Sample sales now run on standing calendars from New York Los Angeles, stocked with clothing brands made and never sold, as Europe moves to outlaw destroying unsold stock.
The company Assaf and Ariel Azani inherited from their father sells what other brands made too much of.
“Our father started the company, and it wasn’t called 260 Sample Sale at the time,” Azani told Retail Brew. What they inherited runs sales in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and Dallas, moves roughly 40 percent of its volume online, and has turned three of its permanent New York addresses into year-round shops carrying more than 60 brands. Assaf is chief executive and Ariel is chief operating officer. “We make a big splash, but it’s still my brother and I,” he said.
The splash is measurable. Foot traffic across 260’s sales rose 10 percent from 2024 to 2025. “Even high-income shoppers are frequently shopping at new retailers to find value,” Brad Jashinsky, a director analyst at Gartner, told the publication, noting that a single well-run sale can produce millions of dollars for a brand. “The luxury houses have been doing versions of this for a long time,” Michael Prendergast, a managing director at Alvarez & Marsal, told Modern Retail, placing the practice in a much longer lineage.
Los Angeles was not supposed to be part of this. In 2017, 260’s own marketing director, Laura DiGiovanna, told Glossy that “though the sample sale culture is not as prevalent in L.A. as it is here in New York, we’re happy to provide [our services] to the California customer.” Nine years later the California customer has a standing calendar. Chicmi has been carrying roughly 20 Los Angeles-area sales at a time this season, among them Reformation and Trina Turk in West Hollywood, Rails and The Elder Statesman in Beverly Hills, Figs in Santa Monica, and warehouse sales out in Vernon and Tustin. Shop The Sample, which buys designer overstock through direct partnerships with labels, now lists a store at 8451 Melrose Avenue among its five locations, the only one outside the New York area.
What ends up on a sample sale rack?
Very little of what hangs on the racks now is trulya sample. Chicmi describes itself plainly as a platform for fashion overstock, with more than 12,700 brand partners. The merchandise is last season’s production run, canceled wholesale orders, size curves that never moved, and returns still fit to sell. Azani sorts the intake by a standard that has nothing to do with volume. The question is “not so much, ‘Who has the most stuff that they need to get rid of?’ But, ‘What does the 260 customer want to see?'”
The outlet mall occupies the same mental shelf for most shoppers even though it works on entirely different terms. Retail analysts estimate that 80 to 85 percent of goods sold at outlets are manufactured specifically for those stores rather than diverted from full-price inventory, according to a three-month investigation of 40 major brands by Consumers’ Checkbook. “These stores don’t sell seconds or old merchandise; they are mostly channels where you get stuff that is exclusively manufactured for the outlet,” Gonca Soysal, a marketing professor and retail expert, said. “Outlets are very different from what general folks perceive they are.” The market researcher Pamela N. Danziger described the same arrangement to the investigation in blunter terms. “Basically, outlet stores have become just another distribution channel for brands to make lookalike items for less.”
“We’re not trying to buy product that is made for off-price,” Azani told Retail Brew. He calls the company curators rather than liquidators, and he is candid that the model cannibalizes something. “It’s like disrupting what is full-price activity and introducing our full-price customers,” he said. The test for a shopper is whether the garment matches the mainline piece in construction, fabric, and season code, and on a rack of real overstock it does, because it is the mainline piece.
Are sample sales a sustainable way to shop?
The markdowns are steep and honestly stated. Shop The Sample advertises tiers at 50, 60, 70, and 80 percent off retail; Chicmi promises up to 90 percent. Both are measured against list price, a number that already anticipates the season’s markdown cycle, and brands write that cycle into the plan long before anything reaches a warehouse in Vernon. “To sell out of a product actually costs a business more than having extra product that you end up discounting,” Mairi Fairley, a partner and head of the retail practice at OC&C Strategy Consultants, told Vogue Philippines.
Buying the surplus keeps a finished garment in circulation, a better outcome than what befalls a great deal of unsold clothing. The European Environment Agency estimates that 4 to 9 percent of all textile products placed on the European market are destroyed before anyone wears them, between 264,000 and 594,000 metric tons a year. About a fifth of unsold stock is destroyed outright. Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, that practice became illegal for large companies on July 19, with medium-sized companies following in 2030, and resale and donation become the required exits. The sample sale, in Europe at least, is now partly a compliance channel.
Researchers who study the wider system are unconvinced that any of this reaches the factory floor. A Loughborough University study published in Frontiers in Sustainability in February 2025 reviewed 20 influential circular fashion reports and found the economics unsupported. “The circular fashion solution, which has been embraced by governments and industry, does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny,” said lead author Talia Hussain in a statement. “Overproduction, which anyone can see in the never-ending sales on the high street, is not addressed.”
Shoppers are moving anyway. ThredUp’s 14th annual resale report, released in April, projects the global secondhand market at $393 billion by 2030 and the U.S. resale market at $78.8 billion, with Gen Z and millennial shoppers driving 71 percent of that growth. The sample sale occupies the most curated corner of that shift, a business that runs on more clothing existing than anyone planned to sell.
“The goal here is to make sure that we can expand without diluting the concept,” Azani told Retail Brew. “We still have never expanded for the sake of expanding or just trying to increase market cap.”
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