A Chat With September’s Profile, Scott Drayer, director of marketing, Paul Fredrick MenStyle

CS: What’s the primary merchandise offered in the catalog?
SD: Men’s business dress. Our roots have been in dress shirts — the company was actually founded as an offshoot of a contract shirt manufacturing company. Initially it was a shirt factory that was developing shirts for higher-end department stores, private label. And as a way to fill in some of the production lulls, Paul [Paul Fredrick, company founder] and his father-in-law, Lenny Abrams, who was the owner of the Fleetwood Shirt Company, decided to try to go direct to the consumer.
So it started off with small advertisements in the Wall Street Journal, basically just trying to sell a white dress shirt. We’ve kind off sprouted off of that, first introducing ties, cuff links, and more recently, more business casual dress as we went through the dot-com bubble. Things like that, as well as suits.