A Bethesda-based menswear company best known for nabbing a deal with Mark Cuban and Peter Jones on “Shark Tank” will expand to Reston later this month.
Collars & Co, which produces polo shirts with a sturdy, dress shirt-style collar, will open its first permanent location in Northern Virginia in a 1,700-square-foot store at 11869 Market Street. The space was previously occupied by an Allen Edmonds shoe store.
“This space came up and we jumped on it,” founder Justin Baer, a Bethesda resident, told FFXnow.
“It’s local to us,” he added. “You know, we’re a Bethesda-based business. We go to Reston all the time to eat. And the other truth is, we have a ton of customers in the Northern Virginia area. It’s one of our top areas of the country, and we would always love to have a footprint there.”
Baer founded the company as an online shop during the pandemic, and went on “Shark Tank” in November 2022. During the episode, Cuban and Jones offered a $300,000 investment and $700,000 line of credit in return for a 10% stake in the business.
“The company started around kind of a simple idea: that I wanted the look of wearing a dress shirt under a sweater, but making it comfortable,” Baer said. “It’s very uncomfortable for guys to wear a dress shirt under a sweater, but I wanted that look…that’s basically all I wore to work.”
“I said, you know what? I’m going to make a polo shirt, but I’m going to put a firm collar on it, so it’s going to give you the look, but it’s going to be so much more comfortable underneath the sweater.”
Shortly after the episode aired, the company opened its first Northern Virginia location — a pop-up store that operated for about two weeks inside Saks Fifth Avenue at Tysons Galleria. Locations have subsequently opened in Rockville, Maryland; New York City; Chicago; Pennsylvania; Florida; and Texas.
The Reston store doesn’t have a specific date set for opening yet, but Baer said that he hopes it will be “just after Memorial Day,” which falls on May 25 this year.
