Two thirds of London's working residents are in the formalwear occupations.
This is an audience brief: the sibling format to the teardowns. The job is to build a category’s audience from public data before anyone commissions a survey, using the shelf the ONS already publishes. The category here is men’s formalwear, suits and shirts, sold in London. Every number below is public and cited. None of it comes from client work.
The buyer did not disappear. He is at home on a Tuesday.
Tom, 41
Professional services, London
Kept the shirts. The suits stay for client days.
- 2.7 office days a week, the London average note 5
- 45% of £50,000+ earners now work hybrid note 4
- £57,057 the London professional median he earns around note 3
Illustrative composite. Not a real person.
The wearer base
Two thirds of the capital’s working residents, 66.7%, are in the top three occupation groups, against 53.6% across Great Britain: 15.1% managers and directors, 34.9% professionals, 16.5% associate professionals. London holds the occupations that wear formal. The City of London alone holds 657,000 employee jobs, about 57 jobs for every working-age resident.
London professionals earn a median of £57,057 full time, managers and directors £82,380, and corporate managers £91,982. The top tenth of London’s full-time earners clears £106,203.
What hybrid did
The heaviest wearers now attend the office 2.7 days a week, so the same wardrobe lasts nearly twice as long between purchases.
The heaviest wearers stopped commuting daily. Among earners over £50,000, 45% now hybrid work, the highest rate of any income band, and managers and directors hybrid work at close to half. The average London office worker attends 2.7 days a week.
At 2.7 days a week the same wardrobe lasts nearly twice as long as it did on a five-day commute. The buyers did not go anywhere. Their replacement cycle stretched, and they are still there to be won.
The five-day suit week is gone.
Office days a week for the average London office worker. At that rate the same wardrobe lasts nearly twice as long as on a five-day commute.
Measured. Note 5; the doubling is arithmetic on the attendance rate. · gabrielgruter.com
The money
The richest tenth of households outspends the poorest nearly six to one on clothing.
The average household spends £3.50 a week on men’s outer garments. Clothing and footwear spend in the richest tenth of households runs £34.80 a week against £6.00 in the bottom, nearly six to one, and London households spend £20.10 a week on clothing and footwear against a £17.40 UK average.
The richest tenth outspends the poorest nearly six to one on clothing.
The richest tenth of households spends £34.80 a week on clothing; the poorest spends £6.00.
The segments
Four segments in value order: the reduced daily wearer, the occasion buyer, the first-suit buyer and the switcher into tailored-casual.
Four, in order of value. The reduced daily wearer: still suited for client days, buying less often, trading up when they do buy. The occasion buyer: weddings, interviews, events. The ONS does not count weddings, so this one has to be sized from category sources instead. The first-suit buyer: new entrants to the professional occupations each year, small per person, high lifetime value. And the one-notch-down switcher: the hybrid professional who kept the shirt and dropped the suit, which is where the £50,000-plus hybrid numbers say the volume went. The switcher is the open question. Does a formalwear brand follow the buyer into tailored-casual, or hold the formal occasions that are left?
Where they live
The buyer is home half the week, and home runs from Richmond (78.2% top occupations) to Barking (39.8%) inside one media buy.
Retail and geo plans for this category were built for the five-day commute, and the five-day commute is gone. The buyer is at home two or three days a week, and home is not EC2. Richmond upon Thames has 78.2% of its working residents in the top three occupation groups on £1,056.60 median weekly pay; Barking and Dagenham, the same city, has 39.8% on £754.10. Of the 50 highest-income small areas in England and Wales, 47 are in London. Use the occupation and income layers to pick the boroughs. Then buy the media around where the buyer lives.
What I would do
Weight the plan by the spending tenths, defend the occasion moments in search, and aim the equity work at the switcher.
Split the plan by segment and weight it by the spending tenths, not by age band. Defend the occasion moments in search, where the intent is explicit and dated. Put the equity work behind one claim aimed at the switcher, because that is where the volume is moving. Measure it in branded search against the category, borough by borough. The pay and income tables above are your targeting file, and they cost nothing.
Where this argument is weakest
The pay tables miss the self-employed, the spending survey sees households not individuals, and no public data sees taste.
The census is from 2021, collected mid-pandemic, and the ONS itself says to take care not to overinterpret its travel-to-work data, which is why the commuting numbers here come from TfL and the occupation numbers from the current population survey. ASHE covers employees only, so the self-employed barrister buying three suits a year is invisible in the pay tables. The spending survey reports households, not individuals, and its regional cuts are three-year averages. And public data cannot see fit, taste or the difference between a £200 suit and a £2,000 one. And the named person in the card is a composite, assembled from the figures in the notes.