Store meets big needs
M.H. Grover & Sons will fit you to a T
An average size man entering the Verdun clothing store M.H. Grover & Sons, walking past the suits and on to the casual clothes section, could be browsing through any men’s store.
Then something gives pause: the belts, which hang vertically from a rack, their ends an inch or two above the floor. Nothing exceptional about that except that the rack is about five feet tall. On closer inspection, perspective continues to be skewed. Shoes go up to size 16, there are pants that measure 74 inches at the waist, some jeans are longer than the average person’s height and T-shirts are available in 10 sizes beyond extra large.
M.H. Grover & Sons caters to men who have spent too much time searching in vain in various shops, seeing clothes made for others who are slimmer or shorter. Opened in 1925, it became a store for family and worker attire and for many years carried a wide range of sizes. In 1995, it decided to sell exclusively extended-size items. Choosing to leave the average size man to others has allowed M.H. Grover & Sons to become one of the few surviving clothing stores on Wellington St.
“When I started here,” says owner Kenny Grover, grandson of founders Max Hirsh and Jenny Grover and who began working alongside his late father Ronny in the mid-1980s, “there were eight to nine menswear stores. Now we’re the only one.”
M.H. Grover & Sons has become what is known as a destination store, targeted by customers looking for hard-to-find items. Most visit from off island or out of town. “Ninety to 95 per cent of customers who come in buy something,” said Grover, whose customers include large-size comedians and actors, tourists who take a detour to his store on their way to the Jazz Fest or the Grand Prix, as well as other retailers, such as the store calling him on this day for a Size 66 uniform for one of its clients.
“There’s nothing for us in regular stores,” said Sirica Benjamin, who fits both the big and tall categories and has come to the store for years with his father. He’s now shopping for more conservative apparel after having spent years dressing in younger, sportier gear, and able to satisfy both his guises at Grover’s.
Serge Cool, at 245 pounds, may be one of the store’s smaller-sized regulars. Like Benjamin, he finds other businesses do not think about bigger guys. “I’ve gone into stores, asked them right away if they have a 44 (waist) and, right away, they tell me they don’t,” the retired bus driver said.
While Big and Tall stores cater to sizes ignored by your average clothing outlet, having on hand such a vast range of sizes makes the operation expensive to manage. Most clothing stores will carry as little as three sizes per style. Grover’s store, meanwhile, stocks up to 15 or 16 sizes. He estimates that at any time there’s $1.5 million in merchandise sitting inside his 14,000 square feet of floor space and basement storage, significantly more than would be found in another store of that size
His suppliers range from casual-clothing outfitter Point Zero to suit-maker Jack Victor, both Montreal-based manufacturers that have branched out into extended sizes.
Others include Buffalo Jeans, Nautica and Robert Graham. The jeans he shows me, the type that a weightloss spokesperson that shed 150 pounds would hold up in front of their new body, carry the label Black Ice, which has made a name for itself with Big and Tall stores.
Oversized clothing costs about 15 per cent more than the average article because manufacturers will need to typically make the less-popular items in smaller lots.
Grover, whose store employs seven full-time and two part-time employees, puts his store’s annual gross sales at $1.5 million to $2.5 million.
His mother, Reva, who still works part time in the store and was on hand on this day, says her husband, who died in 2005, always wanted to make sure clients could find clothes in their size.
She remembers a vacation in Florida, where Ronny spotted a Size 52 pair of pyjamas. He brought them home for one of his regulars.
Son Kenny, a trained accountant who never expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, was given free rein in his 20s to transform the store into a more fashionable destination.
He believes fashion has to come in all sizes. “Just because you’re bigger, why shouldn’t you be able to dress just as well as anyone else?”
philip.fine@bell.net