How The Black Tux Solved Formal Wear's Biggest Problem

0:00Andrew Blackmon:I do think this is a really, really hard business. This is like six businesses in one. For decades, renting a tuxedo meant settling for an ill-fitting polyester suit with little to no style. Andrew Blackmon rebuilt the Formawear rental experience from scratch. We actually manufacture really high-quality garments at a great price, like better than anyone in our segment. As the founder of the Black Tux, he grew it into a nine-figure business with seven flagship stores and showrooms in over 40 Nordstrom locations. The conversion rate of the stores is so high, we got to open more. Andrew is here to break down how he disrupted the men's formal wear category and is tailoring the Black Tux for the future of retail.

0:41Andrew, welcome to the show.

0:42Andrew Blackmon:Thank you for having me. What's the origin story? You were at a wedding or? Yeah, so I had been in so many different weddings, been to prom a bunch of times. and basically like in all these experiences, I showed up in a suit or a tuxedo that was like two sizes too big and it looked like something that maybe I took out of my dad's closet or something like that. Which you could have done. Yeah, which I could have done, but I didn't want to, no offense to my dad. But yeah, that was like the industry. It was go to a strip mall, try on something from a guy who smells like he just smoked some cigarettes and you're left like either on the altar or as a groomsman or at prom.

1:18Andrew Blackmon:Like these days that, you know, when you're young are like so important to you, I guess always are important to you. And you're just left like not looking your best. So that was the inception of the idea is for such important days, your clothing should help you to feel confident, not work against you. And that was everything we wanted to change. And, you know, we set out to do it and change the delivery method. Like originally the business was totally online. Now we have a bunch of locations, as you mentioned. But really it was about the feeling. Like I really wanted myself and other people to feel confident for those important days in their lives.

1:52Andrew Blackmon:Did you tackle rental first? Because you can purchase, right, these tuxedos online now? We only went after rental at the beginning. But the idea was to expand after. But at the beginning, that's where I really kind of saw like the missed customer experience was on the rental side. So that was how we launched. And then only probably in the last three years have we started to sell clothing. But that was more because customers were asking us. They were saying like, hey, this thing fit me well. I really like the process. Can I just keep this one? Or more likely, can I just buy a new one? Going back, what is it, 12 or 13 years now that you've been in the business?

2:28Andrew Blackmon:Yeah. At the beginning, what was that first rental experience like that was different from what was on the market? On the market was kind of like I was saying, you go to a strip mall, someone measures you, and then you pick it up the day before your event and then you drop it off. So with us, the disruption was a lot around, obviously, the internet. So people would submit their sizes online. They'd submit like height, weight, body type, a bunch of different questions. We would send them the suit or tuxedo about two weeks before their event so they could make sure that it fit well and felt nice, and then they would send it back after.

3:01Andrew Blackmon:So the disruption was like in the delivery method, but the bigger disruption was in the clothing itself. So all these rental tuxedos were made in the same places. They were all polyester garments. The shirts were made out of microfiber. The shoes were literally plastic. And so we reinvented the whole supply chain as well. And our idea was like, we want a suit that feels like, or a tuxedo that you would buy it for$1 ,200 rather than this kind of like cheap garment. The value prop was the ease of use, but then also like the physical garment itself. Was there anybody else attempting to do this at the time?

3:35Andrew Blackmon:No, not on the rental side for sure. There were some other brands, kind of direct-consumer-y brands like Bonobos, or there's a brand called Indochino that were kind of doing custom suiting. Yeah, they weren't rental though, right? Yeah, nothing rental. We were the first ones to do the rental, but at least at scale. There were some tiny players kind of dipping their toe in. And it was like a mom and pop shop that would have a store and kind of try to rent it out. But we were the first ones to raise capital and try to create this into a bigger business. Did you raise capital before you officially launched?

4:09Andrew Blackmon:So it was kind of like a long journey. We raised some friends and family capital. And then my co-founder, Patrick, and I, we put in whatever we could. And then we actually went and pitched in Silicon Valley. And we were a little different than most entrepreneurs. We didn't have like a 10 slide deck. We created a business plan that was like 50 pages. And we were like super methodical about this, which is funny in hindsight, but I think was good for us to think through all the risk. And so we went to all these people, anyone we could get connected to in Silicon Valley and pitch them. And everybody said, no, they're like, this is an interesting business, but you guys are really young.

4:45Andrew Blackmon:You haven't done anything, which is true. Like I barely even had a job before. So we got a bunch of no's. But then about nine months later, like we decided, okay, we're just going to launch the business anyways. Let's do what we can with the capital we have. We had some really fortunate things where a bunch of like influential people that wrote for GQ and the Wall Street Journal used our service. Like we really hustled our way there and they loved it and wrote about it. So we had this really long waiting list. And then we went back to all these investors who had liked us in the first place. And we said, look, now we have a lot of demand.

5:19Andrew Blackmon:We need to raise capital to finance the supply side of the business. And a lot of them were like, yeah, we're in now. That went from a moment where we wanted to cry to a really gratifying moment six months later. Yeah, I read that about GQ capturing you guys very early on and driving that demand. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what does that do to the business? Do you feel like that was like a huge initial turning point? Yeah, totally. Because it's, you know, GQ would never even tell anyone to rent a tuxedo. They would be like, you should avoid this industry as a whole. Like the industry kind of had a stigma on it.

5:51So to get a stamp of approval from them really early on, and it wasn't for nothing.

5:56Andrew Blackmon:Like, you know, they came and they saw the garments that we were making, or actually we were in New York. And so it was like a methodical approach. They wanted to also make sure that they're recommending something that's valuable to their customers. It's not like overnight success, but it really gave us a stamp of approval in an industry where you need to like trust whoever you're working with or whoever you're renting from. Yeah. So it was really valuable. Did you have enough product on site after that GQ? No way. Okay. Like not even close. So what happens then? I mean, we were still also figuring out how to operate the business when that happened because rentals is not just you have a garment and you give it to them.

6:34Andrew Blackmon:it comes back from the customer and you have to like sometimes retailer things we have cobblers we it's like a whole process we have dry cleaning like now we have these big facilities that do that but at that time we were still figuring that out and we didn't have the capital to buy like that many different tuxedos it was only tuxedos at the time so basically it created a waiting list like we put on our website like do you want this but you can't get it and so we would collect email addresses from people. And then, you know, if we were able to get more inventory, we would let them know. But it gave us a good way to figure out like, and I don't remember how many people were on the waiting list, but there was a lot like thousands.

7:11Andrew Blackmon:And so it gave us a good way to say, hey, a lot of people like this concept. You know, we need to like figure out a way to get it to them. It feels like this business, even from the beginning, is so unbelievably complex from an execution standpoint. Fast forward to today, you're in 40 Nordstroms, you've got seven flagship stores, you've got an online business. It's still operationally complex, but at the beginning, what did you and Patrick bring to the table? You've got the logistics piece, you've got the manufacturing, you've got product design, you've got fashion, aesthetic, tech, who's tackling what?

7:48Andrew Blackmon:So we probably just brought a lot of vision to the table and a lot of, what's the word, like tenacity, like the willingness to like just push through when problems arise. Patrick brought a lot of value through sourcing. Like he would go to different countries and, you know, like a bowl in a China shop, try to figure out how are we going to make this stuff. And it was so valuable to the company. I was doing a lot on kind of the brand and I was even answering phones like under a customer service alias. We both were cobbling shoes. Like we're just doing like everything we possibly could to make this business work.

8:21Andrew Blackmon:Like it really was us. And then slowly we would bring on a few people. And we had this little place in Santa Monica that was basically an old garage. And we ran the whole business out of there until we could get the capital. You know, you have to kind of prove that like people want this service and they want to do it from you. And then you can get the capital to kind of stair step your way to where we are. I have great memories of those days. We were just doing whatever we possibly could. And I hired all my friends, like a bunch of guys who just surf normally and don't really, at that time, didn't really have a job.

8:54Andrew Blackmon:And so they would come and they would like pack boxes with us and, you know, fix shoes and fix garments and all this weird stuff. How does the Nordstrom partnership come together? And was that the first physical presence that Black Tux had or did you have a flagship store before that? I wouldn't call it a flagship. We had a makeshift store in that same warehouse, which was like in the back of like a little thing in Santa Monica. We started having friends and friends of friends come by. And they were like, you know, I want to do this with you guys, but I kind of want to see what you have to offer.

9:31Andrew Blackmon:I want to try it on. Sometimes they come in like with the bride because it's a pretty wedding focused business. So we outfitted like this little thing into a showroom and took appointments and just became so popular. And then we realized that literally almost every single person that came in to try it on ended up using us. And so we're like, okay, the conversion rate of the stores is so high. We got to open more. But we were also like, we don't know how to run a retail business. We don't know how to open stores and do build outs and all this. And so I had a connection to somebody who had sold their company to Nordstrom.

10:06Andrew Blackmon:And we always were like, Nordstrom would be the perfect player to partner with. In fact, this is a funny story, but like maybe one or two years prior to getting a deal with them, we put on our site, like just go get measured at Nordstrom because the tailoring department would measure people in the Nordstrom locations. But we didn't, you know, get their approval on that. And they sent us a cease and desist letter and we had to like remove that. But two years later, we were there pitching their corporate team, the CEO and a bunch of people that we got connected to about like why this makes sense for us and them.

10:39Andrew Blackmon:And so we did a pilot in 10 stores and it went really well. And now we have a lot more. So it's like another stair step, some luck, some good introductions. In that time, they were really active in the D2C space. Yes. But I think our model makes the most sense because, you know, they want people coming into their stores of a younger age. Our customer is fairly young and fairly affluent. We need a place to send people. So it's like really like the perfect value add for both parties. We talked about GQ, but what else has been effective from a marketing standpoint? For the first couple years of the business, we didn't spend much on marketing.

11:14Andrew Blackmon:Our perspective was like, let's let the customer experience drive the marketing. And we're lucky that we're in an industry where like, you know, you're wearing this thing to your friend's wedding or to a wedding you're in. And people are often asking about the clothing and the attire. And so it really did spread without spending a lot of money. Like we kind of spent money on PR and stuff like that. but that was it. Those were also the days where I think you could get a lot more value with a PR firm. Once we got past that and we're like, okay, we want to grow a little faster. For us, it's a lot of the normal channels.

11:46Andrew Blackmon:You got to think about for this industry, like where is there some intent? Like where does the customer need a suit or a tuxedo? Because you can't just like blast your name out there. I mean, you can, but it's not the most effective way to do it. So for us, AdWords is really effective. Social is pretty effective because you can get really targeted and you can know when person or people are going to have a life event. Anything with like wedding partners is pretty effective for us historically where like with the knot or something like that, where they have like a big, like a massive engaged people who are planning their weddings.

12:21Andrew Blackmon:There's like a bunch of different ways in the process to get in front of them. And then we had a lot of luck with podcasts in the past. I think that's a more efficient market it now. So it's a little bit more expensive to advertise on podcasts, but you know, when podcasts were first increasing in popularity, like I don't know how many years ago, six or seven years ago, it was almost like you got influencer marketing because you would get the podcast host to do a read and we would always make sure that they wore our stuff before so that they really understood the product and it was really cheap.

12:50Andrew Blackmon:And so we did that like as much as we could for a while. When did you introduce the one-time purchase where people could not rent but could buy? We had been planning on that for a while. We were going to introduce it in COVID, but COVID introduced a whole bunch of stuff to us that we didn't want, like just a bunch of problems with our industry because there were no, you know, much fewer events during that time. So I believe it was like about a year after COVID that we launched that. And that's actually the fastest growing part of our business right now. I truly believe we have the highest quality suit or tuxedo at the price points we offer because we spend a lot of time on production and have a really talented team.

13:31Andrew Blackmon:And so also that has spread word of mouth. People have started to say for a relatively affordable price, I can get a pretty good suit or tuxedo from the Black Tux. So is that side more profitable? You know, the margins are pretty similar, actually. Are they? Yeah, yeah. Without divulging the whole business, margin profile is pretty similar between rent and buy. It just depends on the price point at which we're selling the garment. But you don't have the reverse logistics at play. You don't have the reverse logistics, but you have a higher average order value on a purchase. So it really depends how you look at it.

14:04Andrew Blackmon:But we are very happy with either, like whatever the customer wants. We also want to meet them there. Like if somebody wants to buy, we want to offer a product that they want. If somebody wants to rent, we want to offer that to them too. What happened in 2023 when you gave out your cell phone number to like 10 ,000 customers? Is that a true story? It's a true story. I don't recommend it. Actually, I kind of do, if I'm honest. So at that time, you know, we were thinking about how do we reward our best customers, basically. You know, a lot of companies will do this handwritten card that really isn't handwritten, and the machine's writing it, and it looks handwritten.

14:45Andrew Blackmon:and this was also when like AI was kind of or LLMs were almost kind of like increasing popularity and people were using them but people were really skeptical is this AI is this not it was new and so we decided okay let's do something where we give all of our best customers$50 to the black dot or whatever amount maybe it was$100 I don't remember but let's like do it in a really human way and let's see how people respond and so the human way was like I wrote all these cards and literally my cell phone number was in there. And there was some cheeky line that was like, hey, this is actually from the CEO.

15:18Andrew Blackmon:Like, don't believe me, send me a text. And so, I mean, I got thousands of texts and I responded to every single one. I FaceTimed people sometimes and it was fun and it was interesting and people loved it. People were like, this is really engaging. And it was helpful for me because every single time I asked the customer, like, what do you think about our business? Like, And tell me the good and tell me the bad. I want to learn. And I think people appreciated that so much. And I did too. I learned a ton about what was landing with people, what wasn't, what they liked, where we could improve. So it ended up being this big customer feedback thing for me that I could then share with our team.

15:58Andrew Blackmon:And then those loyal customers really loved us. I still randomly sometimes get people texting me like, hey. Because you haven't changed your phone number. Yeah, I haven't changed my phone number. They're like, hey, we talked a year ago. I got to rent something. or a couple of years ago, I have another need. Can you hook me up? And I always do. So it was like fun. It was interesting. And I think we also wanted to prove or tell people there are real people behind this in this age of AI. Like there's real people that think about every word we put on the site, everything we put into the garment, every point of the experience where it's cleaned.

16:33Andrew Blackmon:I think it's really easy to forget, but I think consumers really like feeling like they're part of something with other people in the end. Did any of the feedback fundamentally change how you were operating the business? Like, could you pattern match and then say, look, this feedback is over-indexing, whatever. I don't know. And we've got to move in this direction. Yeah, we have a period of time in which you need to send the suit or tuxedo back to us. Like after the rental. Oh, gotcha. It's like three days. And I don't remember what it was then, but some of the stuff that people told me is like, hey, you guys are a little too strict on when you need to return it.

17:10Andrew Blackmon:And even the language you use in your emails is too strict. It creates like a sense of kind of like do this now or there's impending doom. So that was very actionable. There were other things like around the fit of the garments. That's mostly what people would talk about. Like, hey, this thing fit really well. This thing didn't quite as well. So I think like a lot of the feedback that I got was around how to actually fit our garments. But most of the feedback was pretty positive. Granted, these were like our repeat purchasers. So these were the people who already loved the Black Talks. But most of them were like, no, I love the business.

17:45Andrew Blackmon:Like I use it all the time. How do you get people to come back? It seems to me that these events are few and far between. Yeah. So I don't know what the repeat purchase behavior looks like in the context of this type of business model. Is there a repeat purchase strategy of any kind? There is, but you're right. Like fundamentally, it's not like a t-shirt brand where you can convince somebody to repeat with you three months after you sold them the first garment. Like they have to have a need and the need for like a suit or tuxedo is less frequent. So we look at it as like we're playing the long game.

18:20Andrew Blackmon:I think over a five-year period, the likelihood for people to repeat is very high. And in any given year, approximately 30 to 40 % of our orders come from repeat customers from the past. So it does drive a lot, but it's just you need more patience. Like I said, you can't acquire the customer, expect them to rent from you day one, and then expect them to rent from you again in 90 days. It's so need-based that you just have to wait, basically. Can you incentivize them through some kind of referral strategy? Yeah, we do have a referral program that we launched last year. We're still kind of working out how that goes.

18:59Andrew Blackmon:But again, even incentivization, if they don't have a need, like if they don't have an event where they need a suit or tuxedo, it's a little tough. I will say, though, now that we sell garments, like that's where we can get people to repeat. And we're trying to do that by changing sort of the perception. I think a lot of people think of us as this is just a brand that has like this rental wedding platform where you can use us for that event. And people are starting to learn like, oh, we actually manufacture really high quality garments at a great price. like better than anyone in our segment. And so that gives us the ability to drive more repeat because you might need a shirt, like we sell a lot of shirts or slacks more than you need a suit or tuxedo to rent.

19:40Andrew Blackmon:We have shirts, ties, some more casual suiting, sport coats, slacks, things like that, but they're not on site yet. That's one of our goals for this year. Right now, if you want to buy that stuff, you have to do it online, but we're going to implement that midway through this year. It's a huge opportunity for us. We see so many people coming into our stores saying like, hey, I need a tie last minute. Like guys are so last minute. I need a tie last minute. I need a shirt last minute. I need a tux last minute. I need a bow tie, suspenders. And always we're having to say sorry because we have this fulfillment that is via our warehouses.

20:16Andrew Blackmon:So we're going to carry inventory in the stores starting this year. Yeah. The last time I bought a tie was last year. I waited till the day of about three. I mean, we literally have multiple people coming into every one of our stores every day asking for these things. It's a little bit complex when you're set up with these two big fulfillment centers to move that inventory into stores and make it available. How do you see the positioning of this company relative to the competition? Like you talked about Indochino, which felt early on like they weren't a competitor, let's say. But now you've got stores, you've got your omni-channel, you're selling product.

20:52like what does the competitive landscape look like for the brand for rental it's pretty

20:57Andrew Blackmon:straightforward you know it's like these big box retail locations where you can rent and then a bunch of mom-and-pop shops there's not a lot of competition for where you can buy there's a lot more i think of it as anywhere you can get a custom suit for that price range like under 500 or maybe call it under 750 so the big competitors are like indochino suit supply honestly like Like Macy's sells a ton of suits, Nordstrom sells suits, Bloomingdale sells suits. So there's not a ton of like singular brands that have a lot of scale. The ones I mentioned do have a lot of scale. Suits Apply in particular, that's a big competitor.

21:33Andrew Blackmon:The competitive landscape has widened. But one of our big advantages is we bring in the customer for the rental. And so we bring them in at a young age. We know their sizes. They have a good experience with us. So in some ways, our goal is to upsell our original customer rather than stealing customers from other people. Yeah, I think that's really smart. I was going to say they're not in rental. Exactly. You are. That's a great entry point for the company. Yeah. And the upsell or cross-sell is into a larger scale purchase at some point. Exactly. But we have the relationship with them. And I know from experience, the rental business is what's really hard to build.