It is often said said that necessity is the mother of design, but in Tanya Zhang’s case, her father had more than a hand in an invention the 2011 San Marino High School graduate hopes will soon be coming to a closet near you.
“I remember going from store to store with my dad after finally convincing him to splurge a little on himself,” Zhang said. “When it came to finding a crisp new dress shirt, he’d say right off the bat, ‘American dress shirts don’t fit me.’ I realized I would often hear the same issues from many of my friends, especially leaner Asian Americans with slimmer body types. They couldn’t find a good-quality, well-fitting dress shirt in the United States without having to pay a premium or shop in the Junior section.”
That’s the necessity, here comes the invention.
“I see whole brands and lines of clothing dedicated specifically for ‘petite’ women, but nothing similar catering to very slim men,” Zhang told The Tribune. “I want to be a part of changing the dynamic clothing landscape and drive awareness of Asian culture through the lens of thoughtfully crafted goods.”
With that in mind, Zhang and a friend started Nimble Made, a men’s dress shirt brand which Zhang said is “focused on increasing representation and inclusion in sizing for unique, actually-slim sizes.”
“Our dress shirts have a trimmed shirt length, sleeve length, and back and shoulder measurements for an actually slim fit,” she said.
Sizing issues also became a personal struggle for Wesley Kang, the friend and co-founder of Nimble Made. As a leaner 5’5,” 140 lb. Asian man working in the finance industry, Kang also found it difficult to find a good fit for his body type—and he was required to wear a dress shirt every day to work.
“He could never express himself properly in a professional way,” Zhang said.
She explained that the dress shirt industry creates their current size charts through an averaging method that caters to the mass market.
“The ‘slim fit’ in the industry is still too large for many leaner men,” Zhang said. “For guys like my dad and Wesley, I have seen them try on many different dress shirt brands, only to find that even the ‘slim fit’ is still too big. Sleeves were usually too long and baggy or the shirt would overflow at the waist. A lot of our customers are guys who, previous to finding Nimble Made, had to get their dress shirts tailor-made.”
Nimble Made specializes in fit solutions for different body types and are more similar to dress shirt brands like Ash & Eerie, who market to short men.
“Except our niche is slim guys, though we can still fit tall men,” she said. “What you’ll get with our dress shirts is trimmed measurements across the back and shoulders, shirt length, sleeve length, and chest. Nimble Made is a response to the dress shirt industry to look at sizing more holistically. Currently, the industry sizes through a function of neck and sleeve length while we size through a function of height and weight, which we believe is the better indication of someone’s size.”
Zhang graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 2015 with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts. She moved to New York City to start her career in advertising, working with brands like H&M, Nissan, McDonald’s, Michelin and others. She became the first brand design hire at a Manhattan financial tech startup before becoming a design consultant at Ernst & Young. She left her corporate job in 2018 to pursue Nimble Made full time and was recently featured by such media outlets as MONEY Magazine, Yahoo News!, MSN and Times of San Diego.
But her roots are still in San Marino, and the daughter of Qing Yun Zhang and Sophie Lin and stepfather Finno Wang fondly recalls her days as a Titan.
And a (Huntington Middle School) Fox.
And a (Carver Elementary School) Pioneer.
“I was very involved in Key Club at San Marino High School and served as president my senior year and was also on the district board,” she said. “I also have a soft spot for Yearbook, which I was a part of for all four years at SMHS. I even attended Yearbook Camp each summer and worked closely with Mrs. Lou Ann Fuentes and then Mr. Jose Cairé, who were our yearbook advisors during my time there.”
San Marino High School’s yearbooks are perennial award-winners, thanks to passionate contributors like Zhang. It’s doubtful this latest venture will be any different.
