Vincent DiGiorgio was nearly three years old in 1968, when he arrived from Sicily with his parents. He has been wearing a tie almost ever since, first as a five-year-old in private parochial school and then at the Aquinas Institute.
Today he runs One Custom Clothier–a Monroe Ave. business he started with his father and continues to run with his 23-year-old son.
Vincent started in menswear in high school at a Big and Tall store, where he took note of customers who left dissatisfied. He had a feeling that someday he would be able to give them the service they didn’t get there. As a young entrepreneur making custom shirts a few years later, he called on those customers and by doing so, he learned that business is more about relationships than he ever realized.
Vincent is the third generation to enter the custom clothing business, but he didn’t want to push his son to become the fourth. He let Alessandro reach that conclusion on his own.
When Alessandro graduated from high school five years ago, Vincent advised him to start his own business. Alessandro seized the opportunity and began a landscaping business that quickly expanded into other unrelated services such as garage and basement cleaning, furniture assembly, organization and painting projects.
He tapped a need, his father says. In his first week, Alessandro made $300. By the second week he made $700, Vincent says. Within two months, he was making $2,000 a week. “He did anything that the person couldn’t get to because of their age or their schedule,” Vincent remembers.
But as the projects grew so did the physical demands. “I enjoyed what I was doing, but the physical labor took a toll on my body,” Alessandro says. “My father always said, ‘Work smarter, not harder.’”
Vincent leveraged the contrast of physical labor with retail and proposed another, less back-breaking business to his son: custom clothes.
Alessandro started a custom shirts business like his father did when he was 18 and opened an office two blocks away from One Custom Clothier. And just like his father did, he eventually merged his custom shirts business with Vincent’s offering.