Have you ever come across a brand and thought, “Damn, that’s what thinking smarter actually looks like?” Well, Mizzen+Main is also what different feelslike. Their signature product is a dress shirt that moves with me, doesn’t wrinkle, and doesn’t feel like a straitjacket after three hours in the Dallas heat.
In a category of menswear famous for being stiff, literally and figuratively, Mizzen+Main came in and began breaking rules, from fabric choice to distribution strategy and grassroots testing. First, they figured out that dress shirts needed to both look professional and perform under pressure. Then they committed to American manufacturing while carefully choosing their retail partners, only selling on Amazon when the moment was right. Their unconventional wisdom started with an idea, but they fleshed it out across their whole strategy.
Business Fashion Needed A Performance Review
When founder Kevin Lavelle watched a young congressional staffer turn up late to a meeting soaked in sweat in the middle of the Washington, D.C. heat in 2005, the image stuck. At the time, Lavelle was interning with a political group for the summer. Mizzen+Main started with that moment. It sparked a question: what if the best performance wear for the office wasn’t cotton?
Until then, professional wear had been pretty standard, with the likes of heavyweight cotton shirts putting appearance first over comfort. Even when dress shirts had athletic roots, like Brooks Brothers’ original button-downs designed for polo players, the focus was on structure and tradition, not fabric innovation. Performance wear, meanwhile, had been relegated to the gym and sports fields.
Lavelle saw the disconnect: the office could be just as demanding as the athletic field. Mizzen+Main’s answer was to engineer a performance fabric that could pass for professional wear. They took the functionality of athletic wear and made it boardroom-appropriate, creating shirts that performed under pressure while looking sharp enough for client meetings.
Doing Scale Their Way
Some brands start bold, then soften as they grow. Mizzen+Main did the opposite, maintaining a laser focus and going all in on making their difference their advantage, despite industry skepticism. Lavelle says they were left out of the first trade shows and even told their performance shirts were a terrible idea.
Rather than pursue traditional, media-driven marketing strategies, they leaned hard into their outsider status and social content that understood their real customers. When they wanted to break into Saks Fifth Avenue, they went straight to the VP of menswear and asked the kind of “naive” questions that challenge assumptions.
The brand’s “Thanks for the Time” campaign had no product placement and no sales pitch, just relatable content for white-collar guys in their late 20s and 30s. The result? 26 million views and 63,500 new followers.
While throwing money at celebrity influence can be a go-to tactic in the fashion space, Mizzen+Main bet on that actualaffinity. Today, Lavelle says, the brand has gone “from being laughed out of the room to basically every major menswear brand doing something similar.”
With 500+ retail partners, 10 flagship stores, and a loyal online base, this is a business rooted in independence and clarity of mission.
Tech That Actually Helps
Conventional online retail sizing gives consumers a limited range of small, medium, or large, and these brands aren’t required to provide anything more than that—measurements, fit types, or recommendations. Online shopping can feel like it’s a case of every man for himself, but if you’re lucky, you might get to download a PDF of the sizing chart. It all feels a little detached.
That’s why one of Mizzen+Main’s moves that made me sit up was their sizing tech: their “Shirt Finder” tool powered by AI and digital body‑modeling is intuitive and personalized. And the result of taking that extra step to personalize the experience was stunning: a 257% increase in conversions and a 30% lift in average order value for users of the tool.
And get this: a 32% engagement rate on the tool when using it from July to October, and a 7% bump in total revenue during that time.
What I love is how they’re not slapping gimmicks on their site to look smart. They’re being smart, reducing returns, and removing hesitation. It told guys: “We get your body. We’ve got your fit.”
Credit: Mizzen + Main
This is where brand meets utility. They took a moment most people overlook, finding your size, and made it a value-add. That kind of detail shows they are relentlessly thoughtful. It feels bespoke, not off the rack. And that’s what makes it stick.
Why It Matters
We talk a lot about creativity here—how it shows up, what it really means. In choosing better over more, Mizzen+Main said no to the way it’s always been.
Of course, they didn’t invent performance wear. They took it somewhere unexpected: the boardroom, the bar, the everyday. For any brand out there trying to punch above its weight, this is your blueprint:
- Build from truth.
- Bet on bold.
- Invest in better experiences.
- And never trade in your edge.
Mizzen+Main disrupted menswear by redefining what dressing well could feel like. In doing so, they put a wrinkle in the industry, not their shirts.
A huge shout out to Founder Kevin Lavelle and Co-Founder Web Smith for truly innovating menswear, Brittney Ann Cardillo for not only killing it with the marketing, but being a fellow Hokie. It’s bold to be so innovative in a category that sometimes feels like a lot of the same. Can’t wait to see what you all do next Ryan Kent , Corey A. Bohler, CMA , Abigail Leija , Caroline Spearman, Katie Blackwell, Jonny Wills, Will Jenkins, Kirsten Gibbs, Neeraj Sachdeva, Alexander Bell, MBA, Katie Hahn, Lacy Janus, Kelly Reeves, Ryne Heath, Denis Lates, Adam Taloni , and the rest of the Mizzen+Main team.
