Elegant suits and shirts and ties drew customers to Zareh, the men’s furnishings store in Boston’s Financial District, but often they first visited after hearing about the business from a friend.
Or more precisely, they heard men speak about the proprietor in reverent tones. The secret to Greg Thomajan’s success, customers would say, was Greg Thomajan.
“If you give good service to this customer, he won’t go anywhere else,” Mr. Thomajan told the Globe in 1997.
That was the case for decades as he ran the store his father founded in 1933. He sold it in 2018 and stayed on part-time until the Liberty Square retail location closed during the 2020 pandemic shutdown — nearly 60 years after he began working for his father.
Mr. Thomajan, an accomplished backgammon player who kept a board and dice handy at his shop, died Thursday. He was 87 and lived in Boston.
Customers stayed loyal to the store for as long as they needed suits, and remained friends even longer. The reason, Mr. Thomajan said, was simple.
“This is a store where men buy the clothes they work in,” he told the Globe in 1997, “and these men hate to shop.”
They may have recoiled at the thought of shopping, but they savored the experience of buying clothes from Mr. Thomajan.
A relentless reader, he always had a few books on hand to page through while awaiting the next customer. When the door opened, his attention shifted immediately and fully to whoever stepped in.
Some assumed their physique might pose a problem, such as Stephen Farrell, a former Boston City Council candidate who, at 6-foot-6, was accustomed to finding himself out of luck in any clothing store.
“He offered to help me,” Farrell recalled of their first meeting, more than a half-century ago. “I said, ‘I don’t think you’d have anything that would fit me,’ and he said, ‘Oh, you’re a 44 long.’ "
Another customer the same height bought seven suits every season, Mr. Thomajan told Farrell, assuring him that his search for a suit that fit was over. Their friendship began that moment.
“He was just the most devoted, kind, loyal person anyone could want as a friend,” Farrell said. “Just an extraordinary man.”
John Nelson Ferrara, a friend and customer since 1971, wrote in tribute that “Greg possessed humility, distinction, and charm.”
Like Farrell and many other customers, Ferrara became a friend, and Mr. Thomajan’s friendships outlasted anyone’s need for suits.
“Greg Thomajan came into my life like a shooting star in 1971,” Ferrara wrote, and he offered friendship “steeped in thoughtfulness, generosity, kindness, humor, and loyalty, unshakeable loyalty.”
The door into Zareh Inc., named for Mr. Thomajan’s father, might as well have been a time machine to a bygone era.
“He did things the old-fashioned way and he did just fine,” said his wife, Andrea, who handled the store’s bookkeeping.
“Technology was not his thing. He couldn’t use a computer and he never used a cellphone,” she said. He kept all necessary details about each customer on index cards “with their sizes and tastes and everything they bought.”
Glancing at a customer’s index card, she recalled, he could say: “You bought that suit in 1980. You need a new navy blue suit.”
Mr. Thomajan, whose first marriage ended in divorce, married Andrea Dedekam in 1984, years after she had become an essential part of the business.
She also, incidentally, was better at backgammon.
“The funny thing is he taught me to play and I used to do better at the tournaments,” she said, laughing.
A serious player who preferred to roll the dice when money was on the line, Mr. Thomajan was vice president of the New England Backgammon Club in the 1970s.
“Some people have said that I was the top player in town,” he told the Globe in 1976. In deference to Andrea he added: “Now I’m not even the best player in my own store.”
Gregory Zareh Thomajan was born in Boston on June 23, 1936, and grew up in Brookline.
His mother, Bergie DeMirjian Thomajan, was a homemaker. His father, Zareh Thomajan, had sold men’s clothing to New England fraternity houses before running Harvardashery in Harvard Square, according to his Globe obituary in 1978.
Upon opening Zareh in downtown Boston in 1933, he began writing single-column newspaper advertisements that took the form of brief, witty essays.
His work appeared in the book “The 100 Greatest Advertisements,” and his family published a collection called “The Thief of State Street” — a nickname Zareh had chosen for himself early on, when friends teased him about his high prices (cashmere ties sold for $3.50).
“Zareh’s prose holds up better than that of many of the newspaper columnists of his day,” Bob MacDonald wrote in a Globe review of the book, which subsequently was updated to add advertisement-essays written by Greg Thomajan, who followed in his father’s business and literary footsteps.
Mr. Thomajan graduated from Lawrence Academy and Colby College in Maine, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history.
“I followed my father into retailing because I didn’t know what else to do,” he said in a 2017 interview with MR magazine. “My BA in history was worthless and here was a business with heat and no heavy lifting so I went for it. It turned out that I loved it: I was really lucky.”
Between college and haberdashery was a two-year stint in the Marine Corps at the branch’s Washington, D.C., offices.
Decades later, he began displaying his dress uniform in the Zareh window each year to commemorate the founding of the Marine Corps.
“I’ll say this for my dress blues: No, I can’t get in them, but they command more attention than all my fancy suits combined,” he told the Globe in 1999.
In addition to his wife, Andrea, Mr. Thomajan leaves two sons, Christopher of Belmont and Keith of Portland, Ore.; a daughter, Dana Holland of Kennebunkport, Maine; a brother, Dale of New York City; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
Family and friends will gather to celebrate Mr. Thomajan’s life at 4 p.m. Tuesday at 604 Union Wharf in Boston.
“He was the best husband and we had a wonderful life together. We worked together at the store and we were a great team,” Andrea said. “He loved his family. He was very proud of his children and his grandchildren.”
She added that her husband “was very generous with everyone. He would never pass a homeless person on the street without giving him a 5 or a 10. I remember one day I was with him in the Boston Common and he took out his cash and said, ‘The smallest thing I have is a 20.’ "
He handed over the $20 bill without hesitating. “And that’s who Greg was,” Andrea said.
After first announcing in late 2017 that he planned to close Zareh, Mr. Thomajan sold the store a few months later to Giblees menswear in Danvers.
The arrangement allowed Mr. Thomajan to keep working two or three days a week, assisting customers who had counted on him for decades. He was a proprietor who always looked forward to opening his store.
“My happiest day of the week,” he said, “is Monday morning.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.