Walk into the showroom on Orchard Lake Road and you will find a rack of Peter Millar quarter-zips with the tags still hanging off them, and three feet away a Zegna sport coat that somebody wore twice. Both ended up here for the same underlying reason, which is that someone paid full retail and we did not. But they arrived by two completely different roads, and knowing which is which changes how you shop.
Most of the floor is overstock, and overstock means brand new. We receive clothing from twenty independent retailers across the USA, real menswear stores, the kind with a tailor in the back. When one of them over-orders, when a season turns, when a special order gets cancelled, that merchandise has to go somewhere. It comes to us, and it arrives the way it left the manufacturer. New, in season, tags on. Nobody wore it. Nobody returned it. It simply never found a buyer on that store's floor.
That is where the savings come from, and it is also why they are not too good to be true. We are not discounting damaged goods or last decade's leftovers. We are buying somebody else's inventory problem, and passing it on at up to seventy percent off retail on a garment that has never been worn.
The other side of the store is consignment, which works in the opposite direction. These pieces belong to real people who are done wearing them. A closet clean-out, a change in size, a retirement from a job that required suits. We do not take everything that comes through the door. Each piece is hand-selected for condition and for label, which is a polite way of saying we turn a lot of things down. If it cannot hang on our rack next to new merchandise and hold its own, it does not come in.
One thing worth saying plainly, because people ask: we do not buy clothing from the public. If you bring something to us, it goes on consignment, which means you still own it while it is with us and we agree on the terms up front.
So what does the difference mean for you standing in the aisle? If you want new with tags, look for the tags, because they are still attached. If you are hunting the labels that almost never turn up new at this price, look to consignment. Hugo Boss, Burberry, Ermenegildo Zegna, Gucci, Peter Millar and Robert Graham move through here on both sides of the store, in sizes Small through XXXL.
The practical difference is availability. Overstock tends to arrive in runs, so there may be four of something in graduated sizes and a reasonable chance your size is among them. Consignment is one piece, one size, one time. If a consigned jacket fits you, that is the whole decision, because there is not another one in the back.
Both sides change constantly. New pieces land on the floor every day, which is why the regulars stop in weekly rather than monthly. We are at 28801 Orchard Lake Road in Farmington Hills, between 12 and 13 Mile, Monday through Saturday, noon to six. No appointment needed. Thousands of pieces are listed in our eBay store as well, if you would rather start your browsing there.