USA: Custom-Tailoring Goes Virtual With The Shirt Tailor

The Shirt Tailor, a true virtual company with no physical store or inventory, connects consumers with Korea's fashion industry via its website, using IBM (NYSE: IBM) e-business technology. The heart of The Shirt Tailor is the 'VirtualTailor' application. Created with Dynamic HTML, VirtualTailor helps customers design their shirts by allowing them to drag and drop features such as collars or cuffs onto a shirt to see how it will look. Shirt customization includes selection of cuff, collar and pocket designs, as well as customized colours, measurements and a personalized monogram. For repeat customers, a 'cookie' stores their information so they don't have to repeat their measurements on subsequent visits. "Behind the scenes of this user-friendly website is a complex, international virtual business enabling customers to set worldwide electronic transaction processes in motion by simply pressing 'send' after completing an order form," said Rick Kearney, President and CEO of Mainline Global Systems, the IBM business partner who assisted in the e-business solution. "A real tailor in Korea receives the electronic order, custom tailors the shirt and ships the product back to the customer within 48 hours - all at department store prices."IBM's Application Frameworks provided the open and reliable environment to build and deploy The Shirt Tailor. Currently, the site runs on an Intel-based IBM Netfinity server, and orders are tracked and pulled from the web in a standard browser environment. The Shirt Tailor site is expected to receive 50 to 100 shirt orders per day when in full production. Mainline expects profits from the site in three to four months, and second-year sales are projected to exceed $1.25m.