By Will Hunter, founder of Rent with Thred. All pricing verified July 2026. Methodology and disclosure at the bottom.
The short answer
Nordstrom shut down Trunk Club in May 2022, and its closest replacement is Nordstrom's own personal styling service, which is free. Most articles will not tell you that. For a paid option, Wantable is the nearest match to how Trunk Club worked, and Rent with Thred is the better fit if what you valued was the premium brands rather than the part where you ended up owning everything.
One warning before you follow anyone's list. Several pages ranking for this question still recommend Amazon Prime Try Before You Buy, and Amazon shut that down in January 2025. An old list will send you straight to another dead service.
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Table of Contents
- What happened to Trunk Club
- Every alternative compared
- The free replacement nobody mentions
- The closest paid match
- Why Trunk Club died, and what that tells you
- If you loved the brands more than the box
- The stylist question, answered properly
- Pros and cons
- What a year costs
- Which alternative fits which man
- Frequently asked questions
- Final verdict
What Happened to Trunk Club
Trunk Club started in Chicago in 2009 with a simple read on how men shop, which is that most of them would rather not. You spoke with a stylist, gave your sizes and preferences, and a trunk arrived with clothes selected for you. You kept what you liked and mailed back the rest, paying only for what stayed. The brands were good, the service felt personal, and for a certain kind of man it removed a chore he actively disliked.
Nordstrom bought the company in July 2014 and ran it for eight years. The unwinding was gradual: the affiliate program ended in 2021, the referral program in early 2022. On May 24, 2022, Nordstrom announced it was closing Trunk Club entirely to focus on its own personal styling operation, and the last trunks went out at the end of that month.
Four years later, the search demand has not gone anywhere, which is why you are here. What has gone somewhere is the quality of the answers. Most pages ranking for this question were written in 2022 and 2023, and a good number still send readers to Amazon Prime Try Before You Buy. Amazon killed that in January 2025. Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe, another common recommendation, ended in March 2023. Follow an old list and you will land on a second service that no longer exists.
Every Trunk Club Alternative Compared
| Service | Model | Cost | What you get | You end up |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nordstrom Personal Styling | Free styling, you buy | $0 for appointments and digital styling | Stylist pulls looks in store or emails a curated collection | Owning what you buy |
| Nordstrom To You | In-home styling | $50 per appointment, credited. Closet audit $300 | Stylist and alterations expert at your home or office | Owning what you buy |
| Wantable | Try and buy | $20 styling fee, credited | 7 items, five day try-on | Owning what you kept |
| Stitch Fix | Try and buy | $20 styling fee, credited | 5 to 8 items per Fix | Owning what you kept |
| Stately | Keep everything | $129 to $499/mo | 3+ to 7+ pieces by tier | Owning all of it |
| Menlo Club | Keep everything | $60/mo | 2 to 3 house-brand pieces | Owning all of it |
| Taelor | Rental | About $85 to $119/mo | 6 to 10 items per month | Owning nothing unless you buy |
| Rent with Thred | Rental | $89 or $139/mo | 3 or 5 pieces, you choose them | Owning nothing unless you buy |
| ~~Amazon Try Before You Buy~~ | Discontinued | Ended January 2025 | Nothing | Nothing |
| ~~Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe~~ | Discontinued | Ended March 2023 | Nothing | Nothing |
The Free Replacement Nobody Mentions
Nordstrom did not exit personal styling when it closed Trunk Club. It absorbed the function into the store, and the result is genuinely good and costs nothing.
Nordstrom's in-store styling appointments are free. You share your sizes, budget and preferences by phone or email beforehand, and when you arrive the stylist has already pulled options into a dressing room prepared for you. Appointments run from thirty minutes to as long as you need, nearly every store staffs stylists, and there is no obligation to buy. The digital styling service is also free: answer a few questions and a stylist emails you a curated collection of looks you can shop or ignore.
There is a paid tier called Nordstrom To You, which sends a stylist and an alterations expert to your home, office or hotel within fifteen miles of select locations. A styling appointment is $50, credited toward any purchase or alteration. A three hour closet audit, where a stylist and tailor go through your existing wardrobe and advise on what to keep, alter or donate, is $300. For a man rebuilding a wardrobe, that audit is the most useful three hundred dollars in this article, and almost nobody knows it exists.
One thing to understand about the free tier: Nordstrom stylists work on commission. That cuts both ways. It means they are motivated to make sure you actually love what you buy, because returns come out of their pay. It also means they are salespeople, and the service exists to sell Nordstrom inventory. Go in aware of that and it is an excellent deal. If what you valued about Trunk Club was the stylist relationship and access to good brands, this is the closest thing to what you had, and you were paying for the shipping box.
The Closest Paid Match
If you want the mechanics of Trunk Club rather than a trip to a store, Wantable is the nearest thing operating today, and it absorbed a large share of the Trunk Club audience when Nordstrom pulled the plug. A $20 styling fee credited toward purchases, seven pieces per edit rather than Trunk Club's typical selection, a five day window to try things at home, and free shipping in both directions. Keeping five or more items earns a discount. Wantable also runs an activewear and lounge edit, a category Trunk Club never covered well.
Stitch Fix is the larger and more established option and works nearly identically: a $20 styling fee credited toward keeps, and boxes that now run up to eight items, increased from the historical five. Its catalog is enormous, spanning thousands of brands and styles, and it leans further into mid-market than Trunk Club did. Worth knowing that the company has been shrinking, with revenue down 16 percent to $1.3 billion in its most recent reported year, though that does not change the box you receive.
Both reproduce the thing men liked about Trunk Club, and both reproduce the thing they did not, which is that your monthly cost is whatever you happen to keep. Some months $80, some months $340, and you own it either way.
Why Trunk Club Died, and What That Tells You
This is the part worth reading before you sign up for anything, because it protects you from picking a replacement that follows Trunk Club into the ground.
Nordstrom did not shut Trunk Club because personal styling stopped working. Nordstrom kept personal styling. It shut Trunk Club because the trunk itself was expensive logistics wrapped around a retail transaction the company could already complete in a store for free. Picking, packing, shipping, receiving returns, processing and restocking them: that is a warehouse operation, and Trunk Club ran it to sell clothes Nordstrom was already selling. The box was never the product. It was a customer acquisition cost with a long payback.
Any service where the shipment exists mainly to close a sale carries that same weakness. The logistics are a cost center, the margin lives in the merchandise, and when the merchandise margin gets squeezed the shipping model is the first thing to go. That is the pattern behind Trunk Club in 2022, Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe in 2023, Prime Try Before You Buy in 2025, and Frank And Oak's Style Plan in 2021. Four services, one shape.
Rental has different economics, and it is worth being clear-eyed rather than triumphant about them. In rental the subscription is the product, so the logistics are the business rather than an expense bolted onto it, and a garment earns revenue across many members instead of a single transaction. The tradeoff is real and runs the other way: everyday menswear rental is punishing on inventory, because members who subscribe to stop shopping wear the same pieces hard, which raises cleaning and repair costs. A Forbes feature on the category in July 2026 named exactly that as the central operating challenge for everyone in this business. Neither model is invincible, but a company whose shipping is a cost center and one whose shipping is the product will make very different decisions when times get hard.
If You Loved the Brands More Than the Box
There is a specific kind of former Trunk Club member who was not really there for a stylist at all. He liked Trunk Club because it put good clothes in front of him without a trip to the mall, and because the brands were a step up from what he would have found on his own. The stylist was the delivery mechanism, not the point.
If that is you, the model that fits is rental, and the only question is whether you want to pick.
Rent with Thred puts the choosing in your hands. The Weekender is $89 a month for three pieces at a time and The Jet-Setter is $139 for five. Free shipping both ways, professional cleaning included, no contract. You browse the inventory and select every piece yourself, so nothing arrives as a surprise.
The roster is where the Trunk Club comparison actually lands. Thred stocks premium menswear men already know: Buck Mason, Faherty, Marine Layer, Alex Crane, Wax London, plus a deep bench that includes Todd Snyder, Filson, Corridor, Universal Works and Taylor Stitch. That is the shelf a Trunk Club member was circling, available without a purchase decision attached to every garment.
Taelor is the stylist-led rental option, running roughly $85 to $95 a month for six items or about $119 for up to ten across two shipments, cleaning and shipping included, with the option to buy pieces at member pricing. A stylist assembles each shipment, so it suits a man who wants rental without doing the choosing.
The advantage of renting from a focused roster is that you can actually run an experiment. Renting one Filson jacket teaches you about a jacket. Renting a few Filson pieces across a season teaches you about Filson: how the shoulder sits, how the fabric wears, whether the cut works on your frame. Most men do not dislike premium clothing. They dislike paying full price to find out they were wrong about it, and rental removes the expensive part of finding out.
The Stylist Question, Answered Properly
Trunk Club was, at its core, a stylist service. Someone got to know you and picked your trunk. So if you are shopping for a replacement, the natural instinct is to look for another service where a stylist chooses for you, and it is worth knowing that rental gives you two different answers to that instinct.
Taelor answers it the familiar way. A stylist picks your shipment, which is close to the Trunk Club experience with the ownership removed.
Rent with Thred answers it differently, and the difference is deliberate. The rental subscription is always self-select, so you choose every rented piece. On top of it we offer an optional Personal Stylist Membership, and the key point is that the stylist does not choose your rentals. The stylist is a menswear expert available on demand for everything around that choice: building a work wardrobe, figuring out what to wear to a wedding with a vague dress code, packing for travel without overpacking, planning a capsule wardrobe, running a closet audit, and advising on fit, color and seasonal wardrobes. A second opinion before you buy something at retail counts too.
That is a meaningful distinction for a former Trunk Club member. At Trunk Club, and at Taelor, the stylist makes the call. With the Thred membership, the stylist advises while you keep the call. You get expert input without giving up control, which is exactly the balance a lot of men wanted from Trunk Club and never quite got, because the stylist there decided and you reacted.
Pros and Cons
Nordstrom's free styling, strengths. It costs nothing, the stylist relationship and brand access closely mirror Trunk Club, and the $300 closet audit is genuinely useful for a rebuild. Tradeoffs. Stylists work on commission, so it is a sales channel, and you pay retail for anything you keep.
Wantable or Stitch Fix, strengths. The closest reproduction of the try-at-home mechanics, with familiar returns and large catalogs. Tradeoffs. Your monthly cost is unpredictable by design, and you finish owning whatever you kept.
Rent with Thred, strengths. You choose every rental from premium brands you already know, nothing accumulates, and the optional stylist membership gives expert help without taking over your choices. The full catalog is public before you pay. Tradeoffs. Choosing takes a few minutes each cycle, the catalog is focused rather than vast, and styling is a separate membership rather than baked in.
Taelor, strengths. Stylist-led rental, the closest thing to Trunk Club's experience with the ownership problem removed, and strong rotation for the price. Tradeoffs. You do not choose your own pieces by default, and standard sizing only, with extended and Big and Tall ranges currently unavailable.
What a Year Costs
Nordstrom's in-store and digital styling is free, and you pay retail for whatever you buy. If your Trunk Club habit was two or three items a quarter, this is comfortably the cheapest path and it is not close.
A Wantable or Stitch Fix habit at two kept items a month lands between $1,440 and $2,040 a year, and you finish owning roughly twenty-four garments somebody else selected. Stately's Luxe tier is $2,148 a year for about sixty permanent pieces. Menlo Club is $720 a year for around thirty house-brand items. Thred's Weekender is $1,068 a year and you finish owning nothing you did not deliberately choose to buy. Taelor's entry plan is similar. The sticker prices sit closer together than most people expect. What separates them is what is hanging in your closet next July.
The number that actually settles it is cost per wear. Three rented pieces at $89 a month, each worn eight times because you selected them on purpose, runs about $3.70 a wear. Five items from a styling box worn twice each before you conclude they are not quite you comes to roughly $18 a wear, and you still own them. That $328 jacket from a trunk you wore twice cost $164 a wear and it is still in the back of the closet, which is probably part of why you are reading this.
Which Alternative Fits Which Man
If you want what Trunk Club was and you want it free, book a Nordstrom styling appointment, tell them your budget, and buy nothing if nothing works. If you are rebuilding a wardrobe and want expert help with what you already own, the Nordstrom To You $300 closet audit is three hours with a stylist and a tailor and it is worth more than any box.
If you want the trunk mechanics without leaving your house, Wantable delivers seven items over five days with $20 credited toward keeps, and Stitch Fix is the larger-catalog version of the same idea.
If you loved the brands and not the buying, rent them. Rent with Thred lets you choose premium pieces yourself and send back anything that misses, with an expert on call through the stylist membership if you want one. Taelor does the same with a stylist making the picks. And if you are rebuilding after a job change, a move, or a change in size, rental gives you a low-risk way to find out what works now before committing money to it.
Start with The Weekender at $89/month. Free shipping and cleaning, cancel anytime.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened to Trunk Club? Nordstrom acquired Trunk Club in July 2014 and announced on May 24, 2022 that it was shutting the service down to focus on its own personal styling operation. The final trunks shipped at the end of May 2022.
Does Nordstrom still offer personal styling? Yes, and the core service is free. In-store appointments and digital styling cost nothing. Nordstrom To You brings a stylist to your home or office for $50 per appointment, credited toward purchases, with a three hour closet audit available for $300.
What is the closest thing to Trunk Club now? Nordstrom's own free styling service is closest in spirit, since it delivers the same stylist relationship and brand access. Wantable is closest in mechanics, with a $20 styling fee credited toward whatever you keep.
Is Amazon Try Before You Buy a good Trunk Club alternative? No, because it no longer exists. Amazon ended Prime Try Before You Buy in January 2025 and shut down Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe in March 2023. Several articles still recommending them have not been updated.
What is the cheapest Trunk Club alternative? Nordstrom's free styling, since you only pay for clothes you decide to buy. Among paid subscriptions, Menlo Club at $60 a month, though its pieces are house brands rather than outside labels.
Which alternatives let me choose my own clothes? Rent with Thred is the only service here where you browse the entire catalog and pick every piece yourself. Taelor allows requests and collection browsing, but a stylist assembles the shipment.
Can I still get a stylist without giving up control of what I wear? Yes. Rent with Thred keeps rentals self-select and offers an optional Personal Stylist Membership that advises on your whole wardrobe, from workwear to weddings to closet audits, without picking your rentals for you.
Can I rent instead of buying? Yes. Taelor and Rent with Thred both rent premium menswear on a flat monthly subscription with cleaning and shipping included, and both let you buy pieces you want to keep at member pricing.
Did Trunk Club have better brands than the alternatives? Trunk Club carried Nordstrom's assortment, which was strong. Among current options, Nordstrom's own styling gives you that same inventory, and Rent with Thred carries a focused premium roster including Buck Mason, Faherty, Marine Layer, Alex Crane, Wax London, Todd Snyder and Filson.
Are there contracts on any of these? No. Every service listed allows you to pause, skip or cancel, and Nordstrom's styling has nothing to cancel.
What happens if something does not fit? Nordstrom, Stitch Fix and Wantable all accept free returns. Stately offers free exchanges. Rent with Thred lets you swap an item. Taelor adjusts sizing on your next shipment.
Final Verdict
Start with the free option, because almost nobody does. Book a Nordstrom styling appointment, tell them what you liked about your trunks, and see whether the thing you missed was the clothes or the convenience. It costs you an afternoon and nothing else.
If the answer is that you missed the convenience, Wantable is the closest paid version and Taelor is the version where you stop accumulating.
If the answer is that you missed the clothes, that good things kept showing up and you never had to go looking for them, then take The Weekender at $89. Choose three pieces from brands you already trust, add the Personal Stylist Membership if you want a menswear expert on call, and notice which piece you reach for on an ordinary Tuesday. A few months of that will teach you more about your own taste than years of trunks did, because this time you did the choosing.
Trunk Club was a good service. What it actually sold you was permission to stop shopping. You can still buy that. You no longer have to buy the clothes along with it.
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Methodology and disclosure
This article is published by Rent with Thred, one of the services compared. Trunk Club's acquisition and shutdown dates come from Nordstrom announcements and contemporaneous reporting. Nordstrom's current styling services and pricing, along with pricing for Wantable, Stitch Fix, Stately, Menlo Club and Taelor, were taken from each company's public pages and current third-party coverage in July 2026. Amazon's discontinuation dates come from company announcements and trade reporting. Prices change, so verify before subscribing. Where another service is the better fit, this article says so.