This article was written before Harrison Butker made his commencement speech at Benedictine College.
The co-founder of high-end menswear brand Shepherd’s, Nathan Price, has been immersed in the clothing industry since his teenage years, so creating his own menswear line was a natural progression.
St. Louis native Price began his career at Men’s Warehouse. Eventually, he moved into custom clothing and soon began traveling to places like Milan, Prague, Portugal and Spain. It was in these places that he became inspired by the old-world craftsmanship and level of attention to fabrics.
Price visited a velvet manufacturer in Italy and saw beautiful fabrics slated for runways like Tom Ford and Alexander McQueen. These trips not only inspired Price, but also helped him gain valuable industry knowledge. On these trips, he collected ideas for his future menswear brand, Shepherd’s, which is co-owned by three others, including Chiefs player kicker Harrison Butker.
We talked with Price about the inception of the brand, its unique suits and suit dos and don’ts as we come upon graduation and wedding season.
Tell us about the inception of the brand and its unique relationship to the Chiefs and chiefs player Harrison Butker. I connected with chiefs player Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Chiefs, and worked with him in a very collaborative relationship designing his wardrobe for the 2022 football season. Harrison likes to dress well. He’s very interested in tailoring and having things custom made for him because he has a unique build. He has an athletic frame, but he’s 6’4” and he has broad shoulders and a small waist, so he always needed things that were made to fit him. We started having discussions while I was doing his wardrobe design about starting a company here in Kansas City. [We] leveraged people’s awareness of him within the Kansas City market and my knowledge to bring a really great product to Kansas City.
How do you make your custom suits? We want custom to be something that is not stuffy. It’s extremely approachable. We all want to have clothing that we can wear and live our life in without it being restrictive or [feeling] like a costume. When a guy comes in, we ask him a lot of questions to understand how often he wears a jacket or a full suit, what kind of colors he feels confident in and ask him questions about work and life. We have around 12,000 fabrics, so we’ll go through a host of fabrics to find things that are appropriate for his lifestyle. We can make over 100 changes to [the suit], so we can see the little nuances in a guy’s body. We can take all these things into account by seeing how the garment sits on someone, rather than taking a bunch of measurements, putting it into the computer, printing out a suit and then hoping for the best. This allows for a much more precise level of fitting.
With graduation and wedding season upon us, what advice do you have for people picking out suits now? [Something] that happens a lot in weddings is not understanding the difference between a suit and a tuxedo. If you’re going to have a tuxedo made—which has satin on the lapels and the satin stripe down the side of the pants—in my view, you really should only wear a bow tie with it. A regular necktie looks a little out of congruence. And the same goes for a suit—no satin on the lapels or trousers—with a regular necktie. I think a lot of times guys mix and match those [different elements] and there’s always something that looks a little bit off. In spring or summer, I enjoy a shorter length trouser where it hits right on top of the shoe tastefully. Some people are getting to the point where the trousers are way too short and you’re seeing above their ankle. The hips are also way too tight and their suit pants end up looking like skinny jeans. The right balance with the trouser [should] just kiss the top of the shoe perfectly.
