We were lucky to catch up with Justin Shaw recently and have shared our conversation below.

Justin, appreciate you joining us today. Do you have any advice regarding quality control and maintaining quality as your brand grows?

At the inception of Shaw’s Covenant we prided ourselves on creating in-depth customization experience. If anyone is familiar with the art of custom clothing the amount of options are limitless. However, I realized several different things:

1. Most customers don’t know what they want.
2. Sometimes it can be overwhelming to have so many options.
3. The likelihood of errors occurring drastically increases.
4. It draws out the experience longer than it needed to be.
5. It elongated our order fulfillment process timeline.

As you can imagine, after our workload increased it came with a cost of learning the experiences above. So we decided to make several adjustments to our systems & our client experience. We only give clients approximately 5 decisions to make (fabric, lining, button, thread, design). We also inserted our expertise more than we used to make the experience seamless. We also created preset design options for the customer to visually see the outcome of our customization and to let our order fulfillment process become a five step process for our team. We are always looking for ways to enhance and evolve our client experience and internal processes, because the market place will always change.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Justin Shaw. I’m the owner and operator of Shaw’s Covenant Custom Clothier. We help the purpose driven become polished, presentable, and capable of producing results simply from his image. We cater to our clients by learning more about their daily lifestyle.

Prior to getting into this field, I had no experience in the apparel industry at all. I just had a natural sense of professional style. I decided to launch this Custom Clothing house, because I noticed that the experience I received in the past was very lackluster. I would meet the tailor and they would tell me which fabric to wear, take my measurements, take my money, and kick me out. I believe if you’re going to be invest a high dollar amount in your wardrobe it should come with a quintessential experience.

We have a call with our clients prior to seeing them to understand their lifestyle and the reason for their inquiry. Next we come directly to their office or home to construct their garments from scratch. However, when we come to fit our clients we provide music, beverages, and a step by step process of crafting each garment from the fabric to the thread.

We take pride in transforming men to look like where they are going, not necessarily where they are today. It’s priceless to watch a gentleman’s confidence grow as he puts on, what we consider, his battle armor to attack the marketplace.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

There are several different ways that we foster our clients into raving and loyal clients. The beauty about our service we are able to build personal relationships with our customers. We spend roughly 3 hours with our clients throughout their commissioning experience.

The first lesson is having the ability to build a quality relationship that exceeds just the product or service provided. When they recognize that you pay attention to the details of who they are and not just the service, it breeds customer loyalty. This naturally creates a raving client that refers everyone to us. More importantly, I ask them at the conclusion of the their experience two questions… (1) If there was anything I could do better to improve this experience, what would it be? (2) Who do you know that would love to have this same experience?

The second strategy we leverage is making customer acquisition a contact sport. We want to engage with new individuals every day with our organization, directly. This means we attend networking events tailored towards our clients, virtual events, happy hours, connect via social media messages, and more. People need to know about you.

The third strategy is a passive strategy that most are familiar with; that being ad campaigns. I spend a lot of time trying to tailor ads specifically to my target audience with small intricacies. But what I’ve come to realize is that people buy from you the more they see you. You don’t have to become a master of ads to acquire needs leads or contacts. People just need to know you exist first.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

I am obsessed with sharpening the skills of not just my trade, but of being an effective business owner. I’ve learned over the years that most business owners are technician entrepreneurs. This means they know how to deliver their product, but don’t know how to build a business. Through reading books, watching videos, and attending seminars, I’ve been able to make the mental transition from being a technician entrepreneur to a c-suite entrepreneur. Here are a few key books that changed my frame of thinking.

The bible – 66 books of wisdom
What Your CPA isn’t Telling You – Teaches you about understanding taxes and how they work
Rich Dad , Poor Dad – Teaches you the correct way to build wealth through enterprise & investments
21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – How to become an effective leader
15 Invaluable Laws of Growth – Helping you create a personal growth plan for your life
Profit First – How to manage business finances
Atomic Habits – How to obsess over the process and not the goal
etc…

Contact Info:

• Website: shawscovenant.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/shawscovenant
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shawscovenant
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shaw-s-covenant/?viewAsMember=true

Image Credits
Mega Pixels Media VSDavis Photography Censored Dreams Photography