have those changes made, free of charge. This is truly Suitsupply leveraging it’s amazing capabilities in a way that honestly no other similar company can. It’s an unbelievable offering, truly.
In the future, you can go online to Suitsupply, and from their menu choose the Custom Made option. You can then design a suit to how you like, and you get a code at the end which you can email to your sales rep at your Suitsupply store to have them place the order with the custom measurements you have on file, along with any specific tweaks you would like. This is the one part of the experience that isn’t entirely seamless (you also have way more fabric options in store than online), but they’re working to improve this as well.
Lastly, I have placed a new order on my own dime, and now am curious to see how this one comes out relative to the fit updates, etc., that I made to the previous option. I will report back, but I have high hopes.
If I sound excited about all this it’s because I am. This is the beginning of the future for Suitsupply, and has been something I have been waiting to see literally for years. It’s amazing to watch, and more amazing to now have these options as a consumer. It should push the whole industry forward (if Suitsupply markets it right!). I know that Suitsupply has been hard at work on this for years, and the product they ended up with was worth the wait. Kudos, and highly recommended. Check it out!