The shirt sellers of London’s Jermyn Street are an object lesson in how single category retailers can struggle to convince when they are all grouped together.

The shirt sellers of London’s Jermyn Street are an object lesson in how single category retailers can struggle to convince when they are all grouped together.

Talk to fashion types and one of the first things you are likely to hear is that you have to be ‘on trend’, but also to have a ‘point of difference’. Quite aside from the fact that this might appear to be some kind of oxymoron, as followers of trends tend to be considering what others are doing rather than going their own way, it is something that is much easier said than done.

This was evident on London’s Jermyn Street on Saturday. This is the spiritual home of the formal and business shirt – an entire thoroughfare dedicated to giving the well-dressed gent (and increasingly, the well turned out lady) choice about what they are going to wear with that two or three-piece pinstripe. The problem that confronts retailers along the strip is that, well, one shirt shop can look pretty much the same as any other and therefore how is constructing a point of different a realistic ambition?

There are in fact four relative newcomers to Jermyn Street: Thomas Pink, TM Lewin, Charles Tyrwhitt and Hawes & Curtis. They are newcomers inasmuch as they offer formal shirts at a fraction of the price of some of their neighbours and are about volume sales. Yet essentially, they all sell more or less the same thing and other than variations in the open-fronted dark-wood perimeter wardrobes where the bulk of the stock is displayed, there is little to choose between them in terms of the way they look.

Perhaps for this reason therefore, outside TM Lewin, a pair of bowler-hatted Champagne Charlie-wannabes (male and female) were trying to encourage passers-by to take advantage of a discount voucher. They looked the part and the exaggerated Queen’s English that they were (presumably) assuming brought a smile to the face and the thought that something different was being done.

The trouble was, a few doors down the road, just inside the door of the Charles Tyrwhitt store, there was a pinstripe-clad bowler-hatted figure with a tape measure around his neck, also trying to drum up trade. What had been an interesting piece of Jermyn Street heritage leveraging now looked a little like me-too, me-too.

Creating real difference within a category probably involves rather more than this and it could just be that there is one (or more) too many cheap shirt sellers on Jermyn Street with not much more than a flyleaf between them in terms of what they do and how they do it.