Tired of “I Love Ptown” T-Shirts? B.xclusive!

Rachel Harrington wanted to start a business in Provincetown, where she’d spent summers for decades, but “I didn’t want to just sell Cape Cod t-shirts,” she confesses. “I wanted something that people wouldn’t find anywhere else.”

She did just that, and today B.xclusive offers trendy, current, fun clothes, “things that people can take home from vacation and really want to wear,” she says.

Harrington has street cred. She was a seasonal worker in town for many years before opening the store. “I get it,” she says. “I understand what townies want.” And, to that end, B.xclusive also offers working clothes, the nice black pants prized by waitstaff and other retail and restaurant workers. “It’s that mixture of visitors and workers that’s so energizing,” she says.

As have other Ptown businesses, B.xclusive has had more than one location over the years. “We started in the basement under Exuma in 2007,” says Harrington. “We were there for four summers, then for the next nine years were at 336 Commercial Street, and then finally in 2021 we moved to 284 Commercial Street, which is a great location. We get a lot of foot traffic, and there’s a good vibe to the space, it feels a little like a New York warehouse.”

Living for part of the year in Atlanta, Harrington began frequenting the vast indoor flea markets that offered off-brand goods, or goods that were branded but not trademarked appropriately. “Sometimes a manufacturer in China will be commissioned by a brand—Coach, for example—and will sell its over-run on the black market,” she says. “You can get great deals that way. I realized I could buy stuff there and ship it to Ptown.” Now she goes to trade shows all over the country to find just the right deals. “I just got back from a trade show in Las Vegas,” she adds. “This year is a lot of fun, bright colors, Kelly green and fuchsia and yellow, things that are big and bright, satin and shiny. Even sparkles!”

How did she get started? “I was always a wild dresser,” she says with a laugh. “I Studied photography in college, but then I had the opportunity to go on buying trips with Ronny Hazel from Shop Therapy. And now it’s great being next to him!”

The store isn’t divided by gender. “Fashion trends are all over the place,” she says. “So you can wear what you want.”

“B.xclusive means that you won’t find this anyplace else,” she continues. “We’ll have 50 or 60 brands here at once, but they’re all on a limited run. I order clothing once, we go through it, and that’s all. This rotation means there’s always something new to see, whenever you come in.” But that also means that “if you see it today, it might not be there tomorrow—and I’m not ordering it again.”

Harrington also has a flourishing screenprint business and “I’m always bringing in new local artists for t-shirt graphics,” she says. “I do have a t-shirt that I like to call Ptown’s least tacky souvenir shirt—it’s a screenprint of vintage street maps that show who lived in the houses.”

While Harrington has overall younger clients in mind, one of her joys is the number of people who keep coming back, year after year. “I’ve watched customers grow up!” she says. “Kids from Family Week who were just little sixteen years ago and now are coming back as adults. It’s like having this great extended family of my own!”