Mortimer Levitt was a legend in the world of menswear.  I always considered it a compliment that he chose us to make some of his personal clothing.  Mr. Levitt was the founder and operator of “Custom Shop Shirtmakers. He was a marketing genius.  It began with his choice of the name ” Custom Shop Shirtmakers.” By my definition nothing they made was custom. Through the years I had a number of “sit downs” with Mr. Levitt.  At one of our meetings I raised the question of what is custom and what is not custom. He said that if someone picked out a cloth and selected the way the shirt was to be detailed- collar style, cuff style, etc. - and they measured the customer for neck size, sleeve length and body size, that the shirt produced was custom. By his definition the fact that they applied the measurements to block patterns did not make them something other than custom.  We sell shirts that are made for us by a  custom shirt-maker . By Mr. Levitt’s definition we are selling custom shirts.  We say we are selling “Ready Made” shirts. Through the years I have had customers ask me if they were getting a “good deal” by buying shirts from the Custom Shop Shirtmakers.  My answer was, and always will be about any product an individual purchases anywhere, if you are pleased with what you got for the money you spent, you got a “good deal”.

Mr. Levitt died at the age of 98.  He sold the Custom Shop Shirtmakers before his passing. He was very generous in his support of the Arts.

Mortimer Levitt, who was the founder and owner of The Custom Shop Shirtmakers, was a Chipp customer. Glen Bernbaum, who ran the chain for Mr. Levitt, was also a Chipp customer. (Mr. Bernbaum went into the restaurant business after leaving the shirt business; he created a very successful restaurant in NYC called “Mortimers”, which was named after Mortimer Levitt.)

My father and Mr. Levitt would sit for hours and talk about the business. Listening to these pros was an education. Mr. Levitt was a brilliant marketer, something that started with the name he chose: The Custom Shop. In fact, they did not make anything custom. He told me that, according to his definition, if the customer chooses the cloth and specifies the details—and then if he takes the measurements, it is custom. By this logic, everything they made was custom.

He felt that selling was like acting. You didn’t have to know that much about the product if you could follow a script. To that end he wrote a script covering all the products being sold by The Custom Shop and required his salesmen to memorize it. Mr. Levitt sold the chain in the mid 1990’s (as I recall, around 1997). Through the years I had many customers ask me if I thought buying custom shirts from The Custom Shop was worth it. My answer has always been that the definition of a good value is if you are pleased with the product you received for the money you spent. It doesn’t really matter that what Mr. Levitt would call custom I would not.

My father had a sign over his desk that said something like the following: If you pay too much money for something, all you’ve simply spent a little extra money. But if you don’t pay enough for something, and you end up with a product that doesn’t do what you want it to do, you have wasted all the money you spent.