The Black Tux, a suit and tuxedo rental startup, landed $25 million in its latest funding round, fueling its mission to eliminate the days of customers overpaying to rent lackluster garments for special events.
“The current tuxedo rental market is served by the same two manufacturers across every retail store in the U.S.,” The Black Tux co-founder Andrew Blackmon told TechCrunch. “We’re talking polyester suits, microfiber shirts, and plastic shoes… any guy who has rented before knows the experience.”
Instead, The Black Tux owns its entire supply chain and operates logistics in-house, from dry cleaning and tailoring, to inventory management. This allows the company to offer its suits, tuxedos and accessories for a lower rate, TechCrunch reported.
“This is a multibillion dollar industry that’s completely overlooked because it’s completely unsexy,” Blackmon added. “There’s little incentive to change because the whole industry is ubiquitous, and most people in the garment or fashion industry don’t look at rentals as something they want to disrupt.”
But Black Tux is on a mission to change that, with its suits and tuxedos starting at $95 to rent and the average customer spending $140.
The company uses an online fitting process to match a customer’s measurements to Black Tux garments via an algorithm and Black Tux claims it offers the same high-quality Italian merino wool tuxedos sold by high-end labels.
The funding round was led by Stripes Group with participation from existing investors First Round and Menlo Ventures. The Black Tux secured $10 million in Series A funding in January, with the most recent capital bringing the company’s funding total to $40 million, TechCrunch confirmed.
The ability to allow customers to access high-end clothing at affordable prices via rental services is an idea has proved to be successful for Web retailer Rent-the-Runway.
Late last year the company reportedly raised $60 million in venture capital, pushing its overall valuation at the time to between $500 million and $600 million.
“What we do in the realm of high fashion is open up the total addressable market to millions of women who haven’t been able to afford it before,” said Jennifer Hyman, co-founder of the company.
While The Black Tux confirmed with Business Insider it only estimates its share of the $1.2 billion formal tuxedo market to be about 2 percent, the company plans to expand that significantly by using its new capital to double its employees and boost its growth.
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