The Dressmaker’s Rule for Ecommerce

There were no clothing stores in the small country, part of the Great Rift Valley, where I grew up. No racks of ready-made dresses waiting to be tried on. No changing rooms with harsh fluorescent lights and three-way mirrors designed to make you doubt every decision. We had fabric shops instead. Glorious, overwhelming fabric shops with bolts of cloth stacked floor to ceiling, each one a possibility waiting to be realised.

My mother returning from London with Liberty prints folded carefully in her luggage like diplomatic documents. Florals and paisleys, geometrics and abstracts. Each length carefully chosen, folded, and carried across continents. Then came the pilgrimage to the dressmaker. I remember her hands perfectly. Capable hands. Certain hands. She understood that clothing was not merely decoration. Clothing was architecture.

A steady stream of women passed through that small, steam-scented room. Yet when she was working on your garment, you knew with absolute certainty that it would be perfect. She was the architect of perfection, presiding over her domain with an authority that did not require words. Pieces left her care complete, correct, and precisely fitted to the reality of the body that would inhabit them.

The Grammar of Garments

There is a question worth examining. What truly distinguishes a dressmaker from a bespoke tailor. The terms blur in common use, both implying made-to-measure. Yet the language carries a quiet hierarchy. Bespoke tailoring calls up Savile Row and gentlemen in dark suits discussing lapel widths and trouser breaks. It suggests formality, guilds, apprenticeships, and centuries of codified tradition.

A dressmaker operates in a different register. The craft is no less skilled, often more so given the complexities of drape and the variety of shapes presented by women’s bodies. Dressmaking frequently sat outside the formal structures that elevated tailoring into a gentleman’s pursuit. Dressmakers were often women working from home or small shops, serving communities rather than clubmen. They understood bodies in motion. How fabric should behave when you bend to pick something up. How a sleeve needs quiet ease if you plan to reach for books on a high shelf. How a waistband must accommodate a good lunch or the bloat of a certain week of the month.

Both are masters. Tailoring often announces itself. Hand-stitching on a lapel, the exact geometry of a collar. Dressmaking tends toward the invisible. The art lies in how seamlessly the garment becomes an extension of the wearer.

The Education of the Body

Her workroom smelled of sizing and steam. Measuring tapes hung around her neck like ceremonial chains. Pins bristled from a cushion strapped to her wrist. More pins were held between her lips, that was how work was done. I learned to stand very still. Arms out. Shoulders back. Breathe normally or the bodice will lie to us later.

The first fitting was always in muslin, a ghost version of what would come. She pinned and tucked, marked with chalk, and made small disapproving sounds when my posture slipped or when growth had arrived at a different address than expected.

The second fitting was in the real fabric. Liberty prints transformed from flat yardage into form. Fabric-covered buttons marched up the back. Seams were pressed open. Darts were placed to acknowledge a person rather than a sizing chart.

Adolescence arrived with its usual chaos. She met each development with professional pragmatism. A tut here, a reassessment there. More room through the bodice. A waist sitting differently. Hips that would need to be told the truth kindly and firmly. She treated these changes as technical challenges, not moral judgments. A body was a body. Always in flux. Clothes were there to accommodate, not to correct.

This is what I learned in those fittings. My body was not a problem to be solved. It was a fact to be respected. Whatever shape it took, there were clothes made to fit. Not approximately. Not close enough. Fit for real.

Seams would follow the line of my form. Hems would break at the right point. Sleeves would end where my wrists began. The message was radical in its simplicity. You deserve clothes that work with you, not against you.

Geography of Constraint & Modesty

The country’s laws set their own requirements. Skirts below the knee, always. No trousers for women. Shoulders covered. These were not suggestions. Enforcement varied with the watcher and the place. I never owned jeans as a child. I own two pairs now and remain faintly uncomfortable in both. Denim feels like costume, as if I am playing at being someone who reaches for jeans without thinking. My tennis dress was made to measure. My school uniform adjusted to fit. So was everything else. The idea that one could buy something off a rack and have it simply fit seemed miraculous, like wandering into a shoe shop and discovering that a random pair of heels was exactly your size and somehow already broken in.

When we decamped to family abroad, we adopted local habits. Ancient waxed cotton jackets, softened by years of re-proofing. Tweed. Comfort. Quality. Wellington boots handled the rain with good sense. I developed a childlike, enduring love for stomping through puddles in wellies and a duffle coat. Did I look like Paddington? Probably. Did I care? Not in the least. Quality waterproof footwear brings a particular kind of joy, a freedom to step directly into every muddy puddle without hesitation.

What Masquerades as Quality Now: I see you Loro...

Fast fashion induces a mild vertigo in me. Mountains of clothing appear and vanish with the seasons. Garments are cut to fit a standardised body that does not exist, sewn at unkind speeds under conditions that should not exist either. The environmental cost is severe. Dyes poison waterways. Fibres become microplastics that will outlast us all. The waste is numbing. Items built to fail are discarded after a handful of wears.

More troubling is a different theatre. Luxury houses that once stood as the antithesis of churn now perform churn at a higher price. Multiple collections each year. Cashmere that is not what it was. Construction shortcuts visible to anyone who bothers to look. It is the production rhythm of fast fashion with the price point of exclusivity. The exploitation of the idea of tradition while abandoning the substance.

The Precision That Shapes Everything in My Life

The dressmaker’s discipline became the foundation of how I think. Her method was patient calibration. Measure, test, adjust. Refuse to accept close enough when correct is possible.

I apply that habit to business, to strategy, to the architecture of ideas.

When a plan looks almost right I feel the same dissatisfaction I feel when a sleeve runs a quarter inch too long. It is tempting to accept approximation because it saves time. But small imprecisions compound. A dress that is wrong in three places does not fit. A strategy that carries three untested assumptions is not a strategy. It is hope dressed as intent.

The dressmaker would step back, tilt her head, and see what needed correction. Then she moved in with pins and chalk. That is the movement I try to replicate. Pause. Reassess. Identify what is not quite right, even when the room has chosen momentum over thought. Precision early prevents catastrophe later.

The economics of scale have convinced us that customisation is inefficient and standardisation the only way to serve many. What we have standardised, too often, is mediocrity. Clothes that fit no one especially well. Business systems that address no particular need with any precision.

The Measure of Modern Systems

If I transpose that discipline into the digital world, most ecommerce still fits like an off-the-rack garment.

Systems do not speak to one another properly. Product data is cut to a single pattern. Marketing automation assumes every customer is shaped the same. Analytics hang awkwardly on misaligned tags and miscategorised events. Every dashboard, storefront, and funnel is stitched from parts that were never measured against the same body.

Brands talk about personalisation. Often it is only pattern grading at scale. The same template adjusted by a size or two, then called bespoke. It is the digital equivalent of taking in a waistband and pretending the whole garment was made for you. It looks fine on the hanger. The moment you move, it pulls.

True ecommerce craftsmanship begins with the dressmaker’s first question. Who is this for, and how do they move through the world.

That is data, yes, but also empathy and context. It is designing systems that fit the contours of reality rather than forcing reality into the comfort of the template. Disconnected platforms are the modern version of assembling a suit from pieces cut by different tailors. Inventory does not know what the marketing calendar is doing. CRM lives alone. Payments, fulfilment, subscriptions, support, and analytics all maintain their own idea of the truth.

The seams will never align. You can force them together. Under pressure they will split.

When integration is done properly, when systems are measured against one another and adjusted until they align, the result feels like bespoke software even if the tools are common. The magic is not in buying rarer platforms. The magic is in calibration.

Clean product data. Reliable event tracking. Identifiers that travel across the stack. Feedback loops that move from purchase to merchandising and back again.

Precision, not extravagance, creates ease.

This is the work I do now. I build the digital equivalent of a well-cut garment. I measure. I test. I align. I remove the quiet sources of strain so the business can move freely. I turn fractured stacks into coherent systems that fit the way customers actually behave and the way operators actually work.

I Am The Dressmaker Now

My body continues to change, as bodies do. I do buy ready-to-wear of course, gone are the slower days of the dressmaker. Though I also hunt for and experiment with young designers who are obsessed with fit, contrcustion and tailoring flair. I am not a relic of the past by any means. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't expect the best fit.

Fit is not a luxury. It is a discipline. The difference between adequate and excellent is often a single additional adjustment. Bodies change. Markets change. Systems must adapt. Standardisation may serve efficiency. It rarely serves people on its own.

So I carry the fitting room into rooms that smell more of coffee and whiteboards than of steam and sizing. The principle does not change. Measure carefully. Adjust precisely. Refuse to accept close enough when correct is possible. When I am presented with a solution that almost works, I think this can be corrected. A seam let out here. An assumption adjusted there. In my mind I am the dressmaker. Only the fabric is data. The muslin is a prototype. The garment is a digital ecosystem. The systems stand on my fitting block while I circle them with quiet concentration. I have pins between my lips. I am tutting.

And it will fit perfectly when I am finished.