<story><title>What&apos;s a $4000 Suit Worth?</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/whats-a-4000-suit-worth.html?pagewanted=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patio11</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Frew, who apprenticed with a Savile Row tailor, can — all by himself, and almost all by hand — create a pattern, cut fabric and expertly construct a suit that, for about $4,000, perfectly molds to its owner’s body. In a city filled with very rich people, he quickly had all the orders he could handle.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You don&apos;t have to be Wall Street to figure out the bleedingly obvious solution to being a starving artist who has so much work they have to turn work away.  Raise the prices.  Then raise the prices.  Then when you&apos;re done with that, raise the prices.&lt;p&gt;At some point you&apos;ll be too expensive for the typical businessman, which will make you absolutely crack for a certain type of person common in New York, thus defeating all efforts at being less busy.  So it goes.  I guess you will have to raise prices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asr</author><text>No offense, but this could be really bad advice. Maybe the customers who&apos;d pay 10k for a suit won&apos;t go to some guy&apos;s living room for fittings. Or maybe the price of top bespoke tailors in town is comparable, because they make better use of lower-paid assistants. Or maybe, to convince a bank to make the loan he needs to move into a nicer place, he needs to show the bank he has a large backlog of orders. Or maybe he&apos;s in the middle of following your advice, just raised his price, and will shortly raise it again because he&apos;s still getting enough orders.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not saying you&apos;re wrong. I&apos;m just saying we don&apos;t get nearly enough information to decide! And that&apos;s ok, because that&apos;s not the point of the article.</text></comment>
<story><title>What&apos;s a $4000 Suit Worth?</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/whats-a-4000-suit-worth.html?pagewanted=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patio11</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Frew, who apprenticed with a Savile Row tailor, can — all by himself, and almost all by hand — create a pattern, cut fabric and expertly construct a suit that, for about $4,000, perfectly molds to its owner’s body. In a city filled with very rich people, he quickly had all the orders he could handle.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You don&apos;t have to be Wall Street to figure out the bleedingly obvious solution to being a starving artist who has so much work they have to turn work away.  Raise the prices.  Then raise the prices.  Then when you&apos;re done with that, raise the prices.&lt;p&gt;At some point you&apos;ll be too expensive for the typical businessman, which will make you absolutely crack for a certain type of person common in New York, thus defeating all efforts at being less busy.  So it goes.  I guess you will have to raise prices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>harryh</author><text>The real question is why hasn&apos;t he done this already? It&apos;s a fairly obvious solution. I suspect that there is some other force at work here, though I&apos;m at a loss to guess what it might be.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s too bad that the NYTimes didn&apos;t raise this question.</text></comment>