Built by hand, run by name
Climbwise Tailoring is a two-cutter atelier in Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Kuala Lumpur. We keep the client list short on purpose.
The house opened in 2018 when Adrian Koh and Faridah Zainal — one trained under a Savile Row-schooled cutter in Singapore, the other in her family’s alteration shop in Ipoh — decided they were done rushing other people’s work. They rented a corner lot above a kopitiam in TTDI, bought a second-hand pressing table, and agreed on a single rule: nothing leaves the room until both cutters would wear it themselves.
That rule has survived more than 1,400 commissions. It is why we still draft every pattern on paper, why baste fittings are never skipped to save a week, and why we will sometimes talk a client out of a commission and into a simple alteration instead. A tailoring house earns its regulars in the years after delivery, not at the till.
Most of our clients arrive the same way you probably did — sent by someone whose suit they admired. They stay because their pattern lives here, refined a little with every order, so the fourth suit takes half the fittings of the first and fits twice as well.
What the house believes
The pattern is the product
Cloth wears out; a good pattern only improves. Yours is drafted once, corrected at every fitting, and archived under your name for as long as the house stands.
Cut for the climate
A suit that behaves in London will sulk in Kuala Lumpur. We favour open weaves, half-linings and tropical-weight cloths that keep their line at 33 degrees.
One pair of hands
The cutter who measures you chalks your cloth, runs your fittings and signs off the final press. Nothing is handed down a line of strangers.
Honesty over turnover
If a ready-made jacket plus RM180 of alteration will serve you better than a RM3,000 commission, we will say so. We would rather keep you than bill you.
Small garments matter
A child’s first blazer is measured, basted and fitted like a dinner jacket. Nobody forgets the first garment that actually fit them.
Repair before replace
We maintain what we make — and rescue what others made — because the most sustainable garment is the one already hanging in your wardrobe.
Two chairs, no juniors
Adrian Koh cuts the house’s suits and ceremony wear. Sixteen years at the board have left him with strong opinions about shoulder expression and a gentle refusal to pad anything that does not need padding.
Faridah Zainal leads shirts, womenswear and the alteration bench. She can read a hanging garment the way most people read a sentence, and she is the reason our repair work is booked two weeks out.
