It's a question I get asked more often than you might think, and I'll be honest — it took me a while to settle on a clean answer. The tie industry has a way of blurring categories that seem straightforward on the surface. When you've spent as many years as I have working with schools, corporates, and sports clubs across South Africa, you start to realise that the definitions we use in this trade carry more weight than most people appreciate. So let me unpack this properly, because the answer is genuinely more interesting than a simple yes or no.

To understand where striped school ties sit in the broader conversation about custom ties, it helps to know a little history. The striped tie — or the "regimental stripe," as it was originally known — traces its roots back to British military regiments in the 19th century, where the angle and colour of the stripes identified a soldier's unit at a glance. From there, the tradition moved naturally into British public schools, where house colours, school colours, and prefect distinctions were all communicated through the humble stripe. By the time that tradition arrived on South African shores, it had already been refined over generations into something deeply purposeful. The stripe wasn't decoration — it was identity. And that, I would say, is precisely where the custom ties conversation begins.

Here's the thing about custom ties: the word "custom" doesn't simply mean expensive or elaborate. It means made to a specification that belongs to someone — a school, a company, a club, an institution. When a school comes to a tie manufacturer and says, "we want our house colours in this order, this width, on a navy ground," what they are describing is a custom tie. Full stop. The fact that the design uses stripes rather than a woven crest or a printed pattern doesn't diminish the custom nature of the product one bit. Back in the day, I think there was a tendency in the industry to reserve the "custom" label for more complex woven jacquard work — the kind where a school's crest is woven directly into the fabric. Don't get me wrong, that is extraordinary work and represents the pinnacle of what tie manufacturers can achieve. But limiting the definition to that level of complexity does a disservice to the craft involved in producing striped school ties properly.

What most people outside the industry don't appreciate is the number of decisions that go into a well-made striped school tie. Stripe width, stripe sequence, ground colour, the angle of the stripe, the weight of the silk or polyester, the interlining, the blade width — each of these is a specification, and each one belongs to that school alone once it's been established. At Vinuchi, we've worked with schools that have been wearing the same stripe sequence for forty or fifty years. That stripe pattern is as much a part of the school's visual identity as its crest or its motto. These days, when a new learner puts on that tie for the first time, they're connecting to something that their parents and grandparents wore before them. There is real craft and real history in that.

The distinction I find more useful in practice is not between custom ties and non-custom ties, but between custom ties and stock ties. A stock tie is a generic product — a plain navy tie or a standard dot pattern that you'd find sitting in a display at a clothing retailer. A custom ties,  whether  woven jacquard, printed design, or a set of striped school ties made to a school's exact colour specification, is a product built around a brief. That brief makes it custom, regardless of how visually simple or complex the finished product appears to be.

One could say the tie industry has always been about identity before aesthetics, and I think that's still true. As tie manufacturers, our job is to translate who an institution is into something worn close to the heart — sometimes literally. The striped school tie does this as powerfully as any other format in our trade, and it deserves its place at the custom end of the spectrum. I would say the best measure of  custom ties isn't its complexity — it's whether it belongs to someone. If the answer is yes, then it qualifies.