Ricardo's Tailoring

Growing up in a small stucco house in Jalisco, Mexico, one of eight kids of a construction laborer, Ricardo Torres hardly had the makings of a promising entrepreneur. He was forced to do manual labor at the age of 6 and didn't complete the equivalent of a tenth-grade education until he was 25. No matter. Torres, 50, always had two undeniable strengths - a warm personality and an enormous capacity for work - and he parlayed that into Ricardo's, a 19-year-old tailoring and menswear shop in Sunnyvale.