When Jeff Covitz took over his family’s menswear business more than 15 years ago, he was 30 years younger than most of his customers.
Covitz’s grandfather, Leo Zemelman, immigrated from Poland in 1960 and worked as a tailor before opening Leo’s Tailor Shop in Brookside, where he ran the business for nearly five decades. Zemelman later taught Covitz’s father, Rick, the trade, who went on to open Rick’s Tailoring and Menswear in 1978.
Rick died relatively young, leaving Covitz to carry on a business centered around a generation of men who put on a suit every morning to go to work. Covitz, then 30, saw that how men were dressing was changing, and he decided to pivot.
“I planned on being in business a long time,” Covitz says. “I wanted to do something kind of younger that I didn’t think Kansas City had.”
For a year, Covitz operated Houndstooth alongside Rick’s Tailoring and Menswear. Once Houndstooth found its footing, he closed the older store and spent the next decade-plus building his own business in the River Market (507 Walnut St., KCMO), honoring his family’s craftsmanship while reimagining it for a new generation.
Covitz grew up around tailoring, absorbing the trade almost unwittingly. When he was young and had time to kill at his father’s store, he spent time with the tailors, picking up techniques bit by bit.
“I never really learned anything all at once,” he says. “It wasn’t like I sat down to learn it. I was just around it and figured it out.”
Many of the most important lessons he learned from his father weren’t even about tailoring but about the relationships formed with customers. Covitz says that years later, many still stop by Houndstooth to share stories about his dad, whose philosophy was to treat patrons like friends, not transactions.
“I think there are a lot of high-end suit establishments that make you feel like a client or a customer,” Covitz says. “We try to make you feel like a friend.”
Houndstooth added a Leawood location (4250 W. 119th St., Leawood) in 2023, and both shops do tailor and alteration work on-site. Covitz considers that expertise a defining part of his business, especially in an industry where skilled tailors have become increasingly difficult to find.
“People think it’s simple and easy, [but] it’s hard to do well,” he says. “That’s one of the things when I opened this store that I really wanted to do well—the tailoring end of things.”
Over the years, things have continued to evolve. Today, Covitz calls menswear an “occasion business.” Customers come in for weddings, trips and events, often searching for one suit they want to get exactly right.
Styles have also changed. In recent years, Covitz has seen formalwear swing back toward black suits and tuxedos, while the more casual side of menswear has embraced relaxed tailoring, linen and what he describes as a Mediterranean palette. “Menswear’s answer to coastal grandma,” he says.
Covitz is expanding Houndstooth’s private-label offerings, working with makers in Ireland and England on sweaters and sourcing pants from Canada. He chooses the fabrics and details, but he is careful with terminology. He calls himself a tailor, not a designer, and pushes back on the loose use of words like “bespoke” in modern menswear.
For all that evolution, the foundation of Houndstooth remains old-fashioned: know your craft, treat customers like friends, and make sure the clothes fit.
