Houston Storefront Chain Q Fifty One Buys Dallas E-Retailer Edition

Dallas—Edition Collective, a men’s e-commerce startup, has been acquired by a brick-and-mortar retail company, Q Fifty One.

Terms of the cash and equity deal were not disclosed. The 13-year-old Q Fifty One is based in Houston and owns and operates Q Clothier and Rye 51 stores in four cities nationwide. Q Clothier sells men’s custom clothing, while Rye 51 features more casual menswear.

Matt Alexander, founder and CEO of Edition, now becomes CEO of Q Fifty One Digital, which will manage the company’s online shopping business.

“Our business has grown to become an eight-figure, profitable enterprise without the web,” Raja Ratan, founder and president of Q Fifty One, said in a press release. “Now, with our acquisition, we’re ready to bolster that growth and extend our experiences into the digital world.”

The announcement comes three months after Alexander had to cut more than half of Edition’s team and deal with being locked out of its Dallas offices due to delinquent rent, D Magazine reported. Alexander told the publication that the startup needed to conserve cash due to a cooling in the retail investment sector.

Alexander founded what was originally called Need in 2013 with the idea to cut through what he called e-retail clutter and offer a “curated” selection of men’s clothing and accessories. “There are hundreds of millions of dollars in the men’s wear industry, but they don’t enjoy shopping,” Alexander told me for a story three years ago. “We’re exploring new ways to get men to be active in the retail world.”

A year later, Alexander launched Foremost, which offers lower-priced clothing to a younger crowd. Need and Foremost were subsequently merged into Edition Collection in 2015.

According to the press release, Ratan plans to continue expanding Q Fifty One’s footprint across the U.S., while Alexander will oversee the online expansion efforts of Rye 51 and Q Clothier to customers around the world.

Author: Angela Shah

Angela Shah was formerly the editor of Xconomy Texas. She has written about startups along a wide entrepreneurial spectrum, from Silicon Valley transplants to Austin transforming a once-sleepy university town in the '90s tech boom to 20-something women defying cultural norms as they seek to build vital IT infrastructure in a war-torn Afghanistan. As a foreign correspondent based in Dubai, her work appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek/Daily Beast and Forbes Asia. Before moving overseas, Shah was a staff writer and columnist with The Dallas Morning News and the Austin American-Statesman. She has a Bachelor's of Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and she is a 2007 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. With the launch of Xconomy Texas, she's returned to her hometown of Houston.