Fletcher alum Dan Snyder started his career in the FBI, but followed his passion for tailoring
A Good Fit for Fashion
When Dan Snyder, F14, worked for the FBI almost a decade ago, he wore off-the-rack suits that fit so poorly he had to bring them to a tailor to be altered. The experience was a revelation.
“I didn’t even like clothes,” he recalled. “But then I got into tailoring, and I went head over heels.” Today, Snyder is the designer behind his own clothing line, Corridor, which is sold in his stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn and by ninety retailers in sixteen countries.
Snyder said his success grew organically as he followed his interests. After learning to sew in night school, he started making his own shirts and tailoring clothes for friends, including his classmates at Fletcher, where he studied security and international business with an eye toward joining the CIA.
While interning with the New York Police Department counterterrorism unit, he frequented the city’s garment district, visiting factories to learn all he could. “I would literally knock on doors,” he said. “I didn’t have a mentor.”
What Snyder did have was determination—and confidence in his own taste. He created a business plan as his capstone project at Fletcher and started selling shirts wholesale from a backpack.
After graduation, he took a job at Palantir, a Silicon Valley contractor that develops software for spy agencies, while moonlighting nights and weekends building his business. “I was working nineteen-hour days for about two years to bootstrap the company,” he said.
Snyder named his company after the Northeast corridor—Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston—where he had lived and worked. His first clothing line was tiny, just twelve shirts. But the next was fifty-four, and then 120. “The profits from each previous line would go right back into making more,” he said. In 2016, after leaving Palantir to focus on Corridor, he launched his first line for women.
Snyder aims for ethical production, and hopes his clothes will bring joy and confidence to the people wearing them, as his poorly fitted suits never did for him. “The purpose of the brand,” he said, “is to make beautiful things.”
Heather Stephenson can be reached at heather.stephenson@tufts.edu.
