Q Fifty One is Texas-based retailer that operates two different brands: Q Clothier, a custom-suit store with 6 locations and Rye 51, a more casual luxury men’s apparel brand with a few stores in Texas.
The stores have quickly become popular – with fewer than10 locations and no e-commerce option they are now doing eight figures in revenue.
But any successful and long-lasting business in 2016 needs a web presence. So instead of doing it themselves, Q Fifty One is acquiring Edition Collective, which is an online-only menswear retailer.
We first wrote about Edition Collective in 2014 when they raised $500,000 in seed funding for their concept.
The brand operates two sites: Imprint (formerly Need) and Foremost. Imprint was a monthly e-publication that featured just a dozen menswear items in an editorial format, making it easy for men to quickly decide what they wanted to buy. And Foremost was an actual clothing brand created by the company that sold basic essentials for men and women.
While these two brands are shutting down (including Imprint’s popular iOS app), their persona will live on as part of Q Clothier’s new e-commerce strategy.
To that end, Matt Alexander, founder and CEO of Digital Collective, will become President and CEO of Q Fifty One’s newly created digital group.
While some customers may be disappointed to see Digital Collective wind down, it makes perfect sense from a business perspective. One company has a great supply chain and brick-and-mortar operation, and the other has cracked the mysterious world of men’s e-commerce – why not combine and do a great job at both?
Plus, Q Fifty One’s success can be mainly attributed to figuring out how to tell a story around its products. Their stores (pictured above) look nothing like a regular menswear retail store – which is why it makes sense for them to have stayed out of e-commerce until they found a way to recreate this in-store experience on the web or mobile.