WWD Honors: Kith, Best-Performing Retailer, Small Cap
Jean E. Palmieri
8 min read
There’s already Kith cereal, creamsicles and BMWs. Could a resort be next? It’s entirely possible that could be the next frontier for Ronnie Fieg, the founder of the buzzy retailer and brand.
“Hospitality is one category I haven’t fully explored,” he said during a conversation with UTA Marketing at an Advertising Week NY presentation last week. He said that while he tends to “dive head first” into most projects, he opted to just dip his toes into the hospitality field when he opened the first international location for Sadelle’s restaurant in his recently opened Paris store, where it serves quintessential New York noshes such as bagels with lox and chopped salmon.
Opening restaurants in stores is nothing new, of course, but for Kith it represents the next chapter in what has already become a storied career for the 39-year-old Queens native.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Kith, which began as a 580-square-foot footwear annex inside the Atrium store in Brooklyn in 2011, where Fieg showcased sneakers from New Balance, Gourmet, Pro-Keds and Nike alongside Florsheim wingtips, Red Wing boots and Clarks’ casual shoes.
Since then the company has grown into a buzzy retailer and a coveted brand, with eight flagships and three shops-in-shop around the world and around 400 employees.
Its retail footprint includes two Manhattan stores, on Lafayette Street and Bleecker Street, where young people camp out for hours to snag the latest drops, as well as locations on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn; West Hollywood; Miami Beach; Hawaii; Tokyo, and Paris. There are also shops inside Bergdorf Goodman’s Men’s store and Hirshleifers in New York, as well as in Selfridges in London.
It is Kith’s rapid growth, and impact on the industry beyond its size, that has earned it and Fieg this year’s WWD Honor for Best-Performing Retailer – Small Cap.
Like many entrepreneurs, Fieg’s beginnings were humble. He started out at age 13 working in the stockroom at David Z, a Brooklyn footwear shop, where he could be surrounded by the shoes he admired but couldn’t afford to buy.
“I fell in love with the product,” he told the Advertising Week gathering. It was there that he developed relationships with big brands such as Asics and Adidas, and clients with boldfaced names such as Jay-Z — experiences and relationships he drew on to create Kith.
Not long after opening that small footwear shop in Brooklyn, he brought his newly created concept to Atrium’s SoHo store as well, where it quickly attracted a following of like-minded shoppers. His first collaboration was with Asics for its Gel-Lyte V Salmon Toe and Leatherback sneakers, models that are being reintroduced for the anniversary.
His entry into apparel was in 2012 when he introduced the Mercer Pant, a camouflage army pant that he altered with an elastic cuff at the hem. It was a hit and led to expansions into varsity jackets, six-panel hats and other pieces that connected with the tribe he had developed.
“Kith has always been a lifestyle brand,” Fieg said. “Even when we first opened, I never thought of us as only a footwear retailer. We were looking to build a community and a place where people could connect while shopping the best product in the market. Over the years as we’ve developed our own brand, we’ve been able to expand that approach and apply our own vision in different categories.”
As stylist Eugene Tong writes in Kith’s 10th-anniversary book: “He has a diehard fan base that’s continuously growing and he treats them like family.”
From the beginning, Fieg was determined to offer an experience that was welcoming and inclusive. He encouraged people to just come in and hang out even if they didn’t buy anything. And he drew them in with not only the merchandise mix, but also innovative and out-of-the-box collaborations.
Over the years the company has partnered with everyone from Levi’s, Adidas and Columbia to Nike, Versace, Coca-Cola and BMW. Many of these partnerships broke new ground — for instance, the Nike collab from 2016 featured an Air Force 1 model that hadn’t been offered in 15 years and was the first time it was sold in the U.S. The Versace partnership from 2019 was the first time the luxury house allowed another brand to integrate its Medusa head logo onto product, and the Calvin Klein co-branded collection from 2020 was the first time another brand name was featured alongside its own on its elastic waistband.
These collaborations became viral sensations, regardless of their price, which can range from a $1 Kith Coca-Cola can to a six-figure BMW car. Last fall, Fieg designed a special-edition M4 vehicle for the automotive company and all 150 cars, which retailed for $120,000 and up, sold out in 27 minutes.
One of his most seminal moments for the company came in 2016 when Bergdorf Goodman opened a Kith shop on the third floor of its men’s store to house the newly designed co-branded collection.
For Fieg, it was an especially emotional moment. He tells of how his mother was a big fan of Bergdorf’s and would take him there as a child to browse, although they couldn’t afford to buy anything. “This is one of the greatest accomplishments for the brand,” he said at the time.
Indeed. It also marked the first time that the retailer had devoted a shop to a brand it hadn’t tested before and allowed its logo to be used on the exterior of garments, in this case baseball caps, sweatshirts and other hoodies.
“He has a consistent point of view and a sophisticated color palette that gives our logo relevance and reverence,” said Bruce Pask, men’s fashion director of Bergdorf’s and its parent, Neiman Marcus. “It’s a partnership we value supremely and he’s a rarity in our business.”
Five years later, the shop, located on the third floor across from Thom Browne, is still there and still attracts a crowd.
Pask said he recognized early on that what Fieg was doing was “compelling,” and since the price point was more accessible than most of the other product in the store, it could attract a new, younger shopper to Bergdorf’s.
“You need to buy it immediately,” Pask said. “When it drops, if you’re not on line, it’ll be gone. It necessitates action and that sense of immediacy in retail was groundbreaking.” And it also helped make the third floor of the men’s store a fun atmosphere in which to hang out and be part of the Kith world.
For David Fischer, chief executive officer and publisher of Highsnobiety, the core of Kith’s success is its expertise in storytelling. “Customers today don’t buy product, they buy stories,” he told the Advertising Week group.
For Fieg, many of those stories are personal.
“The brands I choose to partner with are ones I have an authentic tie to personally,” he said. “That’s the most important element of our collaborations. It could be a product I use in my daily life or one I’ve come to love as I’ve matured and grown. A lot of the partners we work with are ones who I fell in love with between 13 and 19 years old, as I believe that is the most important and transformative time in our lives.”
He hesitated to categorize which partnerships have been most successful, saying he doesn’t measure success by the standard metrics. Instead, “each one is about dimensionalizing our brand and expanding the lifestyle we can offer to the customer,” he explained. “We work on these projects because we know going in they will accomplish this goal.”
Looking ahead, Fieg wouldn’t tip his hand on what other collaborations he has in the works, but pointed to his newly published 10th-anniversary book for hints.
“People who purchased our 10-year book will see what’s in store,” he said. “The majority of the book was dedicated to showcasing what collections we’ll be releasing through this year and early next. We typically would present these in our runway show, but for our 10th anniversary we created this book for people to explore and discover what we have planned for the months to come.”
Leafing through the book, Kith teases upcoming collaborations with Monopoly, Capita, Oakley, Star Wars, Adidas Terrex, New Era, Clark’s and Major League Baseball.
So what’s next for Kith in the next decade and beyond? Fieg is hesitant to make predictions.
“I have plans for the future. We’re working almost two years out on collections at this point, and there are other experiential ideas that I’m looking to accomplish,” he said. “However, there’s not a script for our future. The most important thing to me is that we continue to grow in a thoughtful and considered way to expand and build on what we’ve done in our first decade. We take on these challenges when I feel we are ready to execute them at the highest possible level.”
