BRISTOL, Va. – If you want a glimpse of the essence of Blakley-Mitchell, the city’s most enduring men’s clothing store, don’t ask the owner. Ask his sport coat.
Because the coat – a light khaki, camel hair-affair on a recent November day – says everything that Hugh Testerman says, but more poignantly and with more detail.
On its soft exterior, it voices the talking points Testerman emphasizes: fine threads; elegantly tailored; unique. On the inside, the coat hints at an industry trend that Testerman is less enthusiastic to discuss: The label is a fine garment maker that is no longer making suits.
“A lot of vendors have gone out of business,” Testerman said. “A lot are cutting back on production.”
It is this combo – old-fashioned quality that is increasingly scarce – that adds depth to a phrase Testerman repeats several times in the course of an interview: “There are no stores likes this anymore.”
Scarcity, in fact, is the force that begat Blakley-Mitchell – the offspring of two State Street clothing stores that merged during the Great Depression. Through the 20th century to the present, the store has grown roots and developed a brand its owners have marketed well beyond the region, jockeying for status among the elite clothing stores of metropolitan areas.
Blakley-Mitchell has burnished its reputation by clothing the local business and political elite, from congressmen to candy magnates to NASCAR executives – and anyone who won’t settle for a generic-fitting suit.
But while Testerman won’t acknowledge any peer stores as rivals, Blakley-Mitchell’s history and brand have not sheltered the store from the current economic slide.
“Anything that can take a guy’s dollar is going to be my competitor,” Testerman said.
Buying in
The year was 1933 when the stores Smith-Blakley and Mitchell Smith consolidated into Blakley-Mitchell – a union forged of tough economic times, from what Testerman remembers his father telling him.
Both stores were still listed independently in Bristol city directories as late as 1932, and the name Blakley-Mitchell first appears in a 1934 directory, the Herald Courier found.
The Mitchells were established clothiers who at one point ran a store where Java J’s is currently located on State Street, said Bristol historian V.N. “Bud” Phillips. At that time, Samuel W. Mitchell was in business with the Gump family, some of Bristol’s pioneering Jewish merchants. By the late 1920s, Claude B. Mitchell had partnered with Thomas C. Smith, and the two apparently merged with a separate store run by William H. “Bill” Blakley and his partner. It is unclear who the “Smith” was in Smith-Blakley.
Ted Testerman, a long-serving Sullivan County Commissioner, served an even longer tenure at Blakley-Mitchell, where he started as a salesman in 1954, fresh from the Korean War, at a princely $50 a week. He went on to buy the business in 1973, and died in March 2007.
In 1987, the Testerman family expanded its reach to Kingsport, opening a smaller branch where another storied clothier, Fuller & Hillman, first opened in 1929. That store is managed by Hugh Testerman’s brother, William.
Hugh Testerman began working at the family business as a high school freshman, and with the exception of stints in construction, woodworking and fish-frying, he has worked there since. He now occupies his father’s old office at the back of the block-deep store – a veritable shrine to the Republican Party, populated by a score or so of elephants: a knee-high, leather-stuffed elephant; several wax representations of vibrant, pastel elephants; and another gilded with seashells. Photos of Republican presidents and officials adorn the walls.
If the old office suggests an outsized personality, Hugh Testerman doesn’t play it down.
Using a phrase that seemed to minimize the store’s earlier owners, Testerman said the business “wasn’t doing anything until my father got here.”
That father tailored clothes for three governors between Tennessee and Virginia – including Winfield Dunn, who appointed Ted Testerman to the Industrial and Agricultural Development Commission. Ted Testerman also suited former U.S. Rep. Jimmy Quillen, a Kingsport Republican.
The list goes on.
NASCAR driver Rusty Wallace bought a suit here, Hugh Testerman said, after the first race he won at the Bristol Motor Speedway.
Mike Helton, NASCAR’s president and a Bristol native, has been known to don the Enro dress shirts the store carries.
The meticulously groomed Bristol funeral directors Sid Oakley and David Akard shop at Blakley-Mitchell.
George Helms III, president of Helms Candy Co., was a friend of Ted Testerman’s and also shops at the family store.
“What keeps it going is its tremendous history,” said Rodger Williams, a neatly coiffed store employee with a trim moustache and a necktie crisply knotted in a Double Windsor.
Standing on reputation
“You won’t see a store like this anywhere,” Hugh Testerman said.
He means this in a glass-half-full kind of way – not that his store is an economically endangered species, but that it is a fortress of quality, volume and expert attention to detail.
As to volume of merchandise, Testerman said, “If you can’t find it, you’re not looking.”
The store carries everything from socks and underwear to shoes and hats and custom-made clothing. Testerman said he buys his goods twice a year from Charlotte, N.C. Most of the clothing is American-made, he said.
Another favorite selling point is the tailoring business.
“If you can’t get fitted here,” Testerman likes to say, “you can’t get fitted.”
He said he carries suit sizes ranging from a 34-inch short to a 54-inch extra long. It is a message that Testerman, who said he spends between $30,000 and
$50,000 in advertising a year, has yet to own on his street block. A few shops down the street, Robert Bailey, owner of Pendleton’s Jewelry, flashed a label from Hunter & Lord’s in Knoxville.
Asked why he didn’t shop at his neighbor’s, the diminutive Bailey said, “I’m hard to fit.”
But the Testermans have never relied solely on customers from Bristol; they have reached out all over Southwest Virginia, Northeast Tennessee, West Virginia and North Carolina.
Reputation is hard to break down, but Hugh Testerman pins it on customer service, and describes it best when he tells stories.
When the Miss Virginia pageant came to Bristol in late October, the event announcer came to Blakley-Mitchell needing a pair of slacks. The tailors had left for the day, so Testerman got out his sewing kit and fixed a pant leg – something he hadn’t done in years and wasn’t even sure he knew how to do.
“I just knew I had to,” Testerman said, highlighting just how tough a taskmaster a reputation can be.
But is pure reputation and commitment to service a business model that can survive the tough economic times of today?
That is a topic Testerman is reluctant to touch. Asked about previous hard times, he replied, “There weren’t none.”
He dismisses competition from Internet shopping sources as insignificant – “Who’s going to buy a suit on the Internet?” – and defends his name-brand dress shirts as a better value than less-expensive threads at Walmart and Target.
In a small concession to the budget-conscious, Testerman is increasingly stocking his shelves with non-iron shirts and slacks – “so you can save on dry cleaning,” he said.
The dire economic predictions, Testerman believes, have been exaggerated – at least as far as Bristol is concerned.
“This area has not been hit like other areas,” he said. “You don’t have many foreclosures. A few have lost jobs, but Bristol doesn’t have the industry to lose jobs” in a big way.
As for cost increases, he passes a little on to the customers by incrementally raising his prices, and absorbs the rest. He has enough capital on hand to ride out two years of bad business, he said.
And, when pressed, he said that business has not been that good.
“I don’t see people spending money like they used to,” he said. “They’re trying to get more wear out of their suits.”
Asked if he’s noticed a trend of shabbier-looking Bristolians, Testerman qualified his observation.
“We sold a $1,000 sport coat yesterday,” he said.
dgilbert@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2558
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