How Fredericton’s Jeff Alpaugh Is Adding Some ‘Danger’ To The Weather Network’s Forecasts
FREDERICTON – After doing business during Covid-19, Jeff Alpaugh knows a thing or two about living dangerously – after all he describes his custom-fit designer dress shirts the same way.
Still, whatever Alpaugh was dressed for in February 2020 could not prepare him or his company, Jeff Alpaugh Custom, for the business climate of the last 22 months.
Following up on an expansive 2019, the Fredericton-based men’s custom clothier was primed for an exciting kick-off to 2020. It was ready to open a second location in Waterloo and had an enticing television brand deal in the works.
But Covid-19 had other plans.
“The pandemic came three weeks later, and I did spend and invest a lot of our momentum and resources into a store in Ontario, which obviously in hindsight was unwise because it was locked down for most of the time,” Alpaugh recalled in an interview with Huddle.
Alpaugh holds up a well-designed mask, gently folding it into a nice square, suitable for a breast pocket. It’s something you could stow away into the classic hanky hideout.
The new product was a little bit of a pivot for his company, but Alpaugh says it was timely enough to weather the storm of the pandemic and set up for success when the worst was over.
For Alpaugh, that success today is walking into a gym and seeing The Weather Network on the TVs above a bank of cardio machines, with the anchor wearing what Alpaugh has branded “the world’s most dangerous dress shirts.”
His business over the past two years has not only overcome long periods of store closure due to Covid-19 restrictions in Ontario. It also made it through a bizarre loss of digital advertising capabilities when both Facebook and Google misinterpreted a promo campaign, something Alpaugh says took nearly six months to get corrected.
“We launched this ‘get vaccinated’ campaign where we had this mask that said, ‘hashtag vaccinated,’ and my understanding is that Google thought that we were trying to book people in for false vaccine appointments and they thought we were essentially a scam.”
Alpaugh says while the misunderstanding was being figured out with Google, and his Waterloo store shut down, his company’s Fredericton area store was the only thing keeping the business going.
The Waterloo location was allowed to re-open this summer around the same digital advertising returned after Google realized Alpaugh’s business was indeed a small clothing company based in New Brunswick and not, as he chuckled, “a bunch of scam artists.”
Getting ready for the green screen
Prior to the pandemic, Alpaugh had already engaged in some business with The Weather Network, getting on track with its staff through a close friend whom he had roomed with during his military days.
It didn’t take long for Jeff’s shirts to end up on television.
“I went down there and hung out with the on-air personalities,” says Alpaugh.
He says he was able to talk to them about their clothing and how they dressed for each broadcast, including what happens when certain fabrics are worn in front of a green screen.
“There’s actually a lot of minor nuances to consider when it comes to the clothing aspect of broadcasting,” he explains, adding green solids won’t show on screen, while lined patterns and hard contrasting colours can distort on camera even with minimal movement – all things the anchor must consider before going on camera.
Alpaugh got a second visit with The Weather Network staff, and recalls not really having to drive the sell, in a scene which can only be described as, “if clothing could talk.”
“Luckily, some of these guys were really excited to meet me because we had such a good time with the first crew. So, I showed up to help out the second group and I swear, just as I was helping out the second group, the clothing came in for the first group. And then, you know, the guys put it on and it fit like a glove and they were like, ‘Oh my God, I’m missing out’…it was just insane,” says Alpaugh.
Well-timed deliveries aside, Alpaugh’s brand now gets the daily call-outs for outfitting The Weather Network team, a process he says started before the pandemic but had to be shelved for an indefinite period due to the daily Covid-19 challenge.
Betting on better weather to come
Alpaugh sees 2022 as being the year when wedding bookings finally take off. If venues begin booking again, suit orders are sure to follow. It is a line of business he says has helped attract new customer interest around the Maritimes.
Alpaugh is also eyeing additional expansion in some non-traditional fashion locales.
“I think people will be shocked to hear when I say the third location is going to be in Austin, Texas,” says Alpaugh, whose energy begins to build as he walks through his approach to get his clothes into emerging tech-towns, building on what the company has been doing in perhaps Canada’s best-known harvester for tech, Waterloo.
“Rather than fight to be another fashion guy in Toronto, I wanted to go to Waterloo, the Silicon Valley of this country, and own the tech space – those are my people, you know, if I get some bankers in there too, brilliant,” says Alpaugh.
While he’s feeling Austin as the next Silicon Valley, Alpaugh says he is ready to style some “digital renegades” in other cities, and not necessarily in Toronto or traditional fashion hubs like New York.
“It’s really important that I’ve noticed that a lot of really great Canadian clothing companies will expand East to West or West to East, and then they’ll try to go South of the border, and it just doesn’t work,” says Alpaugh.
“I’d like to not just be a Canadian company. I’d like to be a North American company — and I think that you need to figure out how to do business in a second country while your culture is still young, agile and nimble.”
Tyler Mclean is a Huddle reporter based in Fredericton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].