A morning walk around Mylapore
Luz Corner, the temple tank and the lanes in between: a short walking route around our store.
Why a linen shirt costs ₹2,890
Fabric, cutting, eight tailors and free alterations for life: a plain breakdown of where the money goes.
Linen shirts in Chennai range from ₹800 to well over ₹8,000, and customers fairly ask why ours cost what they do. Here is a rough breakdown for our white band-collar shirt at ₹2,890.
The fabric is the largest single cost. A shirt needs about 1.6 metres of 60 lea pure linen, and finer yarn takes longer to spin and weave. With two washes before cutting, which shrink the cloth and lose a few centimetres per metre, the fabric comes to roughly ₹1,050 a shirt. A 40 lea blend would cost about half that.
Next is making. Cutting, stitching, buttonholes and finishing take about three hours of a tailor’s time, upstairs in our workroom. Real horn buttons cost around ₹90 a set, against ₹8 for plastic. Making and trims together come to about ₹700. Then the shop itself: rent on Luz Church Road, electricity, packing, courier and the alterations we do free for life. Over the years a shirt might come back two or three times, and that time costs us money. Together these add about ₹650 a shirt. What is left, after GST, is our margin. We share this because a cheaper shirt is not always worse value. If a ₹1,200 shirt lasts one summer and ours lasts four or five, the cost per wear is lower here. But if you only want linen for a single holiday, a cheaper blend may serve you better, and we will say so.
