Why Tomas Romita left his corporate job to start a fashion company

Fashion entrepreneur Tomas Romita just kind of blurted out what is now his growing fashion startup, MADE Clothing Co.

“Yeah I’m going to do the clothing one,” he fibbed at a party when teased by friends about his next career move.

He was, at the time, in a situation many young graduates hope to find themselves in. Secure in a job with a large accounting firm and safe in the knowledge that if he stayed, he would move up the corporate ladder.

Despite the prestige and security of his current career, Romita only saw accounting as a means to an end. The end was running his own show —but he didn’t know what that was until that faithful moment when pressed about it.

“I’m a man of my word,” he says of his fashion startup that provides clients with custom suits and an experience that sets him apart from larger, more well-known custom suit companies like Indochino or Montreal-based, Surmesur.

I met Tomas a couple of years ago when MADE was running out of a humble shared workspace. He seemed determined, knowledgeable and his suit game was on point. A few years later, what some might have thought was Romita’s pipedream has become a solid venture with his vast new studio in Toronto’s Queen East neighborhood. So we asked the suit boss: what does it really take to run a fashion startup? Faith and a little bit of planning apparently go a long way.

“I spent as much time as I could while wrapping up my desk job, working on finding suppliers and trying out customers,” he said. “I’d have my friends try a custom shirt and I never gave it away for free but I asked them to try this garment and they were my guinea pigs.”

While planning is always high on the list of priorities for any entrepreneur, just having a little faith was something he learned to accept and embrace early on.

“The counterpoint to that is you can only really plan so much,” says Romita. “I think my ability to plan clientele, design, measuring, customer experience, all of those things in a business plan sense is limited cause it’s just one big experiment.”

Like all startups, MADE comes with its own unique set of challenges.

“Suits need to fit, that’s it…It should fit the person, it should fit their personality, it should fit prevailing styles and it took a long time to get to that point,” he says. “Now looking back, I think I could have found some shortcuts along the way, so that was one of the constant areas of failure.”

As for successes, the fun part of the entrepreneurship game, that definition is always evolving for him.

“You constantly redefine your perception of what success might look like and you get better at predicting it,” says Romita. “When we started, I didn’t think we’d have a studio but now I know it’s an integral part of the business.”

Unlike many of their larger competitors, MADE insists they’ve tapped into what makes clients happy by simply sitting down and asking them.

“What we’re doing is, we’re actually teaching people how to wear their suits so we’re really partnering with people and I don’t think people have that yet.”

That brings us to something that’s especially unique to succeeding in fashion.

“There’s this human and psychological element to fashion,” he says, comparing his business’s success to a company whose successes are based in science or mathematics.

He’s also overcome what many in the fashion industry have failed to do.

“What I’ve observed is alot of people weigh the art aspect of it too heavily, which is great but it’s also a business and you have to find a way to monetize something that’s artistic.”

Romita appears to have found a good balance between art and business — a tribute to his past career, but there’s got to be many traits that make a “Made Man,” right?

“You need to be able to pivot constantly and get people to wear you. It’s the most conspicuous thing, fashion, so you have to be extremely in touch with people,” he says. “You need vision and you need to be very convinced of that vision so you can in turn, convince others. And you need to hustle, there’s just no other way to go about it.”

In an industry as brutally hard to break into as fashion, it’s easy to succumb to failure. But Romita calmly asks: “If you think about it, when have you really ever failed?”