Inventory interview on Hypebeast

What was the overall aesthetic you were looking for?

I think we had general ideas before we even looked at a place but once we took the lease, we starting putting together a bunch of images, concepts and moods, which were eventually edited down to a very precise look and feel. We didn’t want to get caught in the current trend of going overboard on the Americana, cluttered hunting cabin feel either, so I think we looked to shops like Visvim, Margaret Howell and Engineered Garments more so for reference. We kept it quite minimal with some custom furniture mixed in with a couple bits of industrial lighting and accents in small pieces.

What role with a physical space serve and what can we expect? How will this help INVENTORY grow?

The physical space will be both our studio space as well as our shop front. On the studio front, it gives us more room to work freely, shoot product and develop ideas in a more conducive atmosphere. The shop front really just lets us have our own shop, curated in the way we’d like and offer an edited selection of what we think are the best products around. Through our online shop and the magazine we’ve been able to develop a handful of relationships that really allowed us to curate the perfect stocklist in our opinion. The bricks and mortar space allows us to work with some of the brands that might not otherwise sell to us if it were only online.

How do you approach the relationship of retail and editorial?

I feel like it’s a very natural relationship. It’s seen in the products featured online and in the magazine, the clothes we wear and the products in our shop. It’s really pieced together by our tastes and the things we like. The brands we are selling, we truly care about and are interested in. It happens often that we feature a brand or person in our magazine and then have the products in our shop. It’s not a marketing plan or anything, we just really know what we like and find them interesting on multiple levels, so its natural we want to work with them. The brands and people also seem to appreciate it as they can see that we understand their product and can be great ambassadors of their own brand, which is an honor with the people we are working with.

What would you say were the defining factors in your rapid growth?

From the beginning our blog has been where everything has grown from. That access to the global community has definitely contributed a lot to our growth rate. Through the website we were able to do our first collaborations, open an interesting online shop and launch a printed magazine with a built in readership. There aren’t many shops that open for the first time and already have hundreds or thousands of customers, likewise with the magazine. I think having such a focused product also has helped us move forward. Our online and print publications don’t often vary too much from our vision and nor does the product we’ve selected for our shop. I think that consistency has definitely helped us as a brand, but still allows room to try new things to keep it interesting.

We’ve seen an increasing number of people enter the world of print magazines at a time when things and business models would suggest otherwise. What can you attribute these movements to?

I think there’s a saying about how rough economic times often breed quality creative work and interesting products. Perhaps this is the case today, while so many older business models are failing, people are trying different ways to reinvent their brands and do something ‘new’. I think it also creates more of a mentality to go-for-self and do something you really believe in, be your own boss and take a risk. I think there are probably always people entering into the print magazine world, but to be honest, there still aren’t that many that are really good, creating something considered and thought through – there is a handful that really stand apart. I suppose it’s the same for brands and stores as well, it takes a special mix of people and circumstances for everything to work and the product to be just right.

What are your thoughts on the course media will take with the proliferation of e-readers and iPad-like devices?

The current course of media is definitely exciting and there are more platforms to create and communicate with than ever before. I don’t think everyone can do everything so I feel it’s best to choose the mediums that you feel will have the best impact and that you can have some control over. I’m not particularly worried about the iPad and whether or not our content is perfectly tailored for it – but it’s worth considering overall that you can reach the specific markets for your brand or company or client in the more efficient ways. So to somebody else, the iPad could be where you spend all your time. But I’m not about to make an iPad version of our printed magazine.

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