By Robin Washington – Special to the Business Journal
Dec. 6, 2018

Samantha Shih

Title: Founder and owner, 9Tailors LLC

Age: 38

Education: B.A., East Asian Studies, Brown University, 2003; Certificate, Chinese Studies, Johns Hopkins – Nanjing University, 2007

Residence: Boston Seaport

Samantha Shih’s bespoke tailoring shop in the Leather District has a growing reputation and a steady stream of repeat customers. Then there are those who walk into its showroom expecting “Sam” to be someone else.

“It’s definitely a man,” she says of the common misconception. “What ethnicity this man is, I have no idea. I’m not what they expect: a five-foot Asian woman.”

Not that Shih is shying away from her identity. Indeed, she capitalizes off it. Her family includes entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and Boston, going back to a restaurant her grandfather once owned in Chinatown.

With an entrepreneur father, lawyer mother and hedge-fund manager brother, “I felt like every family meeting was a meeting with my board,” she says.

That board may not have had in mind a career in custom-made clothing when sending Shih to Phillips Andover and Brown University. In a deliberate path for her life, Shih’s parents were living in Hong Kong and flew to Boston just before her birth. They all went back a month later.

Shih continued her East-West sojourns at age 14, when she returned to attend Phillips Andover. Among the privileged class in Hong Kong, she now found herself a member of a minority group, and in an effort to belong, tried out for crew.

“The boys on the crew team did not want to listen to me at all, but I was really determined to show them the skills that I had,” she recalls, saying she learned everything she could about rowing. She became the coxswain and was promoted to first boat, along the way finding a mentor in Tom Tiffany, a legendary Harvard team captain in the 1970s.

Brown followed, then three years at Deloitte and enrollment in Johns Hopkins’ Chinese-language immersion program in Nanjing, with an eye toward starting a business. Sensing a niche in men’s clothing made in China for an American clientele, she invested $20,000 to start an online business in which clients would take their own shirt measurements and send them in. After realizing she preferred to meet them in person, she found a Newbury Street sublease opportunity and, eventually, her current location in the Leather District. The business morphed into a bespoke tailor, with patterns measured much more meticulously and clothes made from scratch, for both men and women.

Another person she counts as a mentor is Ian So of the Chicken & Rice Guys — though So expresses surprise to hear Shih looks up to him. “She’s been in business 10 years. I’ve been doing it six,” he says. “I really like the way she does business; very detailed, very different from myself.”

As a food truck entrepreneur, So says he could get away with not wearing a suit — until he was offered a board position with the Asian/Pacific Islander American Chamber of Commerce & Entrepreneurship. He first bought off-the-rack duds at Express for $200 before heading to 9Tailors.

“It was around $800,” he says. “It was definitely worth it. They were impressed.”

Another mentor, Jeff Lahens, operated a similar business and has since joined 9Tailors full-time. So has Shih’s husband, Austin Wei. The couple has a 1-year-old son who takes up most of their free time. Otherwise, she’s involved with a millennial outreach project of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Chamber and co-leads the Equity and Inclusion Committee of the Phillips Academy Alumni Council.

Shih puts revenues between $1 million and $2 million, with six full-time-equivalent employees.

Sewing is contracted in Hong Kong with a third-generation family originally from India. The business has been steady, she says, with clients “around my age that have aged with me” — men and women first looking for wedding wear, and now needing to dress for work after having made partner.

There are also celebrity clients, from New England Patriots players and other sports figures to members of the Boston Music Award-winning group Bad Rabbits, who displayed their garb on a recent Jimmy Kimmel appearance.

An area of growth is in uniform design for boutique hotels. In the future, she says, “I’d love to be able to replicate this model in other cities.” For now, she’d like to share 9Tailors’ showroom space. “It includes a bar, a seating area. We really want it to be a community space for networking or learning opportunities.”

It’s also two blocks from her grandfather’s former restaurant on Tyler Street — even if she arrived there by traveling the world.

“My mom grew up in Chinatown,” she says. “We’ve gone full circle.”