Trevor Shimpfky is the nervous sort.

Despite a résumé that features Ermenegildo Zegna, Hugo Boss and Robert Talbott, he admits that meeting Paulette Garafalo, president and chief executive officer of Paul Stuart, for the primary time was a bit nerve wracking.

“I knew of Paulette through my profession but had never met her,” he said.

Despite his jitters, they hit it off and she or he hired him 4 years ago because the vice chairman of omnichannel for the Recent York-based specialty store.

Last July, Shimpfky was Garafalo’s handpicked successor to take over her position when she transitioned to executive chairman.

In his first interview since being named CEO, Shimpfky was almost giddy with excitement concerning the opportunities for the retailer that was founded in 1938 by Ralph Ostrove and operates stores on Madison Avenue and in Southampton in Recent York in addition to in Chicago and Washington, D.C. It also has an outlet across the road from its Recent York flagship to clear excess inventory, in addition to a newly opened company-owned flagship in Aoyama, Tokyo, and a few 80 shops-in-shop and shut to 500 corners in Japan.

Since 2012, Paul Stuart has been owned by Mitsui, the corporate’s longtime Japanese licensee, which purchased it from the founding family. Shimpfky said he’s received the blessing of the owners for his plans, which include adding three stores within the U.S. over the following five years, expanding wholesale, further enhancing the omnichannel presence and higher positioning the corporate to draw a younger client.

He’s also proving he’s not afraid to make big decisions. Working example: the upcoming exit of womenswear.

“We’re going to be pausing on women’s,” he said. “This fall is our last collection. Once we sell through, which we expect will occur by the top of December or January, we’ll move whatever we now have to our outlet. Then we’ll just focus our energies and our monies on the opposite categories.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean perpetually, he stressed. “There’s at all times a door to open again if we resolve to do this.”

Women’s never represented a big percentage of Paul Stuart’s volume and for the reason that flagship was significantly downsized last 12 months, it made less sense to maintain the category going.

“After I first came, the entire first floor of the town house was the ladies’s store and it was beautiful,” Shimpfky said. “But we just can’t do it anymore, there’s not enough space. In order that was a tricky decision we needed to make.”

Since its founding, the shop spanned 30,000 square feet on two floors and a mezzanine on forty fifth Street and Madison Avenue. Throughout the pandemic, the choice was made to return the second floor to the owner — Paul Stuart never owned the constructing — and shrink the selling space to fifteen,000 square feet. The expansive tailored clothing department on the second floor was relocated to the back of the primary floor together with furnishings and formalwear, putting sportswear front and center, together with the more modern Phineas Cole collection. The hair salon that had been installed during a 2017 renovation of the shop was changed into the tailor shop and the corporate took the smaller space across Madison Avenue for its clearance store, PS 45. The basement, which had previously been used for storage, was changed into a state-of-the-art photo studio and offices.

“We like this layout,” he said. “We predict it’s more modern.”

The shoppers apparently agree. Although the corporate was braced for a negative response from its longtime shoppers to the smaller footprint, Shimpfky said it has actually improved business since salespeople can now help a customer navigate all of the departments relatively than passing them on to another person upstairs.

“Our average transaction value is up 50 percent to pre-pandemic levels,” he revealed.

Although the physical space can have modified, Paul Stuart’s deal with product has remained paramount. The gathering is designed by Ralph Auriemma, the shop’s longtime creative director, who has taken the next profile in recent times.

“Partnering with Ralph is, for me, essentially the most exciting a part of the job,” Shimpfky said. “He’s essentially the most creative designer I’ve seen in my profession and we’re really unleashing him. What we now have to do is create demand. Every thing in the shop needs to be something that’s original and unique and may’t be found anywhere else. After I first got into this business and got here into this store, all the things was proprietary to this place. We want to get back to that golden age of Paul Stuart and create a transparent brand identity.”

That brand identity must span each the physical stores and the web, he believes. 4 years ago, the 2 categories were “very split,” he said. “The stores were doing their thing and we weren’t acting in an omni fashion. Our website was old and crotchety. So we partnered with Salesforce and really began cranking up our digital enterprise.” The result, he said, is “like comparing a jalopy to a Mercedes 560SL.”

Helping him with that transformation is Aslihan Danisman, who worked with Shimpfky at Zegna and serves as vice chairman of digital and CRM.

The timing turned out to be “very fortuitous,” he said, for the reason that updated website launched five months before the pandemic hit and the stores were forced to shut. But due to the brand new and improved website, “we kept shipping e-commerce and it kept the lights on and let our ownership know we were all very passionate and driven here.”

Although much of Shimpfky’s background is in product, he said he’s at all times been more excited by the business side of the industry and believes he can put his mark on Paul Stuart by helping the corporate be more modern.

“Thank goodness for Aslihan, and what she’s done so far as making a customer journey that builds demand for people to maintain coming back,” he said. “That’s really the emphasis at once. The stores are doing well and the e-commerce continues to be good. But I feel we’re facing what everybody else is facing, which is the expectation as we got here out of COVID-19 that e-commerce would proceed full throttle. But as Mark Zuckerberg said a few weeks ago, that’s just not happening.”

E-commerce accounts for around 20 percent of the corporate’s overall sales and it’s the physical stores which are leading the best way — they usually’re performing well. Along with the Recent York flagship, which has seen its sales and traffic improve in recent months, the unit in Washington, D.C., has bounced back after a rough couple of years and the shop in Southampton, which began as a pop-up and is now everlasting and year-round, has shown some “nice activity throughout the fall and holiday time,” he said.

The remaining store on Oak Street in Chicago can also be doing well. At one time, Shimpfky said, there was a second unit on Lasalle Street, however it was destroyed throughout the race riots in May 2020 and the choice was made to step back and focus the energies on the remaining store. “That just made essentially the most sense,” he said.

Going forward, he declined to discover the cities Paul Stuart is exploring for added stores but said they might be concentrated within the Northeast and Southeast.

Although e-commerce has slowed since its peak throughout the pandemic, Shimpfky said the corporate stays bullish overall. “Now we have the total confidence of our ownership and we’re all aligned — from the e-commerce team to the merchants. We’re driving a full-price business again, and really attempting to stay away from the discounts and the specials and the flash sales.”

He said the stores held tight and didn’t break sale until after Father’s Day this 12 months and can proceed to sell at full price until Dec. 26.

Along with its own direct-to-consumer efforts, Paul Stuart has begun wholesaling in recent times. It began with footwear, which was sold at Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman in addition to Nordstrom and Mr Porter. Last 12 months, the wholesale offering expanded into tuxedos and formal accessories, that are being sold at Saks.

“Paul Stuart has an incredible popularity for tailored clothing,” he said, adding that the category still accounts for around 60 percent of overall sales. “How over and over have we heard that tailored clothing is dead? We heard it in 2008, we heard it after 9/11, we heard it when the Silicon Valley e-comm boom happened when everyone was wearing T-shirts. But how over and over has that not been the case?”

The death knell was sounded again throughout the pandemic when everyone was working from home. But now that men have returned to the office, the tailored clothing business is booming.

“We held our position and the business has been going bananas since we reopened the doors. Just a few months ago, 80 percent of the shop business was in tailored clothing. And it’s not only Recent York, it’s D.C. and Chicago too and we’re even getting requests in Southampton for tailored clothing.”

Together with suits, high-end sportwear can also be strong, he said, and the goal is to have the category achieve parity with tailored clothing as the corporate begins offering more athleisure and golfwear going forward.

Among the many top performers at once are the brand’s polo shirts, featuring its man-on-a-fence logo — a business five times as big because it was three years ago — together with cashmere sweaters and casual bottoms.

He said Auriemma recently returned from a two-week trip to Italy “electrified” with the creative opportunities for future product designs and the corporate got down to whet the appetites of its customers by touting his visit on social media and piece of email.

By the point Auriemma’s latest collections hit, the Recent York flagship can have accomplished some physical changes. “Our plans are to create a shoe salon within the front of the shop,” Shimpfky said. “We’ll try this right after the vacations.”

The Custom Lab, the corporate’s opening price point made-to-measure collection, is housed on the primary floor, but will move to the mezzanine in the brand new 12 months.

Other changes will include a subtle repositioning of the Phineas Cole label. The gathering, which Shimpfky said has been growing thanks partly to strong social media marketing efforts, can be renamed Phineas Cole for Paul Stuart to raised connect the 2 names.

The value points of the 2 labels are concerning the same, he said, but Phineas offers a younger silhouette with a more narrow leg within the tailored clothing and a few “edgy” pieces equivalent to a woven silk dinner jacket with an Art Deco-inspired print of city skyscrapers and a silk rope frog closure for $3,295, and silk shirts that feature contemporary bird and butterfly prints that retail for $1,195. “It doesn’t appear to be anything on the market,” he said.

As he strives to create the framework for “Paul Stuart 2.0,” Shimpfky said the corporate will proceed to boost its marketing efforts to deal with what makes it unique. That features the corporate’s distinct fit for its signature tailored clothing in addition to its cheaper price point. Suits can be found for $2,395, lower than comparably made models from other brands and retailers.

The shop can also be known for its propensity for color. In actual fact, the retailer uses a campaign, “Life Is Colourful,” to get that message across. There’s also a weekly email called Ralph Raves that highlights the “newest and coolest thing to are available in that week,” he said. Those pieces are also promoted online.

“We’re engaging another way than we used to,” he said. “We wish to guide with digital and that doesn’t just mean our website. We’ve got to get away from manual processes and have interaction the following generation,” he said.

Toward that end, the corporate recently added Victor Netland, a 22-year-old recent college graduate, to its team to advertise the brand on TikTok. As Shimpfky wrote to customers, Netland can be “educating on special items that make Paul Stuart so very unique.”

The efforts look like paying off. From September 2021 until today, 56 percent of consumers are latest to the brand.

As well as, there may be talk starting to bring Paul Stuart to other international countries, but “we’re just at the place to begin,” he said.