Forty-two years after he began selling clothes from the front bar of a pub, Joseph Uzumcu has dressed three generations of Adelaide men. He puts almost all of it down to two years he spent holding a mop.
The best advice Joseph Uzumcu ever received about business had nothing to do with clothing. It came from his first boss, long before Adelaide, and it was this: learn how to mop the floor correctly.
He was not being punished. He mopped floors for two years.
“It sounds funny,” he says, “but if you learn how to mop the floor properly, it teaches you how to move. And when you know how to move properly in front of a customer, that’s money in the bank. It’s almost like dancing. You become comfortable on the floor. You know where to stand, how to approach people and how to move around them.”
Four decades later, in a menswear shop on Gawler Place, he is still moving around people. He has dressed South Australian men for their weddings, their fathers’ funerals, their first job interviews and their daughters’ twenty-firsts. He has watched the suit go out of daily life and come back as an occasion. He is, by any reasonable description, one of the people who has dressed this city.
Ask him what business he is in and he will tell you it is not clothing.
“Our business isn’t really about selling suits,” he says. “Our business is hospitality. It’s about how we make a customer feel comfortable, and then using our experience to recommend what’s right for them.”
Before Adelaide, there were the bazaars of Istanbul.
“I still use everything I learned in the bazaar in my store today, because the bazaar teaches you commerce. You can learn commerce at university, or you can learn it on the floor of the bazaar. But commerce on the floor of the bazaar is human. You learn how to talk to people, how to understand people and how to build relationships. For me, that’s what business is about.”
He means that literally. A bazaar is not a place where you buy a rug and feel clever about the price. It’s a place where a transaction is inseparable from a conversation, where the price is a function of the relationship, and where a man who cannot read a stranger in the first 10 seconds will not eat. Every instinct he now applies to a groom with a tight budget and a wedding in 11 weeks was formed in a covered market on the other side of the world.
His first Adelaide shop was not a shop.
“My first shop was actually in the front bar of the Austral Hotel. I started selling my goods from there. I had about 20 square metres of space, and I was paying $100 a week. That was where it all started.”
Twenty square metres in a pub, in the early 1980s. Adelaide men, at that point, dressed in a way that would now look like a costume.
“When I first started, Adelaide men always wore suits, shirts and ties, and leather shoes,” he says. “But especially after COVID, we’ve seen a big change. Men have become much more comfortable and relaxed with the way they dress. Now it’s more about chinos, a casual shirt, no tie and a simple sports jacket. It’s still about looking good – just in a much more relaxed way.”
What that shift did to his trade is more interesting than what it did to the clothes. For most of the twentieth century a suit was a uniform, bought because a man couldn’t go to work without one. It is now an occasion – a wedding, a funeral, a court date, a race day, the one good jacket that has to serve for all of them. The customer who used to come in twice a year out of obligation now comes in once every few years with something at stake. That raises the temperature on every visit, and it puts a premium on being right the first time.
A man who has spent 42 years selling tailoring might be expected to have views about all this. Retailers of his vintage usually do, and they are often withering.
“My job isn’t to judge. My job is to help a man find what suits him, what fits him and what makes him feel good.”
So: what is the most common mistake he sees walking past the window?
He declines the question.
“I don’t really believe in judging people by what they wear,” he says. “If someone feels comfortable and confident in what they’re wearing, who am I to tell them it’s wrong? My job isn’t to judge. My job is to help a man find what suits him, what fits him and what makes him feel good. That’s what style is about.”
There is a whole industry built on the opposite position – on the idea that you are currently getting it wrong, and that the remedy is for sale. He has had 42 years to adopt it and has not.
What he does instead is look.
“I look at their build, their torso, their height, even their hair colour. I picture everything together and then recommend – maybe navy, maybe charcoal, maybe black. Because at the end of the day, we’re not just here to sell you a suit. We’re here to look after you.”
Weddings are where this is tested hardest, because weddings are where the money is and where the pressure to extract it is greatest. His sequence is revealing. The first question his team asks is the date. Then who needs dressing – the groom, the fathers, the party. Only then does he raise money, and when he does, it is to lower the temperature rather than raise it.
“Then we talk about budget, because weddings are extremely expensive,” he says. “For me, it would be a shame to simply try to upsell someone. My job is to help them find something that looks good, feels right and suits their budget. That’s always been my motto.”
The work itself changes depending on what a man can spend, and he is candid about that too.
“With made-to-measure, it’s very personal. We’re creating something specifically for that person – their fit, their style and what they want for their wedding. Suit hire is different. We’re finding the best option from what we have available and making sure it works for them.”
Push him for a single rule, the sort of thing a magazine wants and a man of his experience is entitled to be weary of, and he gives one, but it’s not about cloth.
“Always be confident, and always smile. You can wear the best suit in the world, but confidence is what really makes you look good. That’s my number one style rule.”
And what does he wear himself, on a night out?
For himself, the answer is less grand than you would expect from a man who sells suits for a living. A private function gets a tie and some effort. Anything else does not.
“For a nice night out, I’m very happy with a good T-shirt and a sports jacket. For me, it’s all about dressing for the occasion.”
Lately the shop has been having some fun on Instagram, which is not the obvious move for a business in its fifth decade. He is unbothered by the novelty of it, because as far as he is concerned it’s the same job in a different room: introducing people to the shop and letting them see how it feels before they walk in.
Forty-two years is long enough for a business to outlive its own customers, and long enough for their sons to turn up needing a suit. It is also long enough to have watched most of the competition go. Adelaide has lost a great many of the independent shops that were trading when he opened, and the ones that replaced them have mostly been chains, then websites, then nothing at all. Staying is its own achievement, and he knows it.
“It’s been my honour and my privilege to still be here 42 years later,” he says. “Over those years, I’ve met so many wonderful people who became friends. And now, their children are coming in and shopping with us. That’s an honour, man. It really is.”
“Of course, we like making money – every business does. But after 42 years, seeing the next generation walk through that door… that means something to me.”
Some of the men now standing in front of his mirror were not born when he opened. A few are the sons of men he dressed for their own weddings, and one day they will bring in sons of their own, and he will look at the build, the torso, the height, the hair, and reach for navy or charcoal or black.
And he will move around them the way he learned to move with a mop in his hands, in a job he did for two years before anyone let him near a suit.
Joseph Uzumcu
Gawler Place, Adelaide
josephuzumcu.com.au
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