As menswear retailer Spoke continues to prioritise making clothes “built for fit with real craftsmanship”, founder and chief executive Ben Farren talks to Retail Week about how he turned his tailoring travails into a booming brand.
While it might be assumed that fit and fashion go hand-in-hand, Spoke founder Ben Farren says that this is far from the case. Ten years ago, after being consistently frustrated in his goal to find menswear that fit properly, Farren found the sweet spot between bespoke and “ready to wear clothing” and made it his mission to create trousers that are true to size.
Operating in the UK, the US and Europe, Spoke has gained growth of almost 10% in the financial year to date in what founder Ben Farren calls a currently “declining menswear market”. Having also achieved gross revenues of around £25m for the full year to October 31, 2023, and with a media equity deal with ITV under its belt, Spoke is showing no signs of slowing.
Farren sat down with Retail Week to discuss the beauty behind the brand’s business model and the opportunities that come from finding the right fit.
Where did the idea for Spoke come from?
“It started in 2012 when I was frustrated that menswear seems to ignore the things that matter most. I think fit comes first and most brands can’t deliver on it. In ecommerce, I saw an opportunity to fix that.
“We had an opportunity to customise. What that means is we can offer 400 sizes where most brands might offer 20 or 30, which really is changing the game.
“We started with trousers; we sold our millionth pair last year. Now we bring the same obsession with size to different parts of the wardrobe.
“I’d stress that our first love is legwear and there’s good reason for that – it’s neglected. Most retailers or brands, on their websites, have trousers fourth or fifth place down. It’s the foundation of your look and it’s half of your look, but it’s often overlooked.”
Talk me through your business model?
“The idea is to apply ecommerce to the task of delivering better fit. What that means in practice is because we collect our inventory in one place, we are able to run many more sizes.
“Fit isn’t rocket science; the only way to offer better fit is to offer more sizes and to do it consistently. The challenge with that is for customers to figure out which size is theirs, so that you’re not into the purgatory of returns.
“The answer is, we ask a series of questions that customers know the answers to, such as height, weight and how tightly you do your watch strap and various other things, which turn out to be predictive of what their size should be. We make a recommendation that 75% or 80% of the time is accurate.
“If it doesn’t work and we don’t get the perfect size, shipping and returns are free.
“The beauty of this model is that if you give a guy a perfectly fitting pair of trousers, his willingness and enthusiasm for shopping with you again is incredibly high, which translates to incredibly high repeat rates. Twenty per cent of our customers often come back inside the first 30 days post purchase, and by the end of the first year, this figure is getting up to 40% and 50%.”
Where do you see yourselves in the market and who is your biggest competitor?
“I don’t think there is anyone offering exactly what we do, but most of our customers switch from Boss, Hackett, Paul Smith and Reiss – these are the brands that show up when we ask them.
“When you get to slightly better brands operating at slightly higher price points, you actually tend to find that the size range tends to thin out. That’s the space we fill.
“We’ve always thought of ourselves as being accessibly aspirational. [Our offer] is definitely mass luxury and something you trade up to. I think it’s important that it remains accessible so you can fill your wardrobe.”
What are you most excited about for Spoke this year?
“We’ve got some really interesting and exciting product launches coming soon – we’re going to get into a new category fairly shortly with jackets. A tailored jacket is a good complement to a lot of what we sell and it [usually] has some quite significant fit problems, so we feel well placed to address those.
“We ran an archive sale about two weeks ago and it blew the doors off. It reminded us that we do think, on some level, the future is multi-channel.
“Being digitally native is a superpower, it allows us to stay close to our customer, but that doesn’t mean that creating a physical space in real life to showcase our product might not be important for the future growth of the brand.
“It remains true that 60% plus of menswear purchases are still made offline, that’s an awful lot of the market to rule yourself out of.”
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