How Kith's Ronnie Fieg Became the King of Sneakers in 2016

The retail mastermind and collaboration-happy creator blazed a trail through the crowded worlds of kicks and menswear this year—which is no easy task.

Ronnie Fieg has had a very good 2016. His sportswear brand slash retail concept Kith maintained its rocket ship-like trajectory all year, impressing sneakerheads and average guys—who just want a pair of cool sneakers—alike with delivery after delivery after delivery of piping hot exclusive product. Kith collaborated with a list of brands so long that just hearing Ronnie list them seems like an impressive feat, a list that includes (but is not limited to) Rugrats, Colette, Bape, Columbia, Timberland, Asics, Coca-Cola, Iro, Adidas, and Nike (yes, Ronnie teamed up with both Adidas and its mortal enemy Nike in the same calendar year). His Manhattan Kith store doubled in size. He opened a store in Miami. He opened a pop-up shop in Aspen, Colorado. He staged a high-octane fashion show that was part presentation and part nostalgia-tinged hip-hop concert (Fabolous and The Lox performed).

But Kith's constant presence on social media, blogs, and city streets didn’t happen overnight. Once upon a time, Fieg was just a junior buyer at David Z., a downtown footwear shop that specialized in boots, not highly coveted kicks. Slowly, through limited-edition collaborations with brands like Adidas, Asics, and Timberland, he established himself as a gatekeeper of cool. His has been a slow-but-steady takeover of the limited-edition, collaboration-happy, hyped-up retail scene that seems to matters most to millennial shoppers. And becoming this successful, this quickly, is not something that comes without its fair share of naysayers.

Fieg remains dedicated to a singular underlying principal: That his products will always be a reflection of his own preferences, and that he has no desire to sell products based on some phony, VSCO-filtered marketing campaign. Some brands might build up their image based on what Tumblr defines as cool, but Fieg is more focused on getting actual clothing into the hands of real customers, who, if this year has been any indication, are more than willing to buy into Ronnie's idea of style in 2016. But how did Fieg figure it out? And now that he’s mastered the fickle sneaker and streetwear worlds, where does he go from here? Over two lengthy interviews (one over-the-phone and one at his just-opened Aspen shop, and two of the longest he’s ever given) Fieg talked about his ascent to footwear retail king, just how big he wants his burgeoning empire to get, and why he looks to Ralph Lauren for inspiration.

What exactly is sneaker culture to you? How would you describe the community of people who enjoy sneakers?
I don’t want to call it street culture, because I don’t think that it is. It used to be street culture, but today, it’s a lot less stemming from the street and more and more from online. I come from a place where trends started on blocks where I worked, on Eighth Street in the Village. That was the most influential block in the country, where all the hip-hop artists would hang out on the weekend. You’d go to Gray’s Papaya for a hot dog, then you’d get a pair of Parasuco jeans in one of those shops that continuously changed their names, and then you come into David Z.’s for a pair of Gore-Tex boots. Those were the days that made up my DNA of who I am.

Right. Like the way breakdancers used to wear Pumas not to show everyone that they had them, but because they looked fresh when they were breakdancing. There was a connection to this real culture. And today, it’s almost like the only thing that matters are actual items once associated with it.
When Lauryn Hill spits “In some Gore-Tex and sweats I make treks like I’m homeless,”—the week that she recorded that album, I sold her the boots. And anytime when you see Mace and Diddy in the “Been Around the World” video and they’re wearing Dolomites, I sold them their boots. Anytime you’d see Wu-Tang with custom Wallabies, I used to get them custom made for them. Jay was there every weekend. "Cruising down Eighth Street,” when he spits that on the “[Empire State of Mind]” track, that was him every Saturday, cruising down Eighth Street. I used to help him with his Timberlands every Saturday. He would come in and buy two pairs of Trekkers, or a pair of Trekkers and a pair of Constructs.

Every week?
Every week, a fresh pair of Timbs. It wasn’t about people seeing you on social media, seeing you wear them, paparazzi, TMZ—none of that shit. It was all kept in the street. Everything that I do is with that era in mind.

How did you go from working at a sneaker store to collaborating directly with brands?
I started off at David Z., and I worked my way up from the stock room to a sales position to assistant management to management to assistant buyer to buyer. And by age twenty-four, or –five, I think it was twenty-five, I was already the buyer of the chain of David Z.’s in the city.

You got your job at David Z. because your family knew him, right?
So David is my mother’s first cousin. And in 1995, at my bar mitzvah, he knew that my parents were paying off my bar mitzvah with the gifts that I was getting. David knew that, so he came to give me an envelope of money, cash, and I told him thank you, but no thank you. I’d rather him give me a job instead. He took it back, and I started the next day.

So now you’re twenty-five years old and you’re the head buyer of David Z.
I started assisting buying at twenty-two. By twenty-three, I became a buyer. And I started opening up athletic footwear accounts for David Z., which at the time was primarily brown shoes and boots. I opened up the Asics account with David in Vegas at a trade show. Fast forward a little bit and [it] was doing really well as Onitsuka Tiger at David Z. We were selling, like, wrestling shoes at the time, because those were hitting as a trend. And the Mexico 66, and the Ultimate 81, those shoes were hitting really hard for the Europeans on Broadway.

But most people know you for your Asics collaborations.
[Asics] gave me the chance to work on a silhouette. They approached me with a catalog to look through. Back in the day my mom was shopping at Tennis Junction, which is a sneaker store in Great Neck, where my aunt lives. I remember I was crying to my mom for a pair of Reebok Pumps back then—because everybody wanted Reebok Pumps back in the day—and she went into the store and came out with a pair of Asics Gel Lyte III, which at the time I hated. I wore them till they had holes in the soles. I wanted to get another pair, but they were discontinued. So when they gave me the catalog to pick a style out of the catalog to work on, I saw the Gel Lyte III, and obviously that was a nostalgic moment for me. So I pulled them out of the archive and worked on three versions of the Gel Lyte III, which ended being released in May of 2007.

What was it like with those early collaborations when you were unknown?
I had a little bit of pressure on me, because I created 756 pairs of these shoes, and I was unknown back then. So I called on a few friends. We threw an event at the store. The next day, we sold a few pairs. I told the story that I just told you to a gentleman who bought the shoes. The next day, my mom called me up crying like, “Your shoe is on the cover of the Wall Street Journal!” The guy I spoke to was an editor writing this story about limited sneakers. The next day, there was a line around the block. While that happened, the president of Adidas America walked in, I told him the story, and that’s how we started talking about working on a shoe called the Black Tie.

Even the Adidas Black Ties were branded as David Z. x Adidas, not Ronnie Fieg.
Right. They were. It was less about me and more about the collaboration between where I was working. Kids started started following me and what I was doing back then. That’s how I built the following footwear, off of my name, starting off with working on those projects. People would walk into David Z. and be like, “wait, this is David Z.?” They had a different perception of what the store would look like, because of the product that I was working on.

Right. David Z. was not a very curated space.
Exactly. And no knocks to that business, because that business was very successful. I just felt like the product that I wanted to work on was more elevated than the space in which we were selling the product. So I wanted to leave to start Kith. At that time, I had worked at David Z. for fifteen years.

"Self-doubt is a motherfucker. I’m always questioning whether or not people will perceive the product the way I want them to. The market is shifting so fast, and things are moving so quickly, but we’re working a good six to eight months in advance."

When you were working on the sneakers, did [David] support it? What was his perspective on these collaborations?
I don’t want this to be a beef starter in my family, but I guess it wasn’t a big enough part of the business, Actually it was big enough. I don’t know. David didn’t want to make a turn or evolve from what he was doing. I don’t like wording it that way. I think he had a business that was working, and he wasn’t that interested in my ideas.

You can understand that, right? As a dude who made his business selling thousands of pairs of Timberland boots, it’s a hard pitch to sell just five hundred pairs of a sneaker on purpose.
And rightfully so. He had what he built from the early '90s, and he’s one of the godfathers of retail in the city. He wasn’t that interested in changing that—and I respect him for it. I grew up in the era in Manhattan with Union and Supreme, and when those retailers first came to life. I was in love with what they were doing. What I really wanted to do is build a curated lifestyle shop, and not be pigeonholed into one category or another, give the New York vibe of all types of products, multi-brand, and have our own brand.

How you were able to save money to open your own retail space in New York. What was the transition like?
So in 2007, the same year that I released the 252 Pack, I also started a very small T-shirt and jacket line called Kith. By 2010, I wanted to leave to open my own shop. Sam, who is my partner, who was the owner of Atrium, approached me to open up a footwear section in the shop. I was going back and forth with what I wanted to do, either to do it on my own or to team up with Sam, or to take a job with an offering that I had. I had a few offerings from a few big brands.

Which ones?
I don’t want to mention which ones. I actually had three job offers, which I ended up handing off to friends. It was a decision I had to make. It was the right one, because Sam today is my mentor, my partner, and my best friend. [The first shop] was eight hundred square feet. I slept in the Soho shop, for five days, no shower, just building the store with our bare hands. We pulled off a miracle by building that store. At first I didn’t even have a Nike account. I borrowed money to open the shop. It really took off the minute we opened and the money was paid back in like four months of what it took to open the shop.

What were some of those core brands in the beginning? It was Adidas, New Balance, Asics, Puma, Timberland, Clarks, Red Wing…obviously we had the most pinnacle point of distribution from each of those brands. With New Balance, we had their top tier of distribution, and with Adidas we had Consortium, and then with Puma we had Cream.

Were you nervous when you first opened the store?
Self-doubt is a motherfucker. I’m always questioning whether or not people will perceive the product the way I want them to. The market is shifting so fast, and things are moving so quickly, but we’re working a good six to eight months in advance. We take a lot of risks, but you have to take risks in this market to be rewarded and to feel like you’re helping shift this culture and not just be a follower and someone who’s eating off the culture. You need to actually provide newness and culture-shifting ideas.

You’ve been an extremely busy man this year. Was that your plan going in?
My goal this year was just to check off everything that I’ve ever wanted to do before opening the shop—all of our collaborative efforts with Power Rangers and Rugrats and Iceberg. We have [collaborations] coming up with Fear of God, in Aspen with Timberland and Adidas and Columbia—which is the biggest collection we’ve ever designed—and Tumi, and New Era, and then capping off the year with what we’re gonna do with Coca-Cola.

At this point ’m just doing what I fucking like to do. People are gonna love it or hate it. But the one thing is that it’s gonna be fucking honest. And between Kith Treats and all of these nostalgic moments that we had, I’m just fucking living a dream right now. This is what I love.

Captain Crunch, Power Rangers, Coca-Cola are all big corporate brands. There's criticism that you’re just collaborating with everyone to cash a check.
I’m not cashing checks from these brands. For me to get my own Captain Crunch cereal, I would have written a check! It’s never for the check. What we’re doing is to push the boundaries with these brands, for things that they have never done, and the approvals that we’re getting to get some of these things done is insane. Like, what we’ve been able to do with Coca-Cola for what we’re dropping at the end of the year, you’ve never seen anything like it in your life.

Do you think about oversaturation with so many collaborations? Do you ever worry there’s too much Kith stuff out there and people will get tired of it?
I don’t think so, because the demand has just grown. I think that we’re just getting started. We’re not producing a lot of product at all. It’s just a storytelling process throughout the year. These are small notches for the bigger picture. I don’t think it’s too much at all, because we’re selling out a product in like less than a minute. We’re catering to like one percent of the demand when you look at the numbers of traffic at the store and on the site, and according to what we could sell and what we produce. For me it’s just important for the kids to feel special and not have everybody in this classroom or everybody at his job or everybody in his crew wearing the same product. So it’s important to keep it super limited.

If I were in your position, I might be discouraged by blog comments that say things like “Oh great, another Kith product...”
If I was to release my fall/winter collection as a designer in one collection, would that be doing too much? We split it up. I’m trying to give every story its own moment.

Right.
We want to pay homage—we’re storytellers at the brand. I could have released everything at one time, and you would have seen it one time, and that would be that. And it would probably all still sell the same amount, and we probably would have still sold all the product that we did. But for me, it’s about giving every capsule and every concept its own time to shine. I don’t want to tell a Rugrats and Power Rangers story at the same time—it doesn’t make sense.

"I’m not cashing checks from these brands. For me to get my own Captain Crunch cereal, I would have written a check! It’s never for the check."

Your aesthetic and the vibe your brand represents is all across New York and Los Angeles right now, a sort of, bomber jacket with a T-shirt and sweatpants and a cool sneaker.
Miami’s like really psyched on it too, considering how successful the store launch was. But I would agree and disagree about my aesthetic being a bomber and sweats and shit like that. That’s one tenth of my aesthetic and what I represent as a brand. I could see why that would be the most influential we’ve been with that aesthetic, because I felt like we were offering it in a way and at a time that I wasn’t really competing with anyone else, and we were doing it, and still are doing it, in my opinion, best, for that type of offering. But when we introduce denim, very soon, you’re going to start to see a shift.

At the same time, one reason you’ve been able to sell so much and establish a base is that your stuff has always been affordable. Have you made a concerted effort to not be at Bergdorf Goodman prices?
I'm not going to say never, but that’s not gonna change in terms of our core brand and what we produce. A $150 hoodie to like a $200 hoodie, I consider that affordable. We’re just trying to get the best possible product, you know, and not have to just raise prices because of the branding on the product. We want to cater to our consumer in a way where they feel like they’re getting more than what they pay for. That’s the biggest goal for me, is to live in people’s closets. I want to make product that washes well, that fits well, that people can continuously wear, and lives in their closets.

As a business owner, how do you reconcile that? You want things that people will keep for a long time, but at the same time, you still want to sell more products, no?
But that doesn’t mean that they have to, you know, use product and, like, make it disposable. That means they got their money’s worth by wearing it for as many times as they could. You know how many black hoodies I have in my closet? I’d say over fifty black hoodies in my closet. I can continuously buy black hoodies as long as they’re dope and as long as they’re different, I’ll have use for them. I’m a person that likes to have a crazy variety when I step into my closet to put a fit together. I’m catering to the kid the way I want to cater to myself, and that’s the truth.

I respect where your pricing has been, because the fashion industry right now is so polarized: people either want to spend $10 on a pair of jeans, or $1,000 on a pair of jeans. You’ve found a good space in the middle.
That’s a great point. I can afford to wear Rick or Raf or any designer any day that I want. I don’t see the reason sometimes to spend the kind of money to buy into a person’s name or brand. If I was to not release anything in a month, people might not have the brand front of mind. Bottom line is, is the product still up to par? So if the product lost any sense of quality, based on the frequency, then I would tell you that’s like a really bad evolution of the brand.

I’m assuming you’re not necessarily even going after the person who’s Instagram-obsessed and fashion-obsessed every day. Do you eventually want to reach regular dudes, right?
When you say regular dudes...

I just mean dudes who aren’t hypebeasts.
I want to educate regular dudes. I want to tell the regular dudes, “we have amazing product that you can buy. Here is why it’s special. If you buy this special product, where I’m not gonna break your bank to do so, you’ll also be one of few that have this product.” I want to cater to anyone who wants to be special. I don’t care if you’re 90, if you’re fucking thirteen. I’ve been preaching this shit since I was a kid that my biggest inspiration is Ralph [Lauren]. Ralph is relevant from Harlem to the Hamptons, Ralph was respected on the full spectrum and everything in between and every culture. That’s what I’m looking to become.

I guess the difference between you and Ralph, though, is that you seem to be more of the people. Ralph has always branded itself on being aspirational.
I think they did that up until a certain point where they felt like they needed to join. But I don’t believe that they felt like they were above the people. I believe that Ralph Lauren represents a certain lifestyle. You know, and people feed into that lifestyle.

But Ralph Lauren has never personally acknowledged, for example, the 'Lo Head culture.
But I’m not idolizing the person. I’m not speaking about Ralph as an individual. I’m speaking about how the brand has been perceived and loved by everyone. By my mother. By my sister. By myself. By my father. All for different reasons. There was enough substance within the brand for you to love it for a million different reasons. We’re looking to create greatness, you know, through product. I guess Ralph as an individual, that was his form of self-expression, through the product.

What does Kith’s product stand for?
Right now, it stands for New York and for wanting to be different. When you say standing for New York, that means that it stands for all cultures, all styles, all races, both genders.

And you're trying to bring that to Aspen. Why did you choose to open this store when there are other more obvious options?
We do a pop-up shop every year and for our five year anniversary we wanted to do something that would evolve our relationship with the product. So for these big moments, there needs to be a big experiential moment. The first reason for Aspen is that when I think of these things, I think about where I want to go with my friends and family. That’s where we’ve always done the pop-ups in places I’ve simply wanted to visit. Aspen seemed like a place to have fun.

How has the reception to the store been?
I was really surprised with how many people showed up and how many people drove up. We have been working on this for a year, so to see it all come together and the store be the final aspect of the project, and for the people be able to enjoy the labor of love that’s been exhausting not just to me but on the resources of the company, is a fulfilling moment.

How big do you want Kith to be? Is there a number of stores or money you would need to feel satisfied?
I don’t know. Next year we’re going to do some things to revamp our flagship. We’re also going to work on one more flagship store in the United States. And that’ll be it for the United States for the near future. What we’ve been able to do in the past few years has been a lot. The team has been super on point, but it’s exhausting the resources.

As you get bigger, how much do things like Kith’s environmental and social impact play a role in your decision making?
Something people don’t know is that we donate all of the clothes that don’t sell at the end of the year. And those numbers are big. I do care about the community, I do care about helping those that in need. And I think it does come with the territory. As you become more successful, and you have the opportunity to give back, you should.

Are you a nice boss?
No. Well, I challenge people. No one’s ever asked me that before. But just picture the growth and what comes with that. We’ve had to continuously restructure the brand because the growth has been so exponential. It’s like, to get things done—and we’ve done a shit ton of stuff and done it all proper—I feel like I want to look back at 2016 as a case study for what we can achieve. I think we achieved almost the impossible this year. I think people will be more interested than ever in what we’re doing next.

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