Ties.com wants to be a one-stop shop for the modern man—at least from the waist up.
The Garden Grove-based e-tailer, which goes by Wild Attire Inc. in the corporate world, is adding dress shirts and blazers to its annual production output of about 3 million ties and other accessories.
Several years ago Ties.com morphed into a vertically integrated company, phasing out designer ties from its website and focusing on manufacturing and selling “high-quality, wallet-friendly” products under its own labels—some acquired, others developed in-house.
“We made the move because we believed that we could build an equally substantive product that we were purchasing for a markup just for having a brand,” said Chief Executive Omar Sayyed.
Ties.com plans to do the same with blazers and dress shirts, now looking to high-end European designers for inspiration.
“I love Thomas Pink shirts, but I also don’t want to spend $150,” Sayyed said. “When I was single, that was a different story, but now I have a wife and other set of responsibilities. I still appreciate the quality—it’s hard not to—and I’m not the only one. But also I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to pay $150.”
His design team spent nine months figuring out “what exactly makes a great shirt” and how to make it at a $50 price point. The first collection will launch in August, followed by blazers in September.
“I feel that once somebody tries out our product that—for the price they pay for it—they’ll believe they received a better product than they should have,” Sayyed said.
He’s also counting on a recent “cultural shift where people are paying less and less attention to brands and more attention to quality,” and are “looking for companies with some unique factor to them”—like Ties.com.
“When they come to our website, they see a story, they see that it’s a small company, and that we genuinely care about our employees, that we have a great culture,” Sayyed said.
Product diversification—which will also include an underwear line launching in the fourth quarter—is poised to address another trend that’s made it acceptable for well-dressed men to skip the tie, even in the workplace.
“There is a resurgence of men’s fashion apparel that’s not necessarily dictated by the corporate environment, which is becoming more lax with their dress code,” Sayyed said. “Men are more interested in wanting to look nice and wearing something nice. They’re also more comfortable wearing fitted clothes and accessories—a bracelet, lapel pin, pocket square, beads—where before it was just a tie.”
Roots
Ties.com employs 25 and ended last year with an estimated $25 million in revenue. Its annual growth rate is hovering at 25%, per Sayed.
His business partner, Morgan Dunn, founded the company in 2000, offering “goofy ties that you couldn’t find anywhere else” via the wildties.com domain. E-commerce tools such as Shopify software weren’t widely available at the time, so Dunn and Chief Technology Officer David Hansen developed their own, including enterprise resource planning and content management systems.
“In retrospect, it was a better decision to build our own because it gives us a lot of agility and flexibility,” Sayyed said. “We do everything from product inception to renderings, and then those get sent to our own facilities in China.”
He joined the company as president and equity partner in 2010. By then Dunn had acquired the ties.com domain and was battling a post-recession sales decline.
“The company was bloated, had a lot of processes, nothing was optimized, and it was hemorrhaging a lot of cash,” Sayyed said, adding that he also “didn’t find stuff on our website that I wanted to wear.”
He restructured the workforce, aligning team members’ goals with what the company needed. He also introduced more products, including socks and a variety of tie styles under in-house brand names: American Necktie Co., Wild Ties, Elite, Principessa Regale, Peter Hayer, Electric Neckwear, IV Front, Brent Morgan, Ties.com and Silk Rhino. In 2012 the company acquired Scarves.com, as well as its former tie vendors, Alynn and Infectious Awareables Inc., the latter offering custom designs to businesses and nonprofit organizations.
Sayyed also wanted to “improve product consistency” and get “greater control over quality and production deadlines,” so in 2014 Ties.com acquired a factory south of Shanghai, China.
Before the buy, it had to outsource production to other factories, which often interfered with deadlines.
“We would strike a great deal with a factory whose production consistency was great, but if someone else came in and they paid more money than us, then they would move ahead of us,” Sayyed said.
Growth
The company, aside from e-commerce, sells its products wholesale to boutiques and novelty mom-and-pop stores. It doesn’t have bricks-and-mortar stores, and isn’t contemplating any—even pop-up shops that sometimes can build brand awareness for online businesses.
“The experiential component for accessories is probably less important as it is for companies that do full suits,” Sayyed said.
Sayyed’s team instead focuses on the digital space, where Ties.com’s Man Academy blog showcases “manly knowledge for the style-conscious gentleman” via tutorials like, “How to tie a necktie,” “How to fold a pocket square,” and “How to shine shoes.” There’s also the Sparkle & Fuzz blog, where consumers visiting scarves.com can find everything they “need to know about life, lust, love, and fashion.”
“In our space, content is king,” Sayyed said.
He and the two other equity owners, Dunn and Hansen, “never sought outside money,” and instead have been growing the company with their profits, all while “paying fair Southern California wages.”
“We haven’t found the right (investor) fit,” Sayyed said. “Smart money is more important than the amount of money.”
