Henry Poole & Co Brand Guidelines: James Poole’s 1806 Shop and the Back Door to Savile Row

A draper from Shropshire and a door at the back.

The name over the door is the son’s, but the firm dates itself from the father. James Poole, born at Baschurch in Shropshire in 1781, arrived in London in January 1806, the company says, and set up in Bloomsbury, between Brunswick Square and Russell Square, as a linen draper and mantua maker, a maker of women’s gowns. CNBC, reporting in 2016, also put the first premises in Bloomsbury and called it a tailor’s shop. Britain was at war with Napoleon, and the company says Poole soon turned to military tunics and was making them by the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

The business moved west. The company puts a Regent Street showroom in the early 1820s, then a showroom and workshop on Old Burlington Street from 1828. That building had a rear entrance in Savile Row, which the company describes as a street then home largely to physicians and surgeons.

The back door became the brand. Henry Poole, born in 1814, inherited the firm in 1846 and made that rear entrance the main one. Simon Cundey, the present head of the house, told Tempus in 2019 that the street had been little more than a place to leave carriages, and that other tailors moved in as Henry grew famous. CNBC also credited the 1846 move with starting the tailors’ migration to the street. This is the basis of the firm’s description of itself as the first tailor of Savile Row. It says it came to take up nearly a third of the street.

In 1876 the firm passed to Henry’s cousin Samuel Cundey, its accountant, according to Tempus, and in 1883 to Howard Cundey, according to the company’s timeline. It has stayed with the Cundeys since.

Warrants, ledgers and a short coat.

Court work made the name. The company says its first Royal Warrant came from Emperor Napoleon III in 1858, and that it has held more than forty worldwide. Its heritage page dates its next warrant to Queen Victoria in 1869, while Cundey, in an interview with Merchant & Makers, named one from the Prince of Wales in 1863. Liveries, the uniforms of great households’ staff, were a trade of their own: the company says Henry opened a dedicated Livery Department in 1876 with fifty to seventy artisans, and that the department reopened in 2003 for ceremonial dress. A director today holds responsibility for the warrant as Livery Tailor to His Majesty The King, it says.

The claim it is known for is the dinner jacket. The company says the Prince of Wales ordered a short evening coat for informal dinners at Sandringham in 1865, and that its ledgers record this as the earliest example of the modern dinner suit. Dates differ: Cundey’s Merchant & Makers interview says 1860, and Robb Report Singapore put the jacket in the 1880s in 2020. The firm itself qualifies the American sequel. It repeats the story of James Brown Potter carrying the coat to Tuxedo Park in 1886, then notes that no customer of that name survives in its ledgers, and points instead to founders of the Tuxedo Club who were documented Poole customers.

The ledgers are the centre of its archive. The company describes over 120 volumes running from 1846 to the 1950s, each of more than 1,000 pages, from which its curator James Sherwood catalogued over 2,000 notable customers. Robb Report Singapore reported in 2020 that about a dozen books were beyond saving, damaged by water after incendiary bombs in the Second World War, and that Cundey’s conservation project turned up customers including Ulysses S. Grant, Buffalo Bill and Bram Stoker. Some paper patterns, including Churchill’s, were thrown away for the war effort, Cundey said.

Japan is the other long thread. The timeline says the firm made Western clothes for Japan’s first ambassador to London in 1871, and links this to the Japanese word for a suit, sebiro. The word’s origin is unsettled: the blog Language Hat, citing Wiktionary in 2020, gave it as unknown, with Savile Row one of three suggested roots. The company says that in 1964 it became the first Savile Row tailor to enter the Japanese market, through an agreement with the Matsuzakaya department store group.

Chalk, cloth and the cutting board.

Tailoring houses have an unusual advantage in presenting themselves: the work itself is graphic. A bespoke order follows a set sequence. The customer and tailor choose fabrics, linings and details, the tailor takes measurements and drafts a pattern from scratch, and the cloth is chalked out and cut with shears before being basted for a fitting. Chalk marks on cloth, paper patterns on hooks and a cutter working at the board are the working tools of that sequence, and they also make natural pictures for a house’s windows, pages and packaging.

The street matters too. Savile Row in Mayfair, London, is known principally for bespoke men’s tailoring, and tailors have traded there since at least 1803. Its windows can be a statement in themselves: when Nutters of Savile Row opened in 1969, it used bold displays created by the then unknown Simon Doonan. In Italy the home town often takes the street’s place, and a house can put a place name at the front of its story, as Zegna does with its mill in the Biellese Alps.

Cloth carries the identity as well. Fabrics and linings are chosen at the start of an order, which puts the fabric book in the customer’s hands early. Mills keep their own record of that work: the Zegna archive at Trivero holds sample books alongside technical drawings.

The words matter as much as the images. A bespoke garment starts from a new pattern, made to measure adjusts an existing one, and ready-to-wear comes in standard sizes. In June 2008 Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority ruled that an advertisement calling a suit cut and sewn by machine “bespoke” did not breach its code, and the term has stayed contested since.

Family controlled, and still made on the Row.

The firm was once very large. The company says that by 1914 it employed 14 cutters and more than 300 tailors and produced over 38,000 garments in a year, with branches at various times in Paris, Vienna and Berlin. The site that made its name did not last: the company says redevelopment brought demolition of its Savile Row premises in 1961, sending it to Cork Street, and that it returned to the street in 1982 at 15 Savile Row.

Ownership remains in the family. Companies House lists Henry Poole and Company (Savile Row) Limited, incorporated in 1946, as active, and names Simon Cundey as the person with significant control since August 2024, holding more than half of the shares. The company calls him its seventh-generation family owner; he joined in 1988 and became managing director in 2012, it says.

On manufacture the claim is plain. The company says every item is hand-made at its Savile Row premises to the client’s own pattern, with the showroom and cutting room on the ground floor and the tailoring workshops and Livery Department below it. CNBC reported in 2016 that every stage, from measuring to finishing, was handled on site. The company describes a nine-step process with a personal paper pattern, cloth chalked and cut by hand, and a choice from 6,000 samples. Separately, it says it designed a made-to-measure range sold in Japanese department stores, and it opened a Beijing showroom in 2006.

The visual material is cloth and history rather than a published identity system. The timeline records a registered House Check in 1985 and the Cundey Weave, which reached its 70th year in 2023. In 2026, for its 220th anniversary, the company worked with the Italian mill Vitale Barberis Canonico on a Napoleon III Superfine Blue drawn from an entry in its ledgers, with cufflinks copying the bronze Napoleonic eagle it says still stands in the shop. Newer partnerships include adidas and Size in 2017 and Gore-Tex in 2021.

For a design guide, Henry Poole & Co shows how a house can make its own records into its identity. Compare Huntsman, a former breeches maker on the same street, and Gieves & Hawkes, another Savile Row house. For this guide we use a ledger navy, chalk and a bronze with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Henry Poole & Co’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.