How Tailored Brands reacts to tariffs

At Tailored Brands, the owner of men’s apparel brands like Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank, dealing with disruption has become a part of supply chain strategy.

“I’ve been in supply chain or product life cycle management for the last 30 years, and I can’t recall a time where we didn’t see disruptions happening on a more frequent basis,” Jamie Bragg, SVP and chief supply chain officer, Tailored Brands, said during a keynote session at Shoptalk Fall in Chicago.

That reality has made agility, scenario planning, and cross-functional collaboration central to Tailored Brands’s operations.

“It all starts with, ‘What’s the base plan to begin with?’” Bragg said. “Understanding that base plan is solid—whether you’re managing units or you’re managing dollars, that base plan has to be directionally correct.”

And the more cross-functional a brand reaction can be, the more effective it is going to be, Bragg advised: “Planning and sourcing and allocation and logistics and distribution all have to be on the same sheet of music.”

Tariffs, in particular, have forced the company to sharpen its response playbook. Bragg recalled how the first wave of tariffs in 2016 during the first Trump administration taught the company early on about what to do and what not to do. He said the company was highly concentrated in China at the time.

Since then, Tailored Brands—which specializes in suits, dress shirts, and business-casual wear—has diversified sourcing, evaluated trade-offs between speed and tariff exposure, and leaned on vendor partnerships to mitigate cost impacts.

“We believe in deep partnerships with our vendor base,” Bragg said. “You’re going to work with those vendors. You’re going to understand what they can do to help you control costs. You’re going to look at where you’re counter-sourced. You can understand what that looks like. You can make some trade-offs there—where you might sacrifice speed of delivery for tariff avoidance.”

Ultimately, Bragg said the company has refined its overall approach to be able to cross functionally decide next steps. He explained that everyone has a tariff number they’re trying to hit, but there are multiple levers—inventory management, vendor negotiations, country-of-origin diversification, freight planning—and all need to align in order to move in the right direction.

For Tailored Brands, tariffs are no longer a surprise. As Bragg put it: “Today, a tweet can change your quarter.”