Most clothing companies start with a sketchbook. Ours started with a folding table.
In 1978, Vick's Clothing opened at the flea market in San Jose. It sold what working people in the South Bay actually wore: solid tees, work pants, jackets that could take a winter. It was the kind of place where you came for a pair of pants and stayed twenty minutes talking to whoever was behind the counter.
That shop never closed. Today it is the longest-running flea market retail location in the United States, and everything Upfit Allwear does comes out of what we learned standing there.
What a flea market teaches you
Selling clothes face to face, outdoors, every weekend for decades is an education you cannot get anywhere else. There is no brand campaign to hide behind. The customer picks up the garment, pulls on the seams, checks the price, and tells you exactly what he thinks. If the pants he bought last spring did not hold up, he is back at your table telling you so, in front of your other customers.
A few lessons stuck.
People buy what lasts. The repeat customer is the whole business, and you only get him if the first pair survived.
Price is part of quality. A good pair of work pants that a working person cannot afford is not doing its job.
Everybody deserves their size. The big guy, the tall guy, the guy with a 28-inch inseam. When you serve a whole community you learn quickly that most brands stop making sizes long before people stop needing them.
For a stretch the retail side also traded under the name Size Matters, which tells you how seriously we took that last one.
The brands behind the table
For years, a lot of what we sold came from one supplier: Maxxsel Apparel, a wholesaler with close to four decades in the trade and the company behind Oscar Jeans and Oscar Sports. We knew those products the way only a retailer can. We knew which jeans customers came back for by style number, which jackets sold out first when the weather turned, and which sizes we could never keep on the table.
So when the opportunity came to acquire Maxxsel and the Oscar brands, it did not feel like buying a company. It felt like taking responsibility for products we had already been vouching for, one customer at a time, for most of our lives.
What Upfit Allwear is
Upfit Allwear is those two halves joined: decades of retail, where we learned what people need, and decades of wholesale and manufacturing, where those things get made. Today the company owns Oscar Jeans, Oscar Sports and Maxxsel Apparel, supplies independent stores across the country, and sells the same goods directly here.
The flea market lessons are easy to find in the line. The CA999 jean is 14.5 oz denim with bar tacks at every stress point, because people buy what lasts. Pants run to a 54 waist and hoodies and jackets to 5XL, because everybody deserves their size. And the prices are set by people who have spent a lifetime watching customers decide whether something is worth it.
Still San Jose
Our warehouse is in Hollister now, an hour down the road, but the company is a San Jose story and always will be. It was built by a community of people who work for a living and expect their clothes to do the same. We still answer to them every weekend.
Shop the top sellers, or read why workwear still works. Store owners interested in carrying the line can reach us at wholesale@upfitallwear.com.