WHO... Can you think of any good reason why men shouldn’t wear skirts? …we can’t, except it’s almost impossible to find skirts sized, proportioned and styled for men. But - not anymore, along with a few other groundbreaking companies we can now offer a range of garments that go one small step further in the liberation of men’s fashion wear, no longer just on the catwalk shows but available to everyone anywhere, a virtual global shop, midasclothing.com, designs for men.
We established midasclothing.com specifically to address this need, but who, you may well ask, are we? We are a small (unincorporated) company based in Manchester, UK, and source our garments from a well established local garment manufacturer and a number of smaller workshops working to our designs and specifications. We do not have a conventional shop and from the outset intended our sales to be through the word-wide web, our virtual global shop, available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. We do, however, intend to supply to a limited number of retail outlets in the near future so please contact us if you are an interested retailer.
We are ably supported in this venture by Sibilo (UK) Ltd who have designed and maintain our e-commerce functionality. Our site is secure for credit/debit card payments and has obtained its security certification (SSL) from RAPIDSSL so you can use your card and our shopping cart with complete peace of mind. For those of you who are still wary of all this technology we also take cheque or money order through the post.
Anyway, enough of the boring stuff….
WHY... Well, we’ve already mentioned above our prime motivation - to extend the available range of styles for men at hopefully affordable prices - our underlying philosophy is to offer fashion that is different, fun, funky, sensual, sometimes provocative! Adapting ideas from womens wear; sportswear; costume from the past; folk/ethnic references;science fiction and our imaginations; taking pointers from catwalk shows and leading designers, absorbing trends from the gurus of the fashion and media world. Sounds like a tall order, what, but from small acorns etc.etc.!!? It really is time for us guys to be given a much wider choice of fashion options and it will only be possible if we and others do something about it, by providing these alternatives at street level and for you, the customer, to buy these products and be bold enough and individual enough to wear them… it’s up to you!!! Between us we can slowly change the face of men’s fashion.
THE FUTURE... We’ve only just started and with your help we will expand our range to offer a greater variety of products, clothing, accessories etc. This will take time and we would like to work with other designers and/or manufacturers out there who have products to offer or share our philosophy. We would like to develop our website into a portal or shopping mall offering allied products, clothing ranges, accessories etc. If you would like to be a part of this new venture please contact us with your ideas. We may be able to help you market (worldwide) and sell your products through our site on a commission basis. This may be of particular interest to start up fashion designers/businesses or small manufacturers as well as those more established. We wait to hear from you...
AND NOW... We started trading in April 2002 and launched with a limited range of skirts. This range has been extended over the last six months and we now have our first range of tops. Our website has received a lot of hits and our sales are slowly growing.
It is difficult with a start up business to put a large amount of money into stock, particularly with a new and largely untested market where we cannot predict which products will sell well and those that move slowly. We are, however, aware that customers are often not willing to wait for weeks and weeks for their orders. With the experience from our first years trading we can now start to build a profile of which lines are most in demand and will now be stocking some of these in the more popular sizes thus reducing waiting time. Our site will shortly indicate the availability of your chosen garment when ordering and although we will not be able to meet all orders by return we do hope over time to achieve a better turnaround.
It is inevitable, as we are dealing with relatively small (by normal industry standards) runs, that we are paying a premium for the manufacturing. As orders increase we will be able to afford larger stock levels and in turn place larger orders with the manufacturers that will in time reduce the end cost of the garments. We just ask for your patience in the meantime as we move forward.