ShirtCycle: Your Shirts on Demand

Let’s just get the out of the way right now: nothing beats custom.

Clothing made just for you and all your individual physical quirks and which fits supremely well forever jades you to mere off-the-rack (OTR) fare. When combined with the convenience of door-to-door delivery and effortless ordering, you start feeling pretty darn good about yourself and the world at large.

ShirtCycle does that. We have tried a variety of made to measure (MTM) shirt makers, most of which do a fine job and take their business and craft seriously. Some shirt makers have devised highly tested and near proprietary designs for OTR shirting that comes very close to the fit and appeal of custom. However, short of bespoke – the singular act of designing, cutting, fitting , and finishing a garment for a single individual – well done MTM shirts are worth every penny.

ShirtCycle‘s unique contribution to this model injects elements of the subscription model, some predictive preference design, and a useful customization options. Added to this is the aforementioned door-to-door delivery model. Taken together, its a great service for those guys who regularly wear dress shirts, want to inject a little change and excitement into their wardrobe, are too busy to shop, or simply want to try something new without having to figure out if it fits.

The ShirtCycle process is pretty simple. Working with a personal stylist, your color, pattern, style, fit, and design preferences are built into a customized file that allows for all that predictive stuff to get to work. Once they have your measurements, a sample shirt is created and sent to you for a self-fitting. If it fits than you’re good to go. If not, you work with your stylist to tweak your model so that it does fit. They take back the old sample and send you a new one. If that works, you keep it and in a couple of weeks your first three curated shirts arrive.

With a plethora of options, your expectation of receiving something that you’ll like will likely be met. And by the way, as you can see from the hero shot at the top, it’s not all spread collar business shirts. You can opt for casually cool buttoned down gingham too. Interestingly, after reviewing thousands of purchases and customer designs, the vast majority of orders fell into four distinct style buckets (shown below), they named Boardroom, Sartorialist, Dapper, and Weekender. This finding informed the core style options for ShirtCycle’s designs.

We found the ShirtCycle shirts themselves to be of excellent quality and design. The fabrics actually exceeded our expectations. Going forward, they pick three new shirt fabrics and styles every other month. You can review these styles online and confirm, swap or skip the box. You are never locked into receiving shirts you don’t need.