How To Launch Your Own Menswear Brand With $9,000, A Dream, And No Gimmicks

Plenty of menswear designers, and men’s magazines alike, love to talk about their ‘man.’ A sort of idealized customer, reader, and alter ego, the man in question probably prefers BMWs, enjoys artisanal cocktails, and is between 28 and 35 with an unreasonable amount of disposable income for his age. He is “unshaven, gets up at 9:15, he uses this razor blade, he drinks macchiatos, and he hates the Tube,” says Tom Cridland, a fresh-faced 25-year-old British entrepreneur who launched an eponymous menswear brand in 2014, with an audible sneer. “It’s just like, you don’t know that, shut up.”

Cridland doesn’t have an ideal man, whether realistic or not, a fact the founder freely acknowledges. “It’s just me, me telling you a load of bullshit,” he says over breakfast one morning at the stuffy St. Regis Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Cridland wore a Tom Cridland “30-Year Jacket” in “Chilli Red,” a name and color that brings to mind something Guy Fieri might have worn to his senior prom. Rather than artisanal snobbery or urban glamour, Cridland’s brand is all about inclusive luxury, he says. “I don’t want to make it pretentious or open to any one single person. I’m happy to take money from anyone.” Read more at Racked.