CATHAL KELLY
TORONTO STAR
Outside Tom's Place, the streets teem.
Babushkas wrapped in aprons jostle with pincushion punks for sidewalk space. The early afternoon crowd bustles through the narrow streets of Kensington Market, by the seafood vendors and second-hand clothing stores, art galleries and vegan restaurants. It's a joyous chaos.
Inside the doors at 190 Baldwin St., the atmosphere is bourgeois Milan rather than the bustling Mumbai outside.
Welcome to Tom's Place, Kensington Market's haberdasher for the man who wants to look his best while spending his least.
Often, the titular Tom Mihalik will be standing just inside the door. After amiable greetings you'll be led upstairs to the showrooms where the suits are laid out. You're in Tom's hands now.
"Tom has this friendliness about him," Harry Rosen, the dean of this city's men's clothiers, says. "Occasionally, my wife will drop in when she's in the neighbourhood and she talks about (Tom's) mother being on the cash register. There's a hominess about Tom's operation that makes it work. I admire him."
Today, eight Mihaliks help out at the store. Tom's retired brother Vilmos comes in on weekends. Sister Annette works there full-time. Son Tom, Jr., 25, is learning the business while younger sons Andrew, 15, and Robert, 13, help lay out the hundreds of ties on weekends. Tom's wife Irene handles the store's correspondence. Magda, Tom's 68-year-old mother, still brings his lunch every day.
Even a niece, Melinda, 11, has her role in the operation.
"She loves to play with the cash register," Tom says.
This is in addition to the 30-odd employees who aren't blood relations, but have been with Tom so long they're family.
Leading the cast is Tom himself.
Tom Mihalik, 48, is a businessman in the Ed Mirvish mold — a wheeler-dealer, a charmer, a personality. He is a broad-chested man with wide Slavic features dressed in a fine Italian suit. He often speaks of himself in the third person, in the off-hand way of a natural showman.
Tom's father, William, arrived in Canada during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. William had been a peddler of clothing and furniture before he'd made his escape from the Eastern Bloc.
Unable to find steady work, William took a chance in 1958 on a shuttered used-clothing operation at 54-56 Kensington Ave. He committed to the $50 a month rent and painted William's Clothing Store on the window.
Armed with bottles of Johnny Walker scotch, William toured Toronto's Goodwills and thrift shops. He made each store manager an offer — call me first when you get white shirts, black pants, tuxedos and fur coats, and I'll bring you another bottle. Soon, he was doing good business supplying a generation of Hungarian waiters with work clothes.
By 1968, a prospering William was able to bring Tom and Magda to Canada.
Tom's school life was hard; he spoke little English and was teased for his accent, for his haircut, for being different.
He took refuge in his father's store.
"When I was 12 years old, I knew I wanted to run a clothing business like my father. And I wanted a (Cadillac) Eldorado."
At his father's knee, Tom received an education in immigrant work ethic, the importance of family and the value of a repeat customer.
Tom came to work full-time with his father after high school. William moved the store from Kensington Ave. to its present location on nearby Baldwin Ave. In 1981, Tom, age 25, bought the business from his dad.
William's Clothing Store became Tom's Place.
Upon taking over, Tom decided to change the focus."I realized that the people that were buying seconds and used clothing were no longer around," Tom says.
He started with some new clothing. Then he began stocking women's wear. The quality of the men's clothing, always the main emphasis, grew steadily.
There were some hard times. There were also missteps. Tom's first mistake was putting prices on the clothes.
"In my father's store, you were able to haggle," Tom laughs. "Those people didn't like the price tags. `Who do you think you are?' they asked me."
The price tags disappeared. Tom carefully phased the tags back in, so carefully it took him nearly 20 years to complete the job.
Despite the tags, the haggling still exists. Any customer of Tom's knows that no transaction is complete until the salesperson talks to Tom himself, who cuts a little break, throws in the alterations or puts another tie in the bag.
To this day, "99 per cent" of the sales have Tom's hand in them.
The change from old to new was incremental. The secret was Tom's bridge building. At the time, the idea of top-drawer merchandise at bottom-drawer prices was new. Customers didn't understand it. Wholesalers didn't see the emerging market. Fellow retailers feared being undercut.
Tom went from wholesaler to wholesaler, much as his father had done years earlier, persuading them that there was a place for their excess stock, for the unused cloth — Tom's Place. To ensure their comfort, Tom took the labels of high-end houses out of suits. In their place went dummy names. That tradition continues in large part today.
In the early '80s, Tom would travel across the city looking for bargains. If a wholesaler in the north end had some suits that he couldn't ship, he'd call Tom. Since he had no car, Tom would take the TTC up to the wholesaler's warehouse, inspect the goods, cram them in a taxi and have them on the racks hours later.
Tom started to hook into emerging trends. His breakthrough moment in men's clothing came courtesy of Hugo Boss. In 1983, the German men's wear line was known for its pastel fashion showcased each week on the TV smash Miami Vice. A Hugo Boss suit was the very sharpest of the cutting edge.
One day, Tom got a call from a salvage company. Toronto retailers had refused a large shipment of Hugo Boss suits after moisture seeped into suit bags during transport. Stuck with the suits, the president of Hugo Boss Canada suggested Tom.
"I didn't really know who Hugo Boss was," Tom admits.
But he knew a finely made suit when he saw one. These were nice suits, only in need of a pressing. He cleaned them up and put them out at suitably reduced prices. Word got out quickly. Fashionable Toronto men thronged Tom's Place.
Those same men would soon lose their taste for double-breasted silk dinner jackets. But they would never stop coming to Tom's.
As times improved, Tom's Place consumed adjacent buildings. After starting with one ground-floor retail space, the store now takes up four entire buildings. Tom owns them all.
Today, a Tom's Place suit ranges in price from $300 to $1,200. Shirts range from $50 to $150. Ties cost from $35 to $60. Of course, all this is negotiable.
It's growing harder to grab a slice of a shrinking retail pie, Tom says, but he continues to prosper "in the shadow" of the Harrys and Holts.
"I don't think I could do it now," Tom says of building a clothing business. "I used to be able to get merchandise with just a handshake. That's not the case any more."
His family lives in the nearby Annex. Tom makes the short drive to work seven days a week. During the three or four warehouse sales he throws each year, he's on the go 14 hours a day.
Amidst the tumult, Tom has never let business overshadow family or community. Over the years, Tom has raised around $500,000 for the nearby Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre at Bloor St. W. and Spadina Ave. It's Tom's way of saying thanks to all the locals who kept his business afloat during the early lean years.
"Tom is part of the heart and soul of our community," says Bryan Keshen, executive director of the JCC. "He's a hero to many of the people here." The centre will honour Tom Nov. 7 by naming the men's locker room after him.
Tom's business continues to thrive because of his strong and immutable conviction that every man needs a good suit at a good price.
"I've always been a great believer in suits. When everybody was going into the T-shirt business, we never followed. We always stayed with the suits," Tom says from his desk.
"Without the family, I couldn't do this," Tom says. Tom Jr. squeezes past the ladies' racks into the cramped office to get his dad to look at some paperwork. "Same age I was," Tom says proudly after his son leaves, referring to the moment a quarter century ago when he took over the business.
Is a passing of the torch imminent?
"No, no, not yet," Tom waves the question away. "I still have few people to dress."