Meet Martin Tailors, Houston’s go-to tailor for Astros and Rockets

Rice University jerseys wait to be worked on near shelves stacked with buttons. Photographs, newspaper clippings, military memorabilia cover the walls. Longtime customers walk through the same doors their families have used for generations.

And behind the sewing machines, members of the Hernandez family are always working, as they have since 1972.

Martin Hernandez III grew up here, first as a child getting into his grandfather’s thread and scissors, then as a young man learning the trade that has passed through his family.

“I was probably five or six years old and going to Memorial Elementary,” he said. “As soon as I got out of school, I would go straight to the tailor shop.”

Now 45, he carries not only the family business but also his grandfather’s name.

“It means I have big shoes to fill,”  Martin III said. “Sometimes it feels like I haven’t quite filled those shoes. There’s pressure, but it’s a good pressure.”

An old chair in the shop keeps him especially close to his grandfather. Martin Sr. made its cushion himself and hid inside it a tool he used whenever something needed fixing — plumbing, a car or a problem around the shop. He called it “the key of life.”

“I remember sitting there doing homework. I remember cutting fabrics there, eating my food there and having talks with him. Sometimes because I was in trouble and sometimes just general talks where he’d give me his wisdom,” he said. “Everything happened around that chair.”

His grandfather, Martin Hernandez Sr., built the business with his wife, María. Orphaned as a child, Martin Sr. spent part of his youth in Harlingen before returning to Mexico. He worked with cattle and lived as a vaquero before learning to tailor.

He met his wife, María del Socorro Hernandez, as teenagers studying in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He was 19. She was 17.

They knew each other for three years before marrying. Before the wedding, he gave her a choice.

“I’m going back to my country,” she remembers him telling her. “We’re going to live in the United States. If we have a family, I want them to be educated there.”

“You decide,” he told her.

“And I decided,” she said.

They eventually built a life in Houston around family, faith and a tailor shop that would grow alongside the city. Martin Sr. spoke English. María did not. And money was tight. “We worked a lot,” María said. “It wasn’t easy. But everything can be done when you have the will to say, ‘I can.’”

The shop became an extension of their home. Martin Jr. played in a baby walker between the racks while his father worked. After school, he and his siblings returned to the shop. In time, nieces, nephews and grandchildren would grow up there, too; some working at the shop while attending college.

Today, four generations of the Hernandez family work at Martin Tailors. Blanca Hilda Hernandez, Martin III’s mother and the widow of the late Martin Jr., remembers her father-in-law encouraging younger family members to use the shop as a place to begin.

“Use the shop as a stepping stone to go to college, and then spread your wings,” she remembers him telling them.

She also remembers the effort it took to build it.

“They worked until three or four in the morning almost every day while they were building this place,” Hilda said. “That’s what legacy means to me.”

The legacy Hilda described covered a table: Martin Sr.’s Mexican passport and a letter he wrote to his son while his son was serving in the Marines. In it, he described a duplex he hoped to buy after years of leasing space for the business and drew a blueprint. That duplex, at 4712 Feagan St. in Houston, is now the home of Martin Tailors.

Some of the family’s history has also become part of Houston’s.

Before the Houston police officers who would become known as the Chicano Squad became detectives, some were already customers, Martin III said.

The squad was formed in 1979, when HPD pulled a group of Mexican American officers from patrol duty and tasked them with investigating unsolved homicides in Houston’s Latino communities, where language barriers and deep distrust of police had left many cases unresolved. The bilingual officers went on to become a groundbreaking homicide unit within the department.

When the officers moved into the unit and needed suits, they turned to his grandfather.

“My grandfather said, ‘Bring in your sport coats. Bring in your blazers, and I’ll show you how to dress. I’ll show you how to put yourself together,’”  Martin III said.

Decades later, some still return.

Around 2014, Martin III said, the team called looking for help with uniform repairs. Gloves needed restitching. Baseball pants needed patches. Some players, superstitious about their uniforms, preferred repairing the same pair rather than replacing them.

“They’d call and ask, ‘Can you tailor the jerseys? Can you stitch the numbers on? Can you take the jerseys in? Can you make them shorter?’” he said. Sports clients now include the Rockets and the University of Houston.

But when Martin III thinks about those calls, he doesn’t think about the teams first.

“The first person I think about is my grandfather,” he said. “I think about how excited he would be if I could tell him, ‘Hey, Grandpa, we got this account,’ or, ‘They called us today. They want us to do this.’”

For the Hernandez family, the work has never been only about clothing.

John Hernandez, Martin Sr.’s son and a co-owner of the shop, describes himself as a “process engineer,” constantly looking for ways to improve not just an alteration, but the experience of the person walking through the door. Today, the shop handles alterations and repairs everything from everyday clothing and suits to wedding gowns, leatherwork and uniforms.

“It’s not a transaction,” John said. “It’s a relationship. And I’m in it for the long haul.”

He now serves some of the same families his father served.

“I’m seeing three generations of people come through here,” he said. “I’m there at their proms. I’m there at their christenings. I’m there at their weddings. I’m there at the funerals.”

That intimacy is also how Martin III understands the business.

A customer might arrive with a suit for a first job, clothing for a wedding or something to wear to a funeral. Sometimes, the conversation moves far beyond the garment.

“It’s not just altering their clothes,” Martin III said. “It’s like altering their life.”

Over time, customers have watched the Hernandez family change, too.

They saw Martin III grow up. Some remember his grandfather. Others have known the family long enough to notice when something is wrong before Hernandez says a word.

“The community takes care of us, and we’re going to take care of the community as best as we can,” he said.

John calls tailoring a “dying art,” not because people have stopped caring about how they look, but because the speed and disposability of modern clothing have changed people’s relationship with craftsmanship.

“You can always sell quality,” John remembers his father saying. “Always.”

Martin III approaches the craft by first understanding the person standing in front of him.

“When we first meet someone, we try to understand their character, who they are and what they like,” he said. “Then we try to make the clothes match not only their body, but who they are.”

María’s memories reach back further. She remains a presence at Martin Tailors today, working alongside the generations that followed her and her husband.

She and Martin Sr. were married for 52 years. Together, they raised four children, ran the shop and later served a congregation for 28 years as pastors.

When her husband knew his heart was failing, she said he asked not to die in a hospital.

“I want to die at home seeing my children,” she remembers him telling her.

She held his hand when he died.

“When I saw the joy with which he left, the smile he had, I raised my hands and said, ‘Lord, thank you for the husband, the father, the companion and the great man he was,’” María said.

Before he died, Martin Sr. asked her to stay with the shop and take care of their son, Martin Jr. Years later, when Martin Jr. became sick, he made the same request. “Mom, stay. Take care of my children,” she remembers him saying.

Martin Jr. has since died. But María is still there.

So are her children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren.

Martin III hopes someone in those generations will eventually decide the shop is theirs to carry. He dreams of reaching 100 years, perhaps rebuilding on the property and leaving something for whoever steps forward next.

“Whoever’s next in the family, step up to the plate,” he said.

María, now surrounded by the generations she watched grow up inside the shop, puts it more simply.

“I can happily tell him now: ‘Here I am. Here I am. Here I am, until God comes for me too.’”

Then she returned to the phrase that has carried her family through decades of work, loss and change.

“Everything can be done.”