Although college students often come to class dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie, there are certain presentations or events that require professional attire. When it comes to dressing the part, expensive dress pants and stuffy blazers are often standard. However, there are other, more innovative, options available.
Ministry of Supply, a Boston based company dedicated to redesigning professional clothes opened a new store on Newbury Street featuring a wide variety of products tailored to consumers who are looking for more comfortable workday clothes. The company uses scientific data to create sweat proof, high stretch and stylish dress clothes that are easy to care for.
Gihan Amarasiriwardena, the president and co-founder of the company, explained his vision for the brand as a way to dress professionally with more accessibility.
“We were athletes growing up and experienced the shift from cotton running shirts and shorts to moisture-wicking, four-way stretch materials and had seen the step-change in comfort,” Amarasiriwardena said. “We wanted to bring that to the clothes we wore the other 12 hours of the day.”
Ministry of Supply officially kicked off in 2012, following a successful kickstarter campaign. The Apollo dress shirt, their first product, is made out of the same material used by NASA to regulate body temperature and had spent a year in development prior to launch.
Aman Advani, one of Amarasiriwardena’s co-founder at Ministry of Supply, was working on a similar concept trying to combine the material in running socks with the professional aesthetic of dress socks before teaming up with Amarasiriwardena while they were studying at MIT.
“One of our professors at MIT introduced us as it’s rare to find two engineers enjoying hacking clothes as much as they did code,” Amarasiriwardena said.
For Danielle Sievers, a senior in the Questrom School of Business, Ministry of Supply is a welcome innovation in professional attire. Sievers, who mostly buys “the basics” for her courses that require formal wear, appreciates the variety a company like Ministry Supply could bring.
“There is definitely an opportunity for a redesign,” Sievers said. “I am kind of intrigued.”
Tessa Whitley, a Questrom alumna from the MicroMasters online program in product management, now works as a supply chain analyst at Ministry of Supply.
“[I look] at what our customers are buying,” Whitley said, “what they are interested in maybe digging into the specific colors that they like to buy their clothes in or the styles that are doing particularly well and then I use that data to make decisions on how much of any given style we may purchase in the future.”
Whitley said her time at BU taught her to look at products from the eyes’ of the customer to better understand their perspective. Learning about supply chains and highlighting the consumer perspective while working towards her MicroMasters certificate was a great segue into her current job.
“I was really interested in the fact that they looked at clothes from a much more technical aspect,” Whitley said, “they really dove into the product to best understand their customers.”
The opening of their new location, which saw the storefront move from 299 Newbury St. to 303 Newbury St., coincided with Sunday’s Open Newbury, an event where people can spend a car-free day shopping on Newbury Street. With the increase of shoppers for their opening weekend, the new storefront has found early success.
“We’ve seen an amazing first weekend,” Amarasiriwardena said, “ [It was] nearly double our usual sales.”
