I was at Montee Holland’s warehouse in Taylor recently, styling Love Island’s Austin Shepard and Charlie Georgiou for the Season 7 reunion show … really. They needed to look sharp in suits, and I knew Holland’s brand, Tayion Collection, would have the options the network executives were after: impeccable fit and detailing that would translate well on TV. It was my first time visiting the warehouse, where Holland provides appointment-only shopping for his VIP clients. It’s an impressive space filled with a plethora of suiting for men and women, along with tuxedos, outerwear, button-down shirts, ties, and pocket squares.
Setting aside the big Michigan fashion designers from the past 30 years (John Varvatos, Anna Sui, etc.), he’s probably the most successful designer currently living in Michigan. He’s had a yearslong partnership with Macy’s in which it sells its own collection of his clothing, while another collection is sold at men’s specialty stores around the country, and then there is his exclusive collection, which can only be purchased through his website. While he didn’t always know that fashion would be his future, it was always in his blood.
When Holland joined the United States Marine Corps in 1987, it was an easy decision to choose this branch of the military as the one where he wanted to serve.
“It’s the most elite fighting force in the world — ‘The Few, the Proud’ — but that uniform is really what got my attention,” Holland says.
A lifelong Detroiter, he was interested in what people were wearing even as a kid. “When I became an athlete, I would see my coaches coming in from work, and they would have on trench coats, suits and ties, and French cuffs.”
During his nearly three years serving, he made the All-Marine basketball team and was living in Japan and South Korea, where he had plenty of time on weekends to walk the streets and visit shops that patterned and sewed custom clothing. Soon, he was creating his own garments. And it got him noticed.
“I was making suede shoes with gator tops,” he says. “I was making full-length trench coats. I had this really cool wardrobe, and people would say, ‘How do I get that?’”
After the Marines, he received a full-ride scholarship to a college in South Dakota to play basketball. And again, it was the same.
“I’m wearing these clothes, and people are asking me, ‘Where’d you get that?’ I started to use my contacts overseas to make things for people. Not making any money — it was a hobby.”
In 1994, he earned a master’s in secondary school administration from Northern State University, moved back to his hometown, and started teaching at Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men in Detroit.
Teaching wasn’t paying him what he wanted, so he moved into sales in 1995, first for Anheuser-Busch and then for Pfizer. While he was finally making money, fashion was still on his mind.
In 2002, he finally got his foot in the fashion world’s door when he attended MAGIC, the fashion trade show in Las Vegas, with a friend, Bob Saboo, who was there to purchase clothing for his store, The City Warehouse in Southfield. Holland’s attire drew a lot of attention and pushed him to give fashion a try.
The next year, he purchased the smallest booth available and chose four friends to model 15 suits from his closet.
During the show, one of his models reported that he had been stopped by Steve Harvey, who loved what he was wearing and wanted to meet Holland.
“No sooner than he said that, [Harvey] was walking down the hall toward me with this whole entourage and cameras.”
At the end of the trade show, Harvey introduced him to the licensing company he was signed with. Once they saw Holland’s stack of orders, they offered to bring him back in six months to see if he could do it again.
Six months later, Harvey and the group from the licensing company did $1.3 million in orders. Holland did $1.1 million.
The licensing company signed him. The first order for Tayion Collection (Tayion is Holland’s middle name) was 5,000 units. The licensing company sold it all.
It was the win Holland needed to quit his sales job in 2004 and focus on fashion.
Still, it wasn’t a simple path. It took another 15 years of trial and error, and a couple of different licensing companies, to get the brand closer to the level he wanted, which included acceptance into The Workshop at Macy’s, an accelerator program for leading vendors that includes pop-ups, grants, and insights.
In 2019, the Tayion Collection launched at Macy’s, cementing his fashion-designer legacy. Now, six years later, the brand has hit the milestone of over $10 million in annual sales, “and we expect it to skyrocket from there,” Holland says.
The fashion designer, who is married with one child, gives back by informally providing full-ride college scholarships to inner-city youth, working with high school coaches he knows around the country to identify athletes not highly recruitable and without access to funds. To date, he’s helped 63 athletes.
“I mentor them and help negotiate the scholarships,” Holland says. “With the help of Detroit Public Schools and Horatio Williams Foundation, I even took two buses of kids and parents to a basketball camp in South Dakota and secured about 15 scholarships there. I love it, and I’m passionate about it. That’s my thing.”
This story originally appeared in the December 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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