MADE IN SC: Randy Hanauer’s Thoughts on Bow Ties — “Women Love ‘Em.”

Do you trust the guy in the bow tie? Ask Randy Hanauer if you should. Not only will he answer with an emphatic, “Yes,” he’ll give you a host of other good reasons why.

While his ties can be fun and add more than a hint of personality to an otherwise nondescript outfit, they’re also serious business.

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Sometimes, these are conversation pieces.  Other times they are, say, the tie-that-binds, if you’ll pardon the pun, with that whole, “It’s cool, we’re a bow tie club.  I get you, you get me.”  Which of those do you want your ties to be, or does it matter?

It doesn’t matter.  The young people…I just hope all the young people who are wearing bow ties today are wearing them forty and fifty years from now.  I hope it is just not a passing fancy.  Nobody wants to dress like their dad did.  And most of these young people, their dad has been business casual.  He’s being going to work in khakis and knit shirt and they don’t want to look like that.  They like to dress up.  And a bow tie is part of it.  It sets them apart from everybody else.  I had two friends tell me…I was in Tupelo, Mississippi week before last, and this attorney came in, and he wears bow ties.  He said, “We had a real old partner that’s retired now and he wore a bow tie every single day of his life and really felt like anybody who wore a bow tie was intellectually superior to anybody else.”  He felt like that.  I have a young friend in Waxhaw, in the insurance business, and his wife got him to wear bow ties.  He said, “I put that bow tie on and I felt like my IQ went up twenty points.”

What determines the patterns that you go with?

Well, that’s what we’re working on here now.  We’re working on next fall’s line and we just try to have a balance of stripes and woven designs and print designs.  Day bows, formal bows.  We just try to have a balance.  Half of the line remains pretty much the same, basically.  I think we’ve got thirty-six colors in bar stripes we run every season and regimental stripes that we run every season.  A lot of formal things that we run every season, so we fill around all those basics and we have the other 50% of the line is all new this season.  So when we’re in New York, we go to…all the mill people from all around the world are there in January and July so we sit down with the mill people and will go through and pick out designs then we will color them.  (He picks up some samples along with a color book to design patterns.) This is this design right here.  They’ve got these little color tabs, I’ll show you.  Like on this pheasant, you know, ground’s this color and then his wings are this color and this part this color and this part this color and you just lay it out.  Then we get these…these are called strikeoffs.  And they don’t always come out.  Like we weren’t pleased with these so we made some changes.  We reversed the teal and red and we changed some things here.  The design basically was good, but some of the colors didn’t turn out just exactly right.  So we do that with everything in the line.

Do you do any custom patterns? If somebody comes in and says, “I’ve got a specific need…”

Yes, we do custom patterns for stores.  Murray’s Toggery on Nantucket Island.  There’s a thing they run in their store.  We get some new colors for them every season so they buy Nantucket Island.  They buy coordinating ties and bow ties and cummerbund sets and D-ring belts.  We make that for them.  We do a lot of that for stores.  More and more stores are wanting to have their own thing and, because we make so many different products, they can utilize their own design, whereas, if we only made bow ties, they couldn’t sell that many bow ties to use all the yardage because of the minimum yardage so we can divide it up between forehand ties, bow ties, cummerbunds, D-ring belts.

However they want to do it?

We make it work for them.

How do you think that your ties help guys express their personalities?  And what’s your thought process in providing styles to help them do that?

It’s all about color.  We do a lot, especially in the summertime, we do a lot of bright colors, pinks and yellows and turquoises and citrus greens.  I mean it’s just all about color.  Here’s a new tie for fall (He pulls a sample from his secret upcoming collection.). It’s got tons of color in it. I mean, a guy will take that… I mean that says a lot about a guy to wear that, doesn’t it?

How do you general fashion trends impact the designs or are you more isolated and kind of follow your own direction?

We kind of follow our own, depending on what is going on.  But size and pattern, things are a little bit smaller now than they used to be.  The size of the design will change from year to year.  And colors will change, too.  I mean, purple is really, really important now.  It really does sell.  We’ve tried to offer purple before but it didn’t sell.  It’s selling really well, now.

Guys generally are not given a whole lot of credit for caring about how they dress. What is it, though, about a bow tie that really adds that extra punch?

Because you’re the only guy in the room with one on.  Women love ‘em.  I tell guys, “When you buy bow ties, you’re going to get more compliments from women than you have ever gotten before with a forehand tie.”  And they’ll come back to me and say, “You know, you’re right.  I’ve never had so many compliments.”

How are you seeing bows being received outside of South Carolina and the South, in general?

The Southeast is the best territory over to the Mississippi River.  That’s mainly because there are more good men’s stores in the Southeast than there are in any other place in the country.  In the Northeast, they wear bow ties also, they’re just aren’t as many good men’s stores up in that part of the country.  We do a really nice job in the summertime with all the resorts in Maine down to Maryland.  We get some great stores that are just open one season a year.  They’re just open in the summertime.  Once you get across the Mississippi River, the Midwest, into where Jayma and I grew up, it is sore pickings. We go to a Chicago show and it gets better every season.  It’s still not a good show for us, but we are making progress and I talked to a shop owner in Illinois and said, “Do you carry bow ties in your store?”  He said, “Nah. Not really.”  He said, “This Christmastime though, there were a couple of kids from our town went to Ole Miss for school, and they came in and bought some bow ties at Christmastime.”  I said, “Well, there’s hope.”Maybe they’ll teach everybody else how to dress.

There are still people who chant that mantra “Don’t trust the guy in the bow tie.”  What do you say to those people?

I don’t think that’s true anymore.  I don’t think it’s true at all anymore.  Just because people think that if you have a bow tie on, you’re a professional person.

American clothing manufacturers have seen their numbers steadily decline for years, but there’s a renewed drive to keep textile manufacturing at home. What do you say to somebody who’s choosing between foreign and domestic clothing items to improve his or her wardrobe?

Buy products that are made in America.  Look at the label and see where it is made.  Buy made in America. Keep people employed.

• Follow R. Hanauer on Twitter at @rhanauer.
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For Part 1, click HERE. Next week we’ll see one of Randy’s ties come to life just from an off-the-cuff question.