How I tailored my business for recession
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There was never any pressure for 57-year-old Louis Copeland to enter his family’s Dublin tailoring business. But from the age of eight, there was really little doubt where he’d end up.
Hopping on the bus every day after school, he’d head for the Capel Street shop his Lithuanian grandfather, Hyman, had opened in 1908. “I’d go in, sweep the floor and cut the tacking from trousers” in the workshop upstairs.
After a few years studying tailoring and textiles in technical school, by the age of 19 he was working full time for his father, Louis. He and his brother, Adrian, quickly realised that when people bought suits they often asked for a tie and shirt to go with them. Up until then, everything had been made to measure, except for overcoats. But “people didn’t want to wait any more”.
So the two brothers asked Louis Snr. if they could rent out some space in the shop, where they would lay out some shirts and ties. “My father was more of a tailor, he wasn’t a businessman as such”, so he needed some convincing. But in the end he agreed that if they sold he would start selling more ready-made clothes. The boys sold 20 ties in the first day, and they got the nod.
In 1983 they opened a new store in Pembroke Street, selling mostly off-the-peg clothes. “All the doctors and solicitors were over there in the Fitzwilliam Square Area”, a green space in the centre of Dublin that straddled the street. “That’s why we opened there.” But the move wasn’t easy. Louis had to borrow £100,000 from the bank to finance it and suddenly found himself “doing what I was told”, toeing the line with a bank already contending with a miserable economic climate.
“In those days things were tough. We were working from hand to mouth, juggling cheques and never paying suppliers in the ten days” they were supposed to. “You had to watch what you were doing,” he says. “But if you don’t move forwards you’ll go backwards, you’ll always be playing catch up.”
By the early 1990s, with the economy picking up, things began improving. So much so that in 1992 he was able to move the company’s flagship store on Capel Street several doors up to the former Allied Bank premises at number 40. Was that satisfying? “It was actually, to take over the bank, because they nearly took us over.”
Today, only about 20% of the business, which has grown to five shops, deals in made-to-measure, although Louis insists that all customers receive the same level of service. “It’s about being able to communicate with people, to under-promise and over-deliver.” He’s certainly had some famous clients in his shop, including Bill Clinton and the Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. “He wouldn’t be the best-dressed politician, but he’s probably the most improved” – a veiled reference to the anoraks for which Ahern became famous in the late 1980s.
But Louis’s experience of working through the recession has had a lasting effect. Even today, with sales well over e12m, he’s still up at six every morning and in the store at least six days a week. “Somebody recently asked me what drives me and it’s the fear of insecurity. Fear that it will all fall down.”
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