Alton Lane

[sweetface]



This place is a scam!!   I would recommend that you stay as far away from Alton Lane as possible.  I made a huge mistake by going there and hope that at least someone learns from my mistake.


I ordered a suit for my wedding.  They were fully aware of the date when I needed it and assured me they would have it in plenty of time.  I began to get concerned a couple of weeks before my wedding when the suit was not ready.  After numerous telephone messages and emails, I was finally able to reach someone who "investigated" the issue for over six hours.  The end result was that they never even started to make the suit.  Their stated excuse was that the fabric was back ordered and "sorry we dropped the ball."  Nobody ever shared this fact with me until after I inquired.  Of course, they had to have known it was back ordered from the day I ordered (and paid for) the suit, and every day after that for over a month.  Nobody ever shared that fact with me until I inquired.  Moreover, their website indicated that the suit had been shipped.  I am now stuck without a suit for my wedding.  So, not only could they not deliver on the promise they made, and I paid for, by "dropping the ball" and not telling me they were unable to provide the service they promised, they have prevented me from getting a legitimate tailor to make a suit for me.  I suggest that you go to any one of the many custom suit companies in New York.  I have had a lot of success with Tom James.  Unlike Alton Lane you can expect to deal with professionals--not a two-bit company masquerading behind the façade of a leather sofa and empty scotch bottles.  I feel like I was completely scammed.

what was the final total for this suit? I'm still thinking about a new years eve tux. but now im nervous

 

[ErikK]

I have had an extremely frustrating experience with Alton Lane.

In December and January, I had a shirt and some trousers made by Alton Lane in DC. While the trousers turned out fine, the shirt came back with sleeves about 3 inches too long (the ends of the sleeves hit my knuckles when we had discussed in the showroom that they would end at my wrist). It was an unusually bad error, but they offered to make a new shirt, so I let it go, and decided to go ahead and order a jacket after they told me they had some specials going on fabric. This is where things went very wrong.

When the jacket came back and I tried it on in the showroom, the sleeves were comically short, ending nearly halfway between my wrist and elbow. The sleeves were just over 3 inches too short. The salesman in the showroom insisted it was a simple fix, as they could have their local tailor let the sleeves out at the shoulders and that would be that.

When I came in a week later to try the jacket on after alterations, it was clear the sleeves had only been lengthened about an inch. The jacket was still ending well over 2 inches short of where it was supposed to be.

One thing I should note is both times I tried on the jacket with the obviously unwearable short sleeves, the salesman just stood there silently waiting to see if I was willing to walk out with it, relying on me to insist that Alton Lane do its job. He also tried to brush me off, saying “it depends on what shirts you wear,” which was doubly irritating because at both the measuring visit and the fittings, I wore the same shirt to make sure I had a consistent benchmark.

When I asked what Alton Lane could do to fix it, the salesman told me that there was no more room left in the shoulders because the cutters at whatever factory they use didn’t cut the appropriate length of material for the jacket based on the measurements taken in the showroom and they were thus unable to fix the jacket sleeves. He suggested, incredibly, finding the approximately 2 inches in length by extending the sleeves---which had working buttons—from the ends, which would result of course in the buttons looking like they’re crawling up toward my elbow.

So I asked for a recut and Alton Lane agreed. They admitted that they made a mistake by failing to cut the right length of material for the sleeves.

Here is a picture of the final, unfixable jacket from the second go around (after they had maxed out the extra fabric in the shoulders):

http://imgur.com/5tYDFQE

A few days later, they got in touch to tell me “bad news . . . the fabric is out of stock.” I felt I had been pretty patient in the face of a pretty lackadaisical attitude on their part about their mistakes and their repeatedly shoddy work on the garments, so I asked for a refund of the $902 cost of the jacket. If Alton Lane can’t deliver the jacket I ordered, I don’t see how they can claim they provided nearly a thousand dollars in value.

In sum, there is a pattern of bad tailoring and cutting at that company. I don’t know whether the problem is primarily in the showroom with the people taking measurements (who at these made-to-measure places often have little or no experience with tailoring), or at whatever factory abroad they are using to cut the fabric, but I’ve never seen mistakes like this. They've also been dragging their feet about the refund and I’m having trouble getting feedback about where things stand.