Patong, since 1999
He started as a salesman before he became a tailor.
The shop has been open twenty six years now, survived one tsunami, and even got its name from its own customers.
Before any of it
A scrapbook of magazine pages
Johnny kept a scrapbook as a teenager, filled with pictures cut from magazines. He was drawn to how the people in them carried themselves, more than the clothes on their backs.
It took him years, he says, to realise what he had actually been looking at all along was the shoulder line, more than the face.
1999
One unit, close to Bangla
He began as a salesman in somebody else’s shop. Then he opened his own: a single unit near Bangla Road, small enough that the fabric shelves reached the ceiling.
The formula he still repeats has not changed since then. Make something good and people come back. He is not interested in a more complicated version of it.
26 December 2004
The shop was gone.
The tsunami took the building and everything in it. Fabric, patterns, machines, the measurements of every customer he had ever fitted.
He was closed for a year while he rebuilt. What matters is what happened next.
2005
His customers named the new shop
When he reopened, on the same street, the name was not his idea. It was suggested by the customers who came back looking for him.
New David Jone Fashion Tailor. It has been that ever since.
Reviews and awards can be bought in this trade, and so can a nice photograph of somebody else’s workshop. A room full of people who wait a year and then come back to tell you what to call your shop is much harder to arrange.
I want you to feel like the most important person in the room.
Johnny
The part he does not take credit for
It is a family business, and he is not the one running it
His wife has been part of the business the whole time. In his words, she takes care of the things he is less good at, which leaves him free to do the one thing he is.
It is a family business in the plain sense of the word, and he is quick to say so.
Still on the same street
Come and see the shop for yourself
It is a ten minute walk from Bangla Road, and there is no appointment needed to look.