You may not be aware of it, but you probably spend most of your working life wearing a plastic noose round your neck. Apparently the collars of most business shirts look good these days because they are fused with droplets of polythene between the layers, which are then heat sealed.
"The result is a cheap, sweaty shirt experience and a collar that bobbles if you iron it too hot," explains Geoff Quinn, self-confessed shirt nerd and managing director of city slicker shirt retailer TM Lewin.
You may have spotted one of Quinn's shops recently, opening up on a high street near you. In 2000, TM Lewin was just another posh but obscure retailer of regimental ties and city boy shirts based in London's Jermyn Street, with a couple of branches in the City.
Today, TM Lewin is a retailer with trajectory and ambition. In fact, it is one of the fastest expanding shop chains in the UK, with 50 branches peppering the country from Glasgow to Portsmouth. Quinn is currently opening branches at the rate of 15 a year and, when the UK is Lewined to the max, there's always the rest of the world.
We sell a uniform for
people who want to stand out 
Although Quinn claims that he sells "a uniform for people who want to stand out but fit in," it's a luscious, opulent kind of uniform, a million miles from traditional drab executive fatigues. Walk into one of his shops and you see rows of pink, purple, yellow, green and blue shirts in stripes, checks and pin points. There are displays of gem-like, multi-coloured cufflinks, garish socks in contrasting hues and voluptuous silk ties in every colour and pattern under the sun.
Hardly surprisingly, given that TM Lewin now sells an amazing one and a half million shirts a year, not to mention ties, suits, shoes and casual clothing of the toffier variety, TM Lewin is causing ructions in the upper end of the clothing market.
Yet when you ask Quinn about this extraordinary growth, you don't hear about finance or operations or merchandising or the TM Lewin brand, you hear about shirts; how you make them, how you make them better, how you make the perfect collar, how you manufacture the fabrics, how you sew on buttons to stay, how you choose patterns, and so on.
We have this belief that if we focus on making the best possible shirt, the business will follow.
And his is no random obsession. It is the starting point of his entire business and the reason for its success. "A lot of retailers deal with middle men and know nothing about and care nothing for manufacture," says Quinn. "We have taken extreme pains to understand construction of fabric and of shirts so we understand costs and quality.
"We concentrate on doing the basics of our business well and let our brand emerge from that," he smiles. "I suppose we have this belief that if we focus on making the best possible shirt, the business will follow."
Well, nearly. Quinn is a spookily young looking 48 year old who has been with TM Lewin for 27 years now. If his life had gone as expected, he almost certainly would not be the highly successful chief executive that he is today.
He left school at 16 with just one O-level (in pottery) and was recruited three years later to work as a shop assistant by Chris McKenna who had just bought Lewin from the original family.
"The company was a dozy old family business going nowhere and Chris had a vision of selling great quality shirts at reasonable prices, so I joined him as a shop assistant," says Quinn. On the back of the 1980s yuppie boom, turnover shot up in five years from quarter of a million pounds a year to a million.
They started manufacturing their own shirts and even made shirts for US designer Ralph Lauren's premium range. They were just about to open their second shop in 1989 when Chris McKenna was killed in a car accident. So his brother Tony took over. In 1993 he died of a heart attack and that's when Quinn came to lead the business.
He continued the strategy of selling high quality shirts at good prices and the business grew steadily. Over the next five years, Lewin opened three more stores. But it was not until the opening of the fifth store that Quinn would stumble upon the formula that would turbo-charge the operation.
"We always did well whenever we ran offers," says Quinn. "But in May 2000 we were opening a new shop in Ludgate (London) and we contacted all the local businesses to say that we would be selling our stock for half price as a special introductory offer."
The response was phenomenal. Quinn had optimistically forecast that the shop would turn over £100,000 in the first month. In the first five weeks it took £645,000. That meant it sold nearly 13 times as many shirts as predicted, by halving the price. A red-hot business model was born: the semi-permanent, upmarket, special offer.
We sold nearly 13 times as many shirts as predicted, by halving the price.
"It totally changed the way we looked at our business," says Quinn. "For the first time it dawned on us that we could be much more than a niche specialist, that there was room for substantial growth." Not least of all it allowed him to lead a management buyout in 2006 to allow the shareholders – the widows of the McKenna brothers, to take something out of the business.
That, in turn, has allowed him to secure the future by recruiting a powerhouse senior management team consisting of a new chairman, new finance director, mail order director, merchandising chief, marketing director and a new retail director, all with top flight retail experience.
Quinn admits that there are issues for an upmarket business constantly selling on special offer. In particular, constant discounting reduces the value of the TM Lewin brand. But that's precisely why manufacturing is so important. Unlike the modern tendency to create a brand identity and then go about padding it out, TM Lewin's brand is based on truths about what it actually does.
Quinn knows that obsessive attention to manufacturing detail gives his "fantastically priced" shirts extreme value. While the shirt-buying public is probably unaware of exactly what makes a high quality shirt, people know quality when they see it.
That's why business is not just booming but exploding for Geoff Quinn. And that's why, if he has his way, you will probably not be wearing a plastic noose to work in years to come.
