NORTH BEND – Chad and Lucia Iovanovici want to make sure every suit and dress fits just right. As founders and owners of Lucia’s European Tailoring and Alteration, they have wanted to make sure they did that work in North Bend, as well.

“We love North Bend,” Chad said.

Chad was born and raised in Romania, where he went to tailoring school. In Romania, the schools are more specialized and Chad went to a tailoring school during his high-school years. After three years of training, Chad learned everything from trimming up a new suit to building a complete suit from scratch.

When he was 16, Chad met a girl named Lucia in a tailoring shop in which he worked. They were married two years later and started a family one year after that. Chad wanted to get his family out of then-communist Romania, so the family moved to Germany in 1986 and continued to work as tailors and supervisors in a clothing factory. The Iovanovici family worked in Germany until 1989 and then moved to the United States to settle in Phoenix. Arizona was a little too hot for the family and they moved to Los Angeles. They spent less than a year there, however, and moved to Washington.

“I always knew I wanted to live in Washington,” Chad said.

Chad and Lucia went to work at the Nordstrom store in Bellevue. They would work there for 10 years, all the while building up a strong client base.

The Iovanovicis also visited North Bend, a town they came to love, and bought a house in 1996.

“I grew up in a large city with lots of traffic and noise and I didn’t want that,” Chad said.

The family thought about opening a shop in town, but wanted to improve their English before taking on a whole business. They waited a few more years and finally opened their first store on Main Avenue in North Bend in 2001, specializing in custom suits and the tailoring skills the couple has perfected since they were children.

“There are not many [trained] tailors any more,” said Chad. “People appreciate the quality.”

Last year they bought the building on North Bend Way that used to house Iron Age gifts and moved in, followed by North Bend Guitars that later moved in next door. The couple likes the more visible location and hopes to renovate the building in the coming years.

Although not many people come in with the raw materials needed to make a suit, the Iovanovicis stay busy tailoring dresses and suits. Lucia was especially busy last week putting the finishing touches on dresses for the Mount Si High School prom. The couple wants to bring tailoring, which was taught as a craft in their homeland, to their new home in North Bend.

“We want to make it [our tailoring] better and better,” Lucia said.

Ben Cape can be reached at (425) 888-2311 or by e-mail at ben.cape@valleyrecord.com.