Supremebeing started life in 1999 creating street-inspired graphic T-Shirts in Cambridge, England. Today the company wholesales a wide range of men’s casual wear in 20+ countries via retailers such as Urban Outfitters in the US and Europe, Wonderplace in Korea, John Lewis in the UK, Galleries Lafayettes in France and sells online globally via ASOS and it’s own ecommerce site www.supremebeing.com. Since acquisition in early 2014 by investors led by fashion-industry veteran Gavin Aldred the company has been totally restructured and is now poised for rapid international growth.

THE BUSINESS

We believe Supremebeing make the kind of casual clothes coveted by Millennials the world over. We tailor for the Dotcom generation, and our T’s, sweats and hoodies are the workwear of creatives, techies and innovators from Shoreditch to Silicon Valley.

Our in-house designers (and the rest of the team!) wear the clothes they create every day and are obsessed with the quality of the fabric, cut, shape and detailing of every product. This attention to detail is what makes a Supremebeing garment so desirable. We also create exclusive designs for many of our retail clients, working closely with them to ensure a fresh and distinctive offer in their stores. We work hard though to keep our clothes affordable, with our pricing a little above High St. brands such as Superdry, but well below brands such as APC or Norse Projects.

One of our key strengths is speed of response. Working with our manufacturers we are able to get a new design of t-shirt in store in less than 6 weeks from conception. We are working on halving this lead-time in the US.

Since a change of ownership early in 2014 the company has been radically restructured under the direction of Gavin Aldred, a veteran fashion retailer and strategy consultant who headed New Look during their rapid domestic and international growth in the 1990’s, right up to their successful listing on the LSE in 1998. Ranges have been rationalized with a new focus on the fast-growing menswear sector, old stocks cleared, distribution channels streamlined, margins improved, and the management team restructured and strengthened to provide greater speed of decision-making via more timely and transparent management information, with much greater emphasis on international high-margin sales via wholesale, retail (both physical and online), and licensing, a new income generator.

Our experienced management team of 18 is based in a beautiful converted barn in the Cambridge countryside where, using state-of-the-art technology, on average we produce around 10 new product designs every week, generating worldwide sales of c300,000 units annually.

2015 saw the successful opening of our first “Brand Outpost” in London’s Carnaby Village. This is the blueprint for a planned global network aimed at getting closer to our customers, both the national retailers who carry our brand via wholesale, but just as importantly the local shopper – the end user, who can experience our full range of in-season products at first-hand. Their feedback is an important element in keeping our designs fresh and relevant. These Brand Outposts are also designed to act as a 3-D showroom for our fast-growing online shopping operation, allowing customers to ‘try before they buy’ but also have the benefit of home delivery.

We plan to upgrade our online platform to allow multi-language and multi-currency transactions, plus allowing a much wider range of promotional activities aimed at increasing sales and profits. Already over half our online sales are to overseas customers in over 70 countries. We are experimenting with offering carefully selected complimentary brands on our website to better serve our 240,000 database of customers. These complimentary brands also allow us to get valuable feedback on new products that we can then develop under the Supremebeing label.

We recently introduced a Licensing program, where we license our brand and selected designs to manufacturers and retailers on carefully defined products in strictly designated territories. We recently successfully completed our first deal with a large Australian retailer, and are in discussions on significant licensing deals in the UK, Europe, Russia and China.

WHAT MAKES SUPREMEBEING DIFFERENT?

We operate in a very competitive market. Casual clothing may be ubiquitous but our name and graphics are distinctive. We feel we have carved a niche for customers who want casual clothes with a distinctive design ‘edge’. We want our customers to feel ‘special’ when they wear a Supremebeing garment – one of a kind, not one of a herd. Our discreet yes noticeable branding enhances each product in an understated way, signaling style with substance.

We are very selective about our retail partners, ensuring the right balance between accessibility and exclusiveness. We prefer to work with well-established retailers with multiple outlets in a territory to ensure a good spread of product geographically and a consistent presentation in-store. We will produce exclusive designs or colours for them to ensure their offer has the right degree of exclusivity.