For some people, the sub-prime mortgage crisis led to lost homes or jobs. For one Virginia man, however, the economic downturn created a business opportunity.
The business plan for Ledbury was hatched by Paul Trible in a pub on London’s Ledbury Road. With an undergraduate degree from Washington and Lee and a business degree from Oxford, he was preparing to start a career in finance.
“I graduated the day before Lehman Brothers went down, as did my business partner Paul Watson, and so the job that I had lined up -- they sort of shut their doors before I even started,” Trible recalls. “It kind of became this opportunity to say, ‘All those jobs you were supposed to have after business school don’t exist anymore, so if you could do anything, what would that be?’ And for me it was always the clothing business. I’d loved clothes as a kid. I grew up in a formal family where my dad wore a tie to dinner. I had a double-breasted suit at the age of ten. You know, I’d always loved clothes.”
To learn the business, he became an apprentice.
“There was a guy who was making my shirts at the time named Robert Emmett. He’s a master tailor in London,” Trible explains. “I knocked on his door one day and asked if I could possibly work with him. I went to the same local pub as him for three weeks in a row, and he finally said, ‘Yeah, if you want to work with me we can do that.’”
A year later, he and Watson were ready to launch Ledbury online.
“We started right after the crash. People said we should be making burlap shirts as opposed to luxury men’s clothing, but we were able to educate people – folks who cared about value for the first time -- guys that were buying $300 shirts all of a sudden said, ‘Why am I doing this if what they’re doing is very similar, but it’s something that’s much more reasonable?’ So people bought one shirt, and then they’d come back and buy four or five. I mean our top hundred customers have over 100 shirts apiece at this point, and we’ve got a guy who has over 400.”
As I spoke with Trible, a man arrived at the shop Ledbury opened in Richmond’s historic Shockoe Slip. He said he owned 15 of the company’s shirts.
“I love the fit,” he explained. “I have long arms, and the slim cut is better than the slim cut at Brooks Brothers for instance.”
That kind of loyalty has served Ledbury well. In its first year, the company sold out twice after Gentleman’s Quarterly wrote about the fit of their shirts, the real shell buttons, careful stitching and fine fabrics. Doing business from this old tobacco warehouse, Trible says the company could afford to spend more on the basics.
“It’s less expensive for us to operate a business here,” says Trible. “We pay less than $15 a square foot, where I’ve got friends in New York who paying $50 plus.”
Most of the ready-to-wear shirts are made in Poland or Turkey, but the design, marketing and distribution happen here. Many of the fabrics come from luxury mills in Italy, and Trible wants nothing to do with wash and wear.
“Everyone likes the whole wrinkle free shirt but it’s actually like a formaldehyde treatment that they put on it. They bunch the shirts up into a huge brick and spray them down with chemicals, and that just takes all of the softness and feel out of the natural fiber.”
Ledbury shirts are wrinkle resistant, but Trible says they might need some ironing. And it appears consumers don’t mind. The firm now employs 40 people selling 60,000 shirts a year online, through its two company owned stores and 50 independent retailers nationwide.
