A slice of old Miami is closing shop in Wynwood. How it found fame by ‘calling all men’
“Li’l Ole Burkie’ll fit ya personally! Calling All Men! Calling All Men!”
Listen to jovial Austin Burke while he yanks layer after layer of jackets off his portly frame on late-night TV commercials sandwiched between “The Midnight Special” and “The Tomorrow Show.”
Burke came across as the everyman owner of an everyman clothing store, on the border of Miami’s Wynwood and Allapattah neighborhoods. He founded the wholesale clothing outlet a decade after opening his first business in Miami Beach in 1945.
But you’d never know that the man who built a men’s clothing business and who shouted “Li’l Ole Burkie loves you all” while swaddled in a rack full of coats to show off the inventory on those old TV commercials was, well, allergic to wool.
Austin Burke died in 1987, but his namesake store kept going under the ownership of his son and a longtime business partner. Now, the old store — opened in 1955, and built on personality, TV and radio ads, and some good old-fashioned discounts — is shutting for good.
Austin Burke owners are retiring
For decades, two Miami Beach High schoolmates in the 1970s have run Austin Burke since the founder’s death — son, Austin “Barry” Burke Jr. and Kenny Sager.
“We both came out of Beach High; we’re Miami Beach kids,” Sager said.
Both owners, who live in West Broward and are 68, say it’s time to go out of business and retire in March.
There’s a even bit of Austin Burke’s salesmanship character in Sager, who has plugged the store on The Happy Customer Channel on YouTube or on frequent radio commercials and as a guest on Big 105.9.
“They had a great run of 70 years,” said retail expert Steven Henenfeld, executive vice president of retail services with Colliers International Miami.
“The apparel industry is a tough business and to make it 70 years is a testament to the tenants’ hard work and desire to succeed,” he said. “After 70 years, they deserve to sell their real estate, make a lot of money and ride off into the sunset.”
Today’s social media influencers in nearby Wynwood may easily miss the the store, a 7,500-square-foot white cinder-block showroom with green shamrock logo in what was once billed as Miami’s Fashion District on Northwest Sixth Avenue hugging I-95.
The surrounding Wynwood neighborhood has changed around the Austin Burke store, with artsy attractions and eat-and-be-seen restaurants. The area has become so hip that Burke and Sager sold the building for $8 million in 2021. They had purchased it for $300,000 in the 1980s.
Closing sale brings customers
So, the end is coming for “Lil Ol’ Burkie,” but not from a lack of business. Judging by the frenzy that had 19-year-old sales clerk Oswaldo Chamorro hopping on a busy Friday afternoon at the store, plenty of people still browse and buy Austin Burke merch.
Customers looking for a prom jacket or a button-down-shirt for an assisted living social, seem to cherish the store that famously has carried “suits in 34-short for the 100-pounder to 76-portly-long for the 700-pounder” for seven decades.
Somehow, Austin Burke — the store that outfitted the Miami Heat’s Udonis Haslem, actor Don Johnson and other cast members of “Miami Vice,” Burt Reynolds in Carl Hiaasen’s “Strip Tease,” and sports personality Dan Le Batard — has outlasted many of the others in Miami’s Fashion District. Once as well known but now gone are Dorissa Children’s World, Mapsi Casual and Peter Kent.
Now, it’s time to sell off Austin Burke’s inventory and bid farewell to a Miami institution.
“Calling All Men! Calling All Men!”
Until March ends, the owners are moving the mountainous inventory at Austin Burke and started doing so at “retirement sale” prices.
Born into the business
Austin Burke Jr., who goes by Barry, was born into the business. Kenny Sager was a teen at the peak of the late-1970s polyester disco era who was looking for a job to make a few bucks.
“I was in high school,” Burke said. “I was already working here and my parents had an ad for a clothing salesman and Kenny came in from the ad. He started to work and that day he went for lunch. He was very, very, very close to just not coming back. Something in his mind told him, ‘No, let me stick around. Let me gut it out.’ And the rest is history. ...”
“Forty-seven years ago,” Sager said. “I was a kid from Brooklyn. Had nothing. We bought the building. We sold the building. And you know what, when you buy the building for 300 [thousand] and sell it for 8 million, we don’t have to work. The legacy is, do we have one? Yes, we have a great brand and our sales are on top. We’re on top of the world. Our sales have gone up every year. But it’s not all about the money anymore. It’s about our lives, what we have left — 10, 15 years. And you know what? It’s our time now,” Sager said.
“Customers walk in the door. The first thing they say is, ‘What am I going to do without you guys? Where am I going to buy a suit?’ ... We’re iconic. There’s no other stores like this store. We have a tailor shop. We have 10,000 suits, 5,000 sport coats,” Sager said.
“There’s a saying that you want to get out while you’re on top, and that’s where we’re at right now,” Burke said. “We’re going into the Hall of Fame.”
Loyal customers and guarantees
For 49 years of his 70 years, customer Jose Serra has been shopping at Austin Burke, dating back to the founder’s days. “I used to call him ‘Old Man Burkie’ and Kenny was always there,” Serra said on a recent Friday afternoon, moments after the retired food industry executive was one of dozens of people popping in and out of the store with new clothes.
Serra’s job used to include travel to markets in China and Italy. He needed proper attire. The gloss-free Austin Burke was never snazzy and still isn’t trying to compete with those fancy mall shops. The wood paneling lining the store holds sports memorabilia and photos of famous customers. The decor is straight out of the 1960s. Piping on the ceiling above the racks is outfitted to hang suits. Customers pluck a particular cut or color off the rack. Tailors and staffers, some as young as 19, some old enough to remember “Ol’ Man Burkie,” hustle to serve the masses.
“I always bought my suits there. I probably have bought probably two, three suits a year, maybe a blazer or two a year. What I really liked was the good quality and then the old, free alterations. Kenny, since I was younger, since my 20s, did a good job. He had good quality. Always a fair market value and then the alterations,” Serra said.
The adjustments Serra touts were famously offered free for life in keeping with the founder’s marketing. That practice had to alter during the fen-phen diet drug combo craze in the late-1990s.
Burke and Sager rescinded the free-for-life offer in 1997 when customers who lost so much weight on fen-phen and fad diets started demanding suit remakes, not simple tailoring, causing the store to lose $250,000 in a year and sending its 10 tailors “into overload,” the Miami Herald reported at the time.
Since then, until now, the offer has been free tailoring for a year, with a date-stamp on the receipt and inside the garment pocket.
Changing Wynwood neighborhood
Serra navigated to the store from his Kendall home, wending his way through bumpy roadways under construction and leading into rapidly changing neighborhoods.
“From an emotional side it’s another end of an old establishment,” he said of the store’s pending shutdown. “We all grew up with them. I started going there when I was in my early 20s. I haven’t been in Wynwood in about three years and I was surprised driving around saying, ‘Holy cow, look at all this building. That building wasn’t there. That building wasn’t there. So Miami is rapidly becoming a mini New York — if it’s not there already.”
So, it’s time to move on. The owners’ children are grown professionals in law, medicine and other fields with lives and families of their own, Sager said. Passing down the business to keep it in the family isn’t an option.
“We have no one to leave the business to and it’s a very hard business because you have to be here 24-7, seven days a week,” Sager said. “It’s hands-on and it’s very hard to have family and have a good time. It’s very rewarding financially, but you can’t spend it. ... We saw the city grow and our customers grew. And now it’s harder than ever with all the buildings and the traffic. We live in Davie and Weston, so it’s kind of harder for us to get down here. Used to be 40 minutes. Now it’s an hour.”
What would “Ol’ Man Burkie” think of how things turned out?
Said Sager: “”Very happy to see we took it to the next level.”
This story was originally published January 13, 2025 at 1:04 PM.
