Streetwear-focused online publication Highsnobiety has announced that it plans to debut its long-awaited global e-commerce platform on May 22, as reported by the Business of Fashion. It will have an exclusive partnership to carry Linea Rossa by Prada, a sportswear line first released in the 1990s that the brand relaunched last year.
According to BoF, future products and collaborations will be “dropped” every week, following a release model that has come to define the streetwear community’s approach to shopping.
Highsnobiety founder David Fischer projected that in three to five years, the e-commerce platform will make up half of the media company’s total operations and eventually launch a private-label line.
“Ultimately the Highsnobiety commerce model is where we’d be dynamically dropping products over time, sometimes once a week, several a week, where we team up with brands to strategically release product in a content-led model,” he told BoF, defining the online shop as a “true fusion of content and commerce.”
The website, which Fischer began in 2005 as a blog, has more than nine million visitors every month, and raised $8.5 million in its first round of external capital in 2018. That funding was earmarked for branded content, events businesses and e-commerce.
Under its parent group, Titel Media, also founded by Fischer, Highsnobiety already operates an in-house creative agency called Highsnobiety Plus, which creates brand partnerships with the likes of Givenchy and Nike. The agency accounts for most of the company’s business but Fischer hopes that the e-commerce vertical will soon catch up.
“We’re excited about the fact that we can give the stories and the people behind these products space that nobody else can,” he said to BoF. “A normal retailer or e-comm retailer is not focused on the stories. [They] don’t have the spaces to tell the stories where we absolutely do.”
Highsnobiety convinced Prada to be its inaugural partner, according to BoF, by appealing to the luxury brand’s appetite for a younger male audience.
Private label will be part of Highsnobiety’s e-commerce offerings by the end of this year, Fischer said to BoF, though the site has experimented with branded merchandise in the past. While Highsnobiety already participates in affiliate marketing through product-focused articles, selling products directly is a different undertaking.
The online shop was more than 12 months in the making, and is managed in-house by Highsnobiety, which was able to recruit tech talent in Berlin, home of the fashion e-commerce giant Zalando. Taking a cue from Glossier’s playbook, according to BoF, Highsnobiety is set on controlling every element of its digital retail business.
“We are stocking the product, shipping the product — everything customer -facing we are doing,” Fischer said to BoF. “Simply put, we want to make sure we own every customer touchpoint.”
