Zimmer custom tailors sales style at Men's Wearhouse

— -- In the late '60s, George Zimmer was just as likely to be found hanging out with the politically and socially conscious students at Washington University in St. Louis as playing flag football with his Sigma Alpha Mu frat brothers.

"I used to think of myself — though nobody else did — as a sort of liaison between the fraternity guys and the politically active people on campus," he explains with a chuckle.

It was a foreshadowing of his career, and his life.

In fact, Men's Wearhouse's rise is in part due to selling conventional clothing unconventionally.

Since the first store opened in 1973 in Houston, Men's Wearhouse has emphasized lower pricing than competitors. The company claims that its clothes are of the same quality, and often designed and made by the same people who produce those found in tony department stores. Today the average Men's Wearhouse suits sell for $200 to $600 and each item is priced 20% to 50% lower than in department stores, the company says.

A financial crisis in the mid-1980s, when a bank called a loan his company used to finance inventories, persuaded Zimmer to refocus his business model on everyday low prices.

"Instead of playing the typical retail game of 'mark stuff up, then mark it down on sale,' we decided to lower the prices on a significant portion of our inventory and discontinue most of our promotions," he says, referring to weekly and monthly sales, not advertising.

He also hired himself as the stores' TV pitchman. "We could have hired an actor, but nobody believed it the way I believed it."

Still, Zimmer recognized that good advertising and low prices would only get men to buy a suit once. The in-store experience, he determined, would have to bring them back again and again.