Best Products Company

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Best Products Company, Inc. began in Richmond, Virginia, in 1957, when Sydney and Frances Lewis launched a catalog and opened a showroom near Willow Lawn. The pitch was elegantly peculiar: browse the catalog, inspect display models, place the order, then wait for the warehouse to send your prize forward. Retail, but with suspense.

The Richmond-based chain grew into one of America’s major catalog-showroom merchants, selling jewelry, housewares, furniture, consumer electronics, toys and sporting goods through stores across the country. In 1982, Best acquired Modern Merchandising Inc., a deal intended to broaden its national reach; it also acquired Basco that year. Those expansion moves later proved difficult to absorb.

Best was as visually ambitious as it was merchandise-minded. Several showrooms commissioned from SITE became retail architecture legends—buildings that appeared to peel open, sink into the ground, or otherwise reject the boring box-store memo. Its founders also built a significant contemporary-art collection, giving the corporate catalog a distinctly museum-adjacent aura.

A leveraged buyout in 1988 added heavy debt. Best entered Chapter 11 in January 1991, emerged in June 1994, then filed again in September 1996. The remaining stores closed on February 9, 1997; liquidation was completed in 1998.

Our Best Products Company collection celebrates the catalog counter, the delayed gratification, and the gloriously strange showroom facade—proof that even a discount retailer could make shopping feel like an art project.