When I lived in Chicago with my college friend Nate, we would often make bets with each other on just about anything. Payoffs would range from the inconsequential to the monetary to the embarrassing. Upon being asked to stand in the "VIP Party" for our friend Cam's wedding, we struck another deal: The one who improves their physical appearance by a larger margin would front the costs of both suit/tux rentals. It sounded like a great deal: pit two ultra-competitive and morphing slowly out of shape guys against each other in a hopefully mutually beneficial endeavor. And so it began.
Fast forward a month or two and the decision had been made to buy suits for the wedding. Having secured a deal from the up-and-coming online clothes retailer Indochino, it was a pretty good deal to pay $240 for a suit that would be added to your wardrobe rather than pay $150 or so for a rental. Everyone was on board with this plan although it rendered the bet payoff useless. The process for ordering a custom-made suit from Indochino was manyfold.
Following detailed videos on Indochino's website, you took a batch of measurements and submitted them online. The problems started here. Having entered height, weight and body type initially (I chose muscular/athletic of course) the measurements would "default" to a number until you entered your actual number. Imagine how disconcerting it was to measure a thigh or knee or inseam and have your results differ by more than 50% from the expected results (in both directions too!) Nonetheless, Nate and I held true to the video tutorials and painstakingly submitted the exact measurements asked for. Although we submitted the measurements at the same time, my suit arrived more than a week before Nate's did.
Once the suit arrived, I tried on the coat: absolute perfect fit! I tried on the pants: only a European metrosexual would have told me they looked good. Now I knew that Indochino had a "perfect fit" guarantee, offering a $75 alteration credit or even a complete remake if the item could not be tailored (not enough cloth, etc). But since I was on top of things, I knew that a complete remake had to be submitted within a set period from ship date. This is pretty ludicrous since shipping times are variable, but anyways.
So after checking Yelp for the best-reviewed tailors in Chicago I headed over after work. Needing only an assessment of the alterations that needed to be made, I was met by an overzealous Asian lady verbose in broken English. Openly appalled by the fact that I had bought a new suit online, she begged me to never do so again. I tried again and again to get the needed alteration measurements from her, to no avail. After 30 minutes of apologizing, pinning and exhorting from her I escaped, no better off than when I entered, my frustration with the entire experience mounting. At this point I must ask Cam and Selina to please, please not feel bad; not your fault at all and now a fantastic story for me.
Nate has still not received his suit, but I did receive a call from Cam. He and his brothers had received their suits, and he had a question for me: "Do the pants make your ass look really really good?" Needless to say, their pants were in the same state as mine. Something was amiss.
I needed to inform Indochino of how my remade pants needed to be different from my original pants. I knew where the tight parts were: waist, inseam; thigh and knee, so I added what seemed like appropriate amounts to each. I also took the time to assess the original pants. For example, I had submitted a waist measurement of 32 inches, my usual and confirmed by a tailor's measuring tape. The original pants barely made it to 28 inches, so Indochino obviously screwed up somewhere. Tack on some more frustration. Now my dilemma was: If I add inches to my original measurements, and I receive remade pants that are actually made to specifications, they will likely be too big. But if I don't change the measurements at all, Indochino won't make me a remake. So I upped those measurements.
Nate finally received his suit, complete with an awesome fitting coat and sprayed on pants. When I received my remake a few weeks later my suspicions were half correct. The waist and inseam were too large, but somehow the thigh, knee and leg were still ultra slim. Indochino told me I needed to ship my original pants back to them upon receiving the remake, so being a responsible consumer I headed to UPS with the originals and the printed return address. I was then informed that since Indochino was located in Canada, my shipping charges would be in excess of $60. I should have stoutly refused and returned home to send off vitriolic and demanding e-mail to Indochino, but my frazzled state shipped the pants off. The return shipping costs were not publicized in the least by Indochino, so their marketing statement of a perfect fit guarantee for no extra cost was misleading and dishonest.
I then moved to Seattle (that’s about how it happened too). I located another Yelp recommended tailor and headed over after work to have my built-in FUPA pants altered. I had a great experience at this tailor, despite his broken English, but was told by Indochino that the $30 alteration charges were not covered under the perfect fit guarantee since the pants were a remake and "should fit well by this point." At this point I had a mostly well-fitting suit, but my costs had grown about 40% beyond initial purchase price. However, the wedding was imminent and good times awaited.
The wedding day arrived and all my good friends from college descended on West Michigan. It was a mini-reunion of sorts. The wedding ceremony was fantastic and brief, the wedding party a riot, the reception a complete festival/zoo. The dance floor was started early and stayed bustling and joyous all throughout the night. Many hours after the beginning of the reception I found myself dancing solo right in front of the DJ's table (who was awesome by the way!--Adrian aka AB Chocolate Brown). Combine sleep deprivation, dancing exhaustion, dark lighting and adult beverages and I lost my footing, taking a glorious tumble to the floor. Popping up quickly to diminish observation, I spied Cam looking directly at me, the only one who saw me go down. We shared a knowing smile and I headed over to laugh about it together. I felt quite a nice breeze and looked down to see my pants gaping open, a clean tear from the inseam to the knee right along the seam. Cavorting and backslapping followed.
Also in a bizarre twist of events, I won a competition I had with Nate for the best entrance dance to the reception. Since Selina is from Fiji, the wedding party was garbed in traditional Fijian garlands and entered the reception hall in pairs to hastily rehearsed Fijian warrior dance. Judged by Selina's brothers, apparently Nate and I were equally terrible, but my late night wardrobe malfunction garnered me the coveted honor.
Two points of aftermath: Nate sandbagged me and won our workout bet, and I paid up by paying the entire cost of his suit rental. I have split pants and unless a tailor can fashion them back together, I'm out of luck as Indochino has discontinued this line of fabric.
That is the story of my travails with a Canadian clothing retailer and the wonderful memories that transpired which are indelibly etched into my mind.
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