February 26, 2017

Meet Gary Harutyunyan of G&V Tailoring in Santa Monica

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Gary Harutyunyan.

Gary (the “G” in G&V Tailoring) grew up in Armenia learning how to tailor. He spent time in Europe working for various tailors and met his wife Varsik (the “V” in G&V Tailoring) in 2005. Over the years, Gary developed a faithful following among American expatriates wanting to take advantage of inexpensive high-quality fabric in Armenia to have custom suits and coats made. Gary and Varsik immigrated to LA in 2008, with Gary beginning at Rudolf Valentina Tailoring in Venice. In 2011, they opened their own shop G&V Tailoring on Main Street in Santa Monica. They have enjoyed a cult following on Yelp, helping people to find their cozy shop situated in space that they sublease from a hemp clothing store on Main Street called Vital Hemp. They are hard workers and since they keep much longer hours than the clothing shop, they encourage people to use a separate entrance from an alleyway off of Strand Street. Truly, they are a hidden gem!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The big challenge at first was starting from scratch with no reputation in a tucked-away store with no foot traffic. Yelp and Google were key in helping our reputation row. Once we had a few reviews, things began to snowball. Services like tailoring are so hard to judge without a recommendation–they’re really what Yelp was made for. Not every dry cleaner that also does alterations is worth your time, and it’s sometimes hard to know what prices are fair. At G&V Tailoring, we decided to post our prices online from the beginning to be perfectly transparent. Through word of mouth and our online reputation, we now enjoy a steady stream of repeat and new customers, ranging from men with a boxy department-store suit that needs to be taken in and customized to a bride entrusting the team with her wedding dress.

Review sites like Yelp do pose their own problems. Every now and then a situation won’t work out as the customer expected and accusations fly about miscommunications. One person even lit into us online because we don’t monogram towels! On the flip side, Yelp often filters out glowing reviews assuming that we must have put the customer up to saying such nice things because no one could possibly be that enthusiastic. Oh well, the nice thing has been that over time, these things balance out and we have a great footprint online.

Another challenge inherent in the tailoring business is dealing with the seasonality of demand. “When it rains, it pours” goes the adage. Wedding season is very busy, and just after the holidays are often slower. It can be hard to keep staff through busy and slow periods, but the core team of Gary and Varsik has been able to see everything through.

Please tell us about G&V Tailoring.
We’re known for a few things. One, honesty: we post our prices online. Tailoring is an intimidating thing to the uninitiated that don’t have a sense of what things should cost! Regular people often don’t consult a tailor and assume that they will be ripped off. We enjoy being honest about prices, keeping a low overhead so that we can keep our prices really low and make tailoring accessible to regular folk. If something is costly for us to do but something the customer could probably live with or deal with another way, we’ll tell them. We also prioritize being able to work with a customer–whatever their timeline is or strange situation is.

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