Alexa Claire - The Tux Shop

Where do I begin. I live 25 minutes from Portage but when I got engaged I decided to shop out of the area for a dress. I tried Lansing, Okemos, Stevensville, and Grand Rapids. I ended up at Alexa Clare one day when I had to go to Sam's Club for work (the shop is in the mini mall adjacent to the new Sam's Club). When I pulled up in front of the store I saw this beautiful princess ballgown in the window. I had to try it on even though I totally did not want a ball gown. I went in to the store and found a few more dresses to try on from the rack. I was helped by Gwen. She is very sweet and mild mannered. I did not like the ball gown but I ended up finding "my dress" from one of the other two I had picked up. I was a little sad because here I was on what was supposed to be a joyous occasion without my mother of my best friend. Gwen was very sweet and told me that ususally they give a bride a 5% discount if she purchases a dress on her first visit to the store but that she understood I would want my mom and said that if I purchased the dress on my first visit with my mother they would give me the discount. I brought my mom, grandma, best friend, and best friend's mother the next week. The all loved the dress. We did measurements and got everything ready to submit the order (it was well after closing time, close to 9pm) only to find out that my mom could not make the required 50% deposit with an American Express, only MasterCard or Visa. She came back two days later with a MasterCard. The dress was ordered October 11th, 2008. I was told at that point my dress would be in the end of January.

Another sales associate named Katie informed me of an upcoming custom veil event in January with a local custom veil designer. I asked if I needed to make an appointment. She said 'no, just come on in, the designer will be at the store between 1 and 5.' I got there at 3:15 to find out that the designer had left '5 minutes ago' because she had not been feeling well and no other brides had stopped in but that the same designer would be back in March. Not only was I upset that I drove 25 minutes for nothing, Katie proceeded to tell me that when they ordered my dress the store forgot to take into consideration weekends (or some story like that) and that my dress would not be available until the last week in February/the first week in March. Now I was really starting to get upset but I decided that March would still be plenty of time to do fittings and the such for my June 27, 2009, wedding.... (to be continued)

Not much selection but everything is very clean. More of a high end shop, I would go there more for tuxes because they have nice men's clothes.

Wouldn't you know, it would be the LAST place I looked before I found my dress. Dress shopping started in Michigan City, Indiana and stretched to Kalamazoo, hitting stores in South Bend, Stevensville, and Paw Paw in between. When I first started looking for wedding dresses, I window shopped at the Alexa Claire/Tux Shop store in Kalamazoo, but never ventured inside. It was getting close to a "need-to-order-a-dress-in-a-hurry" date, so I decided to actually to in the store to look at their selection. Why did I wait!?!?!?! My first time in, I found the perfect dress. I went back three times to try it on and was convinced it was the one! Success! I was shocked at how reasonably priced my gown was. Beautiful can only descibe it so much. The staff was helpful and encouraging. The best part was AC/TTS offered a custom veil event. I was able to wear the dress and consult with a veil maker about a ton of styles/options for a veil. It was wonderful one-stop shopping! (Big bonus - the designer of the dress happened to be in the store one day, so I got the chance to meet her)!

Staff is very friendly and helpful. Everyone is so happy to serve you. My husband and all his groomsmen really liked the choices of tuxedos and were all able agree on tuxes

My family used this shop to buy my dress, my mom's dress, the bridesmaids dresses, the tuxes and some accessories. My dress was one that was custom made by the owner of the shop. Everything seemed fine when I ordered things. It was great customer service and I got a pretty good discount on the bridesmaid dresses, making them affordable for the girls. When I got my dress in however, it was an inch or so short, making it not wearable with the shoes I had already bought. The shoes have not been able to be returned and were very expensive. I had to buy others. The shop had essentially no suggestions for me as to how to fix the dress. The claimed the had not done it wrong but I have no other explanation how a custom made dress could be that short without them having measured incorrectly. I was measured close to five times for the dress. It was too late to order another one as it could not be promised to be there in enough time. I basically had to live with it. In addition, sections of beading began to fall off my dress in several locations. While the shop did try to rectify the situation, they failed to do as they had promised and send me the beads in time for an alteration appointment (as I live in another state). I was forced to get my dress fixed merely days before the wedding. I figured this would be all that could go wrong with what I had ordered. Unfortunately, when we went to pick up the tuxes, both my dads tux and my fiance's tux did not fit correctly at all. Almost every piece to my fiance's tux had to be replaced. These two people were the only ones actually measured in the shop! Not only was this the case but the replacement pieces were not delivered to my fiance until the morning of the wedding and at that, there were white marks all over his pants. They also had to sticky tack a button cover on merely 20 minutes before the wedding. Overall the shop has been difficult to deal with as they are very slow in responding to us as we try to deal with them over these issues after the wedding. The quality is fairly poor as well and I would not recommend anyone bothering with these headaches!