Timothy Grindle, the founder of Canoe Club, a menswear store in Boulder, Colorado, keeps a list on his phone that tracks all the brands he’s considering buying. “I put them in different categories: one is ‘soon’, one is ‘keep an eye on it’, and the last one is brands that nobody knows about yet,” he says. “I shift them around until I feel like we’re ready to stock them or they start to fill a gap that we might have.”
In recent seasons, Grindle’s buy at Canoe Club has moved away from “traditional runway brands” into independent labels like Seya, Taiga Takahashi, and Aaron Levine. “Legacy brands are not the ones that are leading for us at all; it’s a collective of a lot of the smaller brands,” he says. The shift is buoying Canoe Club’s business: this year, the store is moving to a larger site in a former peanut butter factory, expanding its stock and hiring more staff, which Grindle says is the result of the boom in smaller brands. “It used to be a real risk to bring in new stuff, but not anymore. People have never been this open to new brands.” The labels resonating with Grindle’s customers share similar priorities: a focus on fabric development and manufacturing.
With soaring prices in high fashion and eroding trust in fast fashion and mass-market basics, brands that prioritize craft and fabric are well-positioned to capture market share because they offer a convincing balance of quality, originality, and fair prices. “People are turned off by both extremes for different reasons,” says menswear journalist Louis Cheslaw, who writes the Wardrobe newsletter on Substack. A £500 shirt from Japanese brand Kaptain Sunshine, for instance, may still be expensive, but it doesn’t feel like a rip-off. “You do get your money’s worth in the middle ground, because the fabric feels incredible. It’s very seductive,” he says.
Gregory Hewitt, who runs the London-based showroom DMSR, stocks brands like Kartik Research and Sage Nation, which have seen a consistent uptick in sales over the past few seasons. “There is a higher demand for brands that are known for craft and design, and we’re seeing solid growth across those brands for sure,” he says, adding that buyers want both authenticity and brands that don’t feel like anything else.
Material is crucial. Carter Altman, founder of London-based label Carter Young (which also works with DMSR), says that using deadstock fabrics has also helped differentiate the brand in an increasingly crowded market. “It offers a more unique experience for customers and also creates a differentiated product that feels special,” he says.
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