Fokke de Jong
Founder & CEO, Suitsupply. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivesuitsupply.com ↗
Fokke de Jong is a Dutch entrepreneur who founded the menswear brand Suitsupply in 2000, using a vertically integrated supply chain to offer tailored suits at accessible prices. He scaled the company into an international omnichannel retailer operating more than 100 stores worldwide alongside high-impact marketing campaigns.
1shows
1appearances
20statements
4resolved
3supported
1contradicted
75%fully supported
Everything Fokke de Jong said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
De Jong forged municipal zoning blueprints to save first Suitsupply store
“And so then I thought, ok, I took a pen, I practiced as long as I could, To, you know, have almost the same handwriting as the unit where it was store written in, and I just penciled store in my unit. And then I went back to the municipality and said, but guys…”
Suitsupply hired actors to pose as customers for its initial London store
“So then I started hiring actors to be in the store, to sort of browse around, and sort of, we had some dynamic happening”
Italian luxury suit factories skimmed excess fabric for unbranded secondary sales
“And he made this sort of deal where the factory in Italy was producing suits for some of the bigger brands, right? And they would tell these brands yeah, well, you give me this cloth to make you a product, and we need 3.1 meter to make this product. But in rea…”
De Jong estimates 60 percent of corporate effort goes to internal politics
“50, 60% of the effort in an organization like that goes to the political process, right? Positioning yourself well and all that kind of stuff. It's not just doing stuff, right?”
Dutch luxury retailer Oger sued Suitsupply over a cheeky directional advertisement
“And then we had an ad that says, For a beautiful suit, you go to Auger, and then you'd take a left and a right. All right, basically just a route to go to our store. And it was sort of a little bit of a pun and we're joking. And it was a little tongue-in-cheek…”
De Jong claims Suitsupply's Chinese factory surpassed Italian factories in quality
“This was, you know, something I'm like, I've never seen some, so much quality and so much detail before. It was probably one of the best factories I've ever seen. Better than ever, anything I've seen in Italy.”
Luxury retail markups and middlemen inflated suit prices by four times
“They made a product for a brand, and then this brand goes into a trade show, and these trade show, the customers, and there's agents bringing in these customers, or agents selling it to, you know, independent stores again, and if you then add it all up, becaus…”
Suitsupply is now the largest customer of major Italian luxury fabric mills
“And now our business is by far the biggest customer of all these mills in Italy.”
Simultaneously expanding US stores and launching womenswear damaged Suitsupply's growth momentum
“We did a year when we opened I think, We have 10 or 12 stores in the U.S. When we only had 10 or 12, then, you know, at the same point, we started, you know, figuring out and opening a women's line, and it was few women's stores, and we did too much. And inste…”
De Jong argues elevated casual wear makes menswear coordination harder than suits
“People still want to have looks, right, and it's just going to get a lot harder for them, because before it was a blue suit and a white shirt, and now it's suddenly, you know, trousers, chinos slip-ons. White sneakers or slip-ons or whatever, five pairs of dif…”
London's Savile Row was strictly designated for traditional English tailors only
“I wanted to open a store on Savile Row, and funny thing with Savile Row was actually that, that store was designed, designated by the Crown of London, that could only have traditional English tailors there.”
Logistics and customs nightmares in China nearly bankrupted Suitsupply early on
“So everything was, you know, the quality was great, the craftsmanship was great, but everything else around it was a nightmare. I almost tanked the business with it.”
Suitsupply secured its first Soho lease for $250,000 with a six-month break
“And this landlord was very happy to give me a year lease with a six-month break, and if I couldn't make it after six months, I could happily walk away. 250,000 dollars.”
WSJ blind test rated a $600 Suitsupply suit equal to $3,600 Armani
“There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal that did a blind test on suiting. And we got out of that contest with a headline that a 600 dollar suit supply suit was better or just as good as a 3600 dollar Armani.”
Suitsupply trains its retail style experts to become Instagram influencers
“You can become a style expert in, in, in training other people, but you can also become what we call a key opinion leader, where we train you in how to represent the brand on social media or on outside of the store, where you basically become sort of a I would…”
De Jong personally visits 80 percent of Suitsupply stores every six months
“I go to my stores.
Every six months.
I'm not saying all the stores, but probably 80% of them.
And, of course, we celebrate everybody's success, but everybody has to name two things that we can do better.”
Suitsupply raised cheap debt to sit on $50 million in liquid cash
“When those rates were so low, and money was abundant, you could, you know, suddenly from a constantly cash-strapped business, we raised a lot of debt, and suddenly we had a lot of cash. You know, I've never had, like, you know, let's say just a fifty million s…”
De Jong sold early suits inside Dutch National Bank and Heineken
“No, we went all the way up to, you know, even I remember having events in the Dutch National Bank. And the Heineken.”
Ground-floor retail rents in Soho were $2 million annually around 2010
“That was sort of the ballpark, 1.52 million a year.”
Suitsupply requires new retail hires to complete nine weeks of structured training
“We have a relentless high-end training program where we bring everybody to our one-week onboarding program. When you finish that, you're brought into a store, and you're paired with what we call a style expert, and you're getting, for two months, more and more…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Fokke's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Suitsupply | 1 | 20 | 75% 3/4 | full record on How I Built This → |