How Hockerty Used Engineering to Reinvent Online Tailoring

When Engineers Build a Fashion Company

With an engineering mindset, “efficiency, features and processes become more important,” says Salva Jovells, Head of Marketing at Hockerty and Sumissura. “And that is deep in the core values of the brand.”

Salva is describing what happens when engineers build a fashion company from scratch. Not designers, not retail veterans. The priorities are different. Where a traditional fashion house might lead with aesthetics or trend forecasting, Hockerty leads with systems.

“When you apply [systems], the quality and precision of bespoke fashion can be offered worldwide with very competitive starting prices,” Salva explains.

The company was originally called Tailor4less when it launched in 2008, and the name tells you everything about the founding philosophy: make custom tailoring accessible to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it. The original slogan was “affordable elegance,” and that DNA has never left.

Co-founders Alberto Gil and Andreu Fernandez built the business from their experience in technology, not fashion. Their epiphany from Shanghai was straightforward: skilled tailoring existed at scale and at reasonable cost. What didn’t exist was an efficient digital bridge between those craftsmen and customers around the world.

So they built one.

From the very beginning, the company developed its own proprietary technology rather than relying on existing eCommerce platforms. Not out of stubbornness (though every entrepreneur has a streak of stubbornness), but rather necessity.

“Since the beginning, Hockerty created its own proprietary technology,” Salva says. “It has been proven to be a strength versus those many competitors that disappeared.”

The decision to build in-house meant they could create a 3D configurator that lets customers design garments down to the last detail—fabric, lapels, buttons, lining, monograms—and see a hyper-realistic preview before ordering. Try doing that on Shopify.

“It allowed us to be the first ones to have 3D designers in many different types of products that were not usually related to bespoke brands: jeans, chinos, field jackets,” Salva says. “And keeping those updated to our customers’ high standards.”

The configurator isn’t just a visual gimmick. Behind it sits an algorithm that generates tailor-made patterns from a customer’s measurements. Feed it a few inputs, and it produces a precise body profile that the company’s tailors in Shanghai use to cut and sew each garment.

“Does the iteration ever finish?” Salva says when asked about the algorithm’s development. “I would say it is a constant improvement. There are always challenges to be tackled, patterns to be improved, and changes in customer behaviour that become opportunities to improve the result.”

That engineering mindset—treat everything as a system, measure it, improve it, repeat—is what separates Hockerty from the wave of online tailoring startups that launched in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Most of them are gone. Hockerty is old enough to vote.

“And that’s our commitment,” Salva adds. “We won’t stop improving the patterns so they are balanced for everyone, no matter what size.”

The Marketing Manager Who Knew Nothing About Fashion

Salva Jovells joined Hockerty in 2015. He was 27 years old, coming from another startup, and by his own admission, he knew nothing about fashion.

What he did know was growth hacking.

“During the interview with Alberto, one of the founders, I felt he was really interested in hearing my ideas, and I knew he would let me learn, try, and scale different strategies,” Salva recalls. “It was key to know that it was a place to test, learn, and grow.”

That culture of experimentation wasn’t a phase. A decade later, Salva still describes his work in those terms.

“And I get that excitement even today when testing AI tools and processes myself, for example,” he says.

When Salva arrived, the business was already on solid footing. It had been growing steadily since 2008, and the fundamentals were sound. But the opportunity was about expanding—into new regions, new channels, and new product lines.

“The business was already solid; it was already about expanding regionally, channel-wise and product-wise,” Salva explains.

“Hockerty has always been bootstrapped and growing based on benefits, so that is something that also makes you confident to join,” he adds.

That’s worth pausing on. In an era when most direct-to-consumer brands measure success by how much venture capital they’ve raised, Hockerty has grown entirely on revenue without outside investors or an eager board demanding hyper-growth at all costs.

Instead, the company grew by being profitable and reinvesting those profits into the business. It’s the kind of boring, disciplined growth that doesn’t make headlines but does produce companies that survive for nearly two decades.

The Bets That Built the Business

Every company that survives long enough has two or three moments that made the difference. For Hockerty, Salva identifies two.

“The bid we did on SEO,” Salva says. “The white hat one. Creating content, improving experiences, and creating relations with brands. Long-term actions that made us grow and keep building on top of the brands.”

This wasn’t the shortcut-laden, keyword-stuffing SEO of the early 2010s. Hockerty invested in legitimate content creation, user experience improvements, and brand partnerships that built domain authority over time. It was slow and it wasn’t glamorous. And it compounded.

The second was surviving COVID.

Think about what the pandemic meant for a made-to-measure clothing company. No weddings. No office dress codes. Everyone working from home in sweatpants. The core reasons people buy custom suits evaporated overnight.

“No weddings, home office…” Salva says. “But keeping the teams, the workload, so we could get out of that dark period stronger than the rest. And it worked.”

That last part is critical. While competitors cut staff and scaled back, Hockerty kept its teams intact. They maintained the workload. They bet that demand would return and that being ready—with experienced staff, refined systems, and improved products—would matter more than surviving lean.

They were right. The company’s data shows that suits and wedding outfits remained top sellers even during the pandemic. Love, it turns out, conquers all, including broken supply chains. And when the world reopened, Hockerty was positioned to capture demand that competitors had abandoned.

The company now coordinates roughly 60 employees across three continents. The Barcelona office houses design, IT, customer service, and product teams. The board and marketing team operates from Zurich, Switzerland. And Shanghai handles logistics and manufacturing, with shoes crafted separately in Spain.

Two Brands, One Philosophy

In 2014, the company launched Sumissura as a separate brand for women’s made-to-measure clothing. Two years later, Tailor4less rebranded to Hockerty for the men’s line.

Why two brands instead of one?

“It was Sumissura that split from Tailor4less to have her own identity in 2014,” Salva explains. “Well, you never know what would happen if we had the two brands together, but there are many good things.”

The split forces different thinking. Men and women approach custom clothing differently, and trying to serve both under one brand risks diluting the message for each.

“It forces you to think differently, distinguishing and understanding what women want differently than men,” Salva says. “It allows us to give women the right independent space in a traditionally masculine bespoke clothing environment.”

That last point matters. Bespoke tailoring has historically been a men’s world—Savile Row, old-school haberdasheries, the whole culture of men’s suiting. By giving Sumissura its own brand identity, Hockerty ensured that women’s custom clothing wasn’t positioned as an afterthought or a spin-off. It has its own voice, its own marketing, its own collections.

The two brands share technology, supply chain, and operational infrastructure. But they maintain distinct identities in how they speak to customers. And that dual approach has paid off—Sumissura saw sales surge during the pandemic as women increasingly sought out inclusive, well-fitting options that off-the-rack couldn’t provide.

“We Don’t Know What Clothing Sizes Are”

Ask Salva about inclusivity versus customization, which matters more to the business, and his answer is immediate.

“Mom or dad? Complicated to decide,” he says. “It is mandatory for us to keep both the most balanced we can. We need to offer customisation to everybody. We don’t know what clothing sizes are.”

That last sentence is the whole point. Hockerty’s business model doesn’t just accommodate non-standard bodies. It treats every body as non-standard. In their world, there’s no such thing as a “regular” or “standard” size. Every garment is cut to the individual.

The motivation differs between men and women, though.

“Men don’t know their pants size, so having made to measure options help them purchase online,” Salva observes.

He’s right. Most men have no idea what their actual measurements are. They know they’re “roughly a 34 waist” or “usually a large,” but those sizes vary wildly across brands. Made-to-measure eliminates the guessing game entirely.

For women, the value proposition cuts even deeper.

“Women know perfectly the importance of clothes that fit perfectly,” Salva says. “Once they find the jeans that fit them perfectly, they can’t go back to off the rack.”

This is where Hockerty and Sumissura’s retention story becomes powerful. Once a customer creates a body profile and receives a garment that fits, the switching cost is enormous. Not financial switching cost. Emotional switching cost. Going back to off-the-rack clothing that almost fits feels like a downgrade.

The company’s mission statement captures this: “In a world where the fashion industry forces people to fit into boxes, Hockerty exists to make people feel confident and secure by creating bespoke garments that reflect everybody’s uniqueness.”

It’s not just marketing copy. It’s the engineering problem they’re solving. Instead of manufacturing thousands of identical garments and hoping they fit some percentage of the population, they manufacture one garment at a time, designed for one specific person.

Affordable Elegance Is Not a Discount Strategy

Custom shirts starting at £39. Custom suits under $300. For made-to-measure clothing, those are shockingly accessible price points.

How does Hockerty keep prices this low?

“It is hidden on Hockerty’s DNA as it was originally called Tailor4less and its original slogan: ‘affordable elegance,'” Salva says. “We make big efforts to keep the starting point as low as it is for years.”

The pricing philosophy reveals something important about how the company thinks about margins.

“Our prices are fair, margins are fair and tight, which doesn’t allow us to be on these stupid (sorry) forever discounts,” Salva says. “We offer the best price all year long.”

There’s a real tension in eCommerce between pricing strategy and brand integrity. Many online retailers inflate their “regular” prices so they can run perpetual sales—30% off everything, all the time. It creates an illusion of value while training customers to never pay full price.

Hockerty goes the opposite direction. Margins are tight by design. The price you see is the real price. There’s no Black Friday blowout because the everyday price is already as low as they can sustainably go.

This approach requires operational efficiency that most companies can’t achieve. Every dollar of waste—in manufacturing, logistics, technology, or customer service—directly threatens already-thin margins. It’s why the engineering mindset matters so much. Systems thinking, process optimization, and continuous improvement aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re survival requirements when you’re selling bespoke clothing at near-mass-market prices.

The company’s made-to-order model also helps. Because every garment is produced only after a customer orders it, there’s zero unsold inventory. No end-of-season clearance sales. No warehouse full of suits that didn’t sell. That zero-waste approach is both environmentally responsible and financially essential for maintaining low prices on custom work.

What Comes Next

From three engineers in Barcelona to 400,000+ customers across 81 countries. From Tailor4less in a garage to Swiss Brand of the Year. From a company nobody in fashion took seriously to one that’s outlasted most of its competitors.

The Hockerty story demonstrates what happens when engineers apply systems thinking to a traditional craft. When a company chooses bootstrapped profitability over venture-funded growth. When the response to “Shopify won’t work for this” is “then we’ll build it ourselves.”

Salva Jovells arrived knowing nothing about fashion and brought a growth hacking mentality that helped the company scale through SEO, testing, and experimentation. The founding team built proprietary technology that became the company’s biggest competitive advantage. And the decision to keep teams intact during COVID—when the easy move was to cut—positioned Hockerty to emerge stronger than competitors who played it safe.

The product line continues expanding. Custom jeans launched in 2021 have already crossed 10,000 units produced. Custom sneakers now feature augmented reality try-on. Sumissura keeps growing its women’s line with shoes, boots, and dresses. The configurator keeps getting more detailed. The algorithm keeps getting more accurate.

And prices stay low. Without “40% off” every day.

You can explore Hockerty’s full range of custom clothing at hockerty.com and Sumissura’s women’s collection at sumissura.com.

Key Takeaways

Proprietary technology can be your biggest moat.

Hockerty built its own 3D configurator and pattern-generating algorithm from day one because existing platforms couldn’t handle their model. That decision outlasted every competitor who relied on off-the-shelf solutions. If your business model requires something that doesn’t exist yet, building it yourself might be the best investment you make.

Bootstrapping forces discipline.

Nearly 18 years of growth funded entirely by revenue. No outside investors, no pressure to sacrifice margins for market share. Bootstrapping meant every decision had to make financial sense immediately, which built operational discipline that compounds over decades.

White hat SEO compounds like interest.

Hockerty’s biggest growth lever was legitimate SEO. That meant content creation, user experience improvements, and brand partnerships. It was slow and unglamorous, but it built a foundation that short-term tactics like paid ads can’t replicate.

Keeping your team through a crisis pays off on the other side.

When COVID wiped out demand for custom suits, Hockerty kept its staff and maintained its workload. When demand returned, they were ready while competitors who’d cut were scrambling to rebuild. The cost of retention was real, but the cost of rebuilding would have been worse.

Tight margins and honest pricing beat perpetual discounts.

Hockerty’s prices are low by design, not by promotion. Fair margins with no fake sales builds customer trust and avoids the discount-dependency trap that erodes brand value over time.

Separate brands for separate audiences can be better than one big tent.

Splitting into Hockerty (men) and Sumissura (women) forced the company to think distinctly about each audience rather than treating women’s clothing as an add-on to a men’s brand. In traditionally masculine industries, giving women their own dedicated space matters.

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About the author

Brandon Rollins, MBA, is the Director of Marketing at Fulfillrite. He typically writes about how eCommerce and crowdfunding brands can manufacture, freight ship, and fulfill products, as well as scale their businesses. You can find his work featured on Kickstarter.com, CrowdCrux, Retailbound, and Launchboom. He has been quoted in CMSWire, Quartz, Whatagraph, and Atlassian.