One of the first things Alan Au did after graduating USC was to convince his dad Jimmy to rename the store. As it happened, the change, from Jimmy Au’s Small and Short to Jimmy Au’s for Men 5’8″ and Under, was a turning point for the specialty retailer. Alan Au took over marketing duties for the store, establishing relationships with designer brands and movie studio and television stylists and costumers and before long, sales had grown so much that the 30-year-old retail store was bursting at the seams in its Glendale Galleria location. “I did not anticipate the growth we had in 10 years,” said Alan Au. “The plan was to see where the growth was coming from in the next five years, but that five-year growth target happened in two years’ time.” Last month, Jimmy Au’s for Men 5’8″ and Under moved into new, larger digs at Westfield Promenade in Woodland Hills, a location the owners believe, while still in test, is closer to the clientele they serve. “We track every single sale,” said Alan Au. “We were up over 50 percent last year, but it had nothing to do with being in Glendale. So we’re looking at this area to test our market. I think there are a lot of short men here.” About 28 percent of the adult male population nationally is under 5’8″ tall, a percentage that has not changed significantly in decades, Alan Au noted. Exceptionally tall men must buy specially tailored clothing because a suit or a pant can only be altered so much to accommodate them. On the other hand, clothing can always be altered to fit a short man, so few retailers have emerged to cater to this population. A better fit But what Jimmy Au’s, perhaps the only retailer of its kind, sells, is clothing that is already custom tailored for short men, something the owners, and customers, say provides not just convenience, but a better fit. “This is the only place where I’ve been able to walk into a store and buy something off the rack that feels like a tailor-made suit but isn’t priced like one,” said Stan Friedman, a publishing executive who was shopping in the store on a recent afternoon. Friedman, who lives in San Francisco, has been a Jimmy Au’s customer for two decades and bought his first tuxedo at the store. Jimmy Au, who worked for a number of years as a tailor making custom clothing for jockeys, first founded the store catering to men of all sizes in the early 1970s in what is now the Del Amo Fashion Center. By 1975, when the second store opened in what is now Westfield Shoppingtown Santa Anita in Arcadia, he began to specialize in short men’s clothing. The Arcadia location was followed by a downtown store and in the early 1980s, a location at the Beverly Center. “That store was the first huge success right off the start,” said Alan Au, whose play pen was a regular fixture in the tailor shop at the back of the shop when he was a child. “He found a whole new market there, mostly Jewish.” Some of the designers whose names grew to household prominence in the designer craze of the 1980s, Yves St. Laurent and Armani among them, were at the time, manufacturing clothing for short men, but as times changed they eliminated the lines, and Jimmy Au began developing his own patterns. Then the recession hit Los Angeles, and the store became a luxury few could afford. Jimmy Au consolidated, closing all the stores in 1994 and opening a single location in the Glendale Galleria. By the time Alan graduated USC with a degree in business administration in 1997 and entered the business full time, his dad had decided against re-opening multiple locations his family was growing, he was becoming a granddad, and he was less interested in traveling from store to store to provide the kind of personalized service his longtime customers demanded. But Alan Au had a number of other changes in mind. The first was to rename the store to remove the stigma attached to the word ‘short,’ a change that his dad did not immediately embrace. Courting celebrities “At the beginning I had to persuade him,” said Alan Au. “All I did was I said, let’s just change the poster frame, and the foot traffic kept getting better and better. So we changed the store name, the business cards, everything.” Next, Alan Au set out to capitalize on the A-list celebrities that Jimmy Au’s dresses, including Danny DeVito, Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg along with the stars of some of the highest rated TV shows like “Alias,” “ER” and “Six Feet Under.” “My dad is old school Chinese,” said Alan Au. “I went to USC, where if you do celebrity work you brag about it.” Au said he knew that to attract the kind of publicity he wanted, he would have to add designer names to the store’s selection, and because of the celebrity connections, even large design houses obliged. Jimmy Au’s carries a selection that includes Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, DKNY and Kenneth Cole, in 13 sizes, all tailored specifically for men extra short 5’1″ to 5’4″ and short 5’5″ to 5’8″. The selection and the clientele have gotten the store, which carries suits, sportswear, shirts, ties and other accessories, mention in a range of men’s fashion and trade magazines and on the shopping lists of most studio costumers, all leading to the recent surge in sales. “I would call the studio designers and say did you know we’re taking care of such and such?,” said Au. “Next thing you know we’re taking care of everybody who is short. Those costumers who are not using us, I’m going after personally.” Jimmy Au is still actively involved in the business, personally taking care of the store’s longtime customers. But these days, his family comes first, leaving the future direction of the company in the hands of Alan Au. “He accepted that some of this change had to happen,” said Alan Au of his father. “Most father-son teams don’t last long, but we accept our differences.”
