COLUMBIA, SC (WBTW) – Three USC students have started a company they hope will change the tuxedo rental business, making it faster, more convenient, and less expensive. It’s called Tux on Trux, and instead of a customer going to a shop to rent a tuxedo, Tux on Trux comes to the customer.
Co-founder Parker Moore got the idea after he went to his junior prom at Clover High. “It’s so inconvenient to drive to the local Men’s Wearhouse, which was all the way in Rock Hill, 35 minutes away. I was realizing I was making three trips there, for fitting, for pickup, for dropoff, and it was just ridiculous. It was four hours of traffic,” he says.
Now a senior business major at USC, he and friends Jon Rice and Jonathan Peterson entered the idea in a business start-up idea contest and came in second out of 55 entrants, so they started the business for real.
Monday, Moore and Rice were at Irmo High School, picking up tuxes from customers who had rented from them for last weekend’s prom. Barron Coleman, a senior at Irmo, says, “They weren’t around last year so had to go to a different tuxedo rental place. But it’s definitely more convenient. The prices are so much better, and the tuxedo definitely, I think, looks better than mine last year did.”
Rice says, “Fitting, we come to the consumer. That’s our competitive advantage. We don’t actually have a storefront ourself. We set ourself apart by coming to the consumer. So for high schools, we come to the high school. We had a table at lunch and anybody could get fitted.”
After that, customers go online to choose their tuxes and accessories. Tux on Trux then delivers the tuxes to customers and picks up the tuxes afterward.
Irmo senior Osman Ghandour says, “Be fitted, pick up everything and return everything at the school, without having to make an extra trip somewhere else, that’s what really makes it, I guess, unique, from other competitors.”
Moore says they’re hoping to expand Tux on Trux. “We’ve got weddings we can do this with. We’ve got a lot of feedback from people, say, ‘Hey, this is excellent for our groomsmen. They can put in their measurements.’ We can ship it right there at the location of the wedding,” he says.
“Also, we’ve hit it really big with our college formals, college fraternities. Fraternity guys really see the benefit pretty clearly how simple it is, and they really appreciate our low cost for that as well, being college students. We hope to not only expand our base at University of South Carolina, where we’ve done some college fraternities’ formals, we hope to do some other colleges next year,” Moore says.
They get their tuxes from a supplier in Atlanta. Not having to pay for a storefront keeps costs down and allows them to rent for less than traditional tuxedo rental shops.
Ironically, Tux on Trux doesn’t have any trucks. Since they’re just starting the business, they deliver and pickup the tuxes using Moore’s Jeep Grand Cherokee, but plan to make a truck their first purchase as they expand.