The Eric Musgrave Interview: Three founders on why Wear London is “menswear made simple”

One of the few good things to emerge from the COVID lockdown is Wear London, a fast-growing menswear business that started life as a small online proposition. Five years later, it has five physical shops, an expanding website and a promising wholesale side.

It is run by manufacturing veterans Jim Bender, Matt Lea and Alex Hayes, who admit they are still learning about retailing, merchandising, selling online and operating what is potentially a brand, even though they do not yet claim that status for Wear London.

You cannot fault their work ethic. As well as running Wear London, the trio also maintain their previous “day jobs”. Bender supplies about three million pairs of men’s denim jeans made in Bangladesh to UK high street names via his company Denim Solutions. Lea and Hayes are outerwear specialists whose Concept Asia company sources around 250,000 pieces annually from China for British brands and retailers.

Bender, 71, and Lea, 69, first worked together in the 1970s. Based at Canvey Island, Essex, Jim’s company, Bender International, specialised in making men’s trousers. At its peak it had four UK factories but by the 1990s these were closed and Bender began sourcing from North Africa, then Bulgaria and Romania, and ultimately the Far East.

Lea went out on his own in his early 30s, using factories in Cyprus for outerwear and trousers. He had a menswear label called Method for a time. He started using UK factories and then added Chinese production to his offer. In 2006 he met Hayes, who is now 45, when they were working for Jason Marchant’s high street supplier May Trading. After that business was acquired by the giant Li & Fung organisation in Hong Kong, the pair set up Concept Asia in 2017.

Well over 100 years of experience in menswear manufacturing was put to good use when the pandemic brought unexpected and unprecedented pressure to the UK factories Hayes and Lea used. Something had to be found to keep them in business. That something was Wear London.

It produces well-made, very wearable, unbranded menswear styles in interesting fabrics, all pitched at prices that are affordable and represent excellent value. For this winter season the first womenswear styles have been added as women had been buying small men’s sizes.

Wear London Menswear

EM What was the catalyst for veteran manufacturers like you to become menswear retailers?

AH We were using London factories to make samples for our Chinese production. We were making outerwear for menswear brands like Percival, Gloverall, House of Bruar, Blake Hedley… We had an Instagram page which we used for behind-the-scenes stories. Although we were just mucking about, consumers kept asking us about the garments. I had to keep telling them we weren’t a brand, but after turning so many enquiries away we began to see a potential for ourselves. We thought maybe it would work, and it's proven to be the case.

ML When COVID hit, we thought we had to look after our London factories. We needed to feed them every week. Once you work with factories, it's your responsibility to look after them.

AH: There was no long-term plan at that time. We thought things would go back to normal and we'd resume doing what we had been doing.

EM You asked Jim to join the venture. How do you split the responsibilities?

JB We actually run three businesses for Wear London. We run a manufacturing business, which encompasses all of the things like planning, buying fabric, buying trimmings, because we supply the factories with everything. We support the factories by ensuring that they get paid very, very quickly. And we support them by purchasing any machine we feel will improve our production. It's a continual development in improving quality and improving what we do with the factories.

Then, secondly, we run a retail business, which uses the products. Thirdly, we run a business which wholesales those products in the UK and abroad.

We all work together on the project, but Matt and Alex do all the design and the development on outerwear, which is 50% of the business. I do the design and development on denim and trousers. Matt worked with (menswear brand) Peter Werth for 20 years and Paul van Gelder, who worked at Peter Werth, looks after shirts, knitwear and jersey.

Matt’s brother, David Lea, who is also vastly experienced having worked at brands like Full Circle, looks after HR and staff planning.

Additionally, my main responsibility is the money. I act as a financial director, although without that title. I now also handle the merchandising, which makes life interesting because that's never been a skillset of mine. It's great I'm learning new skills and making it up as I go along.

Also Alex looks after the technical issues with Shopify and everything to do with the online sales. In all we employ 26 people.

EM How much do you make in the UK?

ML A large percentage of what Wear London sells is made in the UK. I have been working with some of the factories for 20 years or so. We're making all the outerwear and all the trousers and overshirts in East London. We make our denims in West Bromwich. We're making our T-shirts in in Golders Green,  north-east London.

We make our knitwear and caps in Turkey because UK manufacturers cannot match the prices we need. We use mainly fabrics from Prato in Italy, plus some from Como in Italy. For our corduroys, we use (British supplier) Brisbane Moss, which also makes in Prato. I have relationships with mills going back 40 years, so we get great prices. Our outerwear sets the levels that everything else has to measure up to.

At first we were buying 100 metres here, 200 metres there, but as we’ve grown over five years we are committing to larger quantities.

AH We have an outlet store and for that we do bring in some things from offshore, but 90% of what we sell is UK-made.

Wear London Womenswear

EM What are these UK factories like?

ML The main outerwear factory employs about 20 or 25 people, mainly experienced Bangladeshi men aged from the mid-50s upwards. Some have been working here for 30-plus years. Making in the UK is a major benefit; it’s a sweet spot for our customers. The downside is the factories need feeding every week. We are in the factories two or three times a week monitoring everything. Making in the UK has pluses and minuses.

AH Typically brands dip in and out of using British factories. They don’t build relationships and they don’t get the prices or service we do. One concern for us is that new, younger people aren’t coming into the factories. The next batch of machinists may turn out to be Turkish or even Chinese, but young people today don't want to be sitting in a factory. That's the truth of it.

ML Another issue is that a number of British brands start out using UK factories, then they take on outside investment. When they have to start paying back their investors, they have to move offshore to get the margin. We are financing Wear London ourselves.

EM What is your relationship like with the factories you use?

 JB Previously we have never been in retail, only manufacturing, so we're coming at retail from a completely different angle. We're manufacturing goods and then retailing them, as opposed to buying goods as a retailer. It's a different mindset. We're all very deeply product-based, which is our strength.

The financial side and money control is not new to me. It's particularly important with retail that you must control the cash. It's triply important to us because we're running three businesses. As a principle, we pay our bills within seven days, which was a lesson I learned working with C&A, which always paid suppliers weekly. We've adopted that business model, which is very important because it means the factories have got stability. They know that they can pay their wages. They know that if they deliver to us Monday to Wednesday, they get paid that same Friday. We pay our fabric suppliers in a similar vein.

EM Why are you so keen on physical shops?

AH We started Wear London online during COVID and then tried a pop-up shop in Broadway Market, a busy street market in Hackney, East London. We soon got great feedback from several generations of customers, which encouraged us to look at other shops.

JB Online is an extremely difficult business to be in today because it's a very crowded marketplace. Everybody thinks it's the cheap option for launching a brand, but it's certainly not cheap. Another problem with online trading is that you can't touch and feel the product. You don't get an idea of what the quality is, which is why the return rates are in the industry as a norm are very high, although menswear is not as bad as womenswear. We found our return rate was very small because, unlike with most of the industry, when customers got something from us, it was better than they expected.

ML As the pop-up worked, we followed Paul Van Gelder’s suggestion to open a shop in Commercial Street, Spitalfields. This was ideal, so we then added another in nearby Brushfield Street. It seemed right to be there as we make in East London. Then we added Berwick Street in Soho – another of Paul’s ideas – which has proved to be a great location. We have our outlet store in Hanbury Street, also in Spitalfields. Our first outside London is Brighton. It took us a while to get things right there, but it’s working out OK now.

AH We all work in the shops, and the biggest learning for us has been on the shop floor dealing with customers. This is why we love bricks-and-mortar retail because you learn quickly what sells and what doesn't, by talking to customers face-to-face. We get feedback, such as if we’ve missed off an inside pocket, or something about the fabric, or the length of the garment. You get little feedback online, so being there face-to-face, has made us better designers and better operators overall.

JB Online is now about 22% of our sales, having doubled over the past year. We are confident we are getting most of sales from people who have been into the shops and either seen the product or bought it. We're getting customers from as far afield as France, Germany, Italy, Brazil and the US who've been in to a shop while on holiday in London and they’ve continued to buy from us.

Alex Hayes and Matt Lea at the Wear London store on Commercial Street, E1

EM Who are your customers?

ML It’s across the generations, we have dads who tell their sons about us and sons bringing their dads in. We have around 11, 500 followers on Instagram and we're collecting about 2,500 to 3,000 new email addresses from every month through people purchasing in the shops. We do a lot of direct email marketing.

AH We like to say we are menswear made simple. We are understated, so we appeal, for example, to pretty trendy South Korean and Japanese guys. Wear London is for men who want nice fits, nice fabrics, no branding, no fuss, and a Made in England label. It's a real wide mix. We have just added some womenswear as we have been selling men’s overshirts in small sizes to female customers. It’s been developed by my wife Kate, who has a background in womenswear buying. We’ll give it some light promotion in the run up to Christmas and see what happens.

JB We are keen on pricing. Outerwear is our strength and our jackets retail from £150 to £250. We have a really good raincoat at £195. One of our best-sellers is our white T-shirt. We found someone in Leicester who had the quality of fabric we were after; we make the garments in London. They give a good fit in a great fabric and retail at £30. We thought of it as an add-on, but it really caught fire.

EM How do you wholesale Wear London?

JB We have a few independent stockists in the UK and wholesale customers in Italy, Spain and the US. It's very small, but it's increasing without us actually putting too much effort into it. We don’t take forward orders. We just operate as a stock house. It is a bit of a different mindset.

We've got a small customer in Manchester who buys from us regularly. When he takes his delivery, in the same month we get an uplift in online sales from that region. Having a wholesale arm is not that profitable, but it is a tool by which we can increase the visibility of the brand.

EM How many more shops do you plan?

ML We’d like another two in London in 2026. We could have eight in total in the UK. We think we could well in Cambridge, for example. People tell us we should open up north, but would a shop called Wear London be welcome in Manchester, Leeds, or Glasgow? I’m not convinced.

We don't have set plans but if a store came up tomorrow, we'd be in the position to move in. The difficulty is getting the right store and then the right staff.

Longer term, I would like to see us with a couple of shops in the US, especially New York. I visit my kids there a lot and the retail landscape for men is shocking. And we get so many Americans who’ve been in the shops buying from us online.

EM What’s high on your 2026 To Do list?

JB We earned a profit last year. It was not magnificent, but it was a true profit and worth having. But given all the rises in our fixed costs, we can’t just do the same again or we’ll fall into a loss.

Even in this poor retail environment, shop rents are going up in the areas where we want to trade, like Soho, Covent Garden, Spitalfields… Business rates are doubling. We employ 26 people and we pay them well above the living wage. National Insurance has gone up.

We can’t just stick our retail prices up, so Matt has been very good at making savings by slightly adjusting how the garments are made. We won’t change the fabric and the customer won’t notice the difference, but we can make savings in our production costs. We're not greedy with our margin. We turn things over quickly. If something sells well, we can make it again quickly in our factories.

We've got the ability to do that with product because we're probably the last people retailing who have ever stood on a factory floor in the UK.

Beyond product, we want to double our sales online again in 2026. Most importantly, we want to get Wear London more recognisable. At the moment, we're a long way from being a brand. We're a product manufacturer that's put a label on garments. Our ambition is to gradually build Wear London into a recognisable brand.

Main image: Wear London directors Jim Bender Matt Lea Alex Hayes