Coming from Barcelona, the label is much "More than a supermarket"
"Streetwear is dead", stated Virgil Abloh a few months ago, before correcting himself and saying that it is not dead, but it's just evolving into something new. In the different and eclectic faces of the fashion industry, streetwear is one of the most chameleonic: in constant regeneration, every year new players take to the field with the aim of revolutionizing the approach to fashion of the latest generations. Among these, you can't miss SSSTUFFF, founded in Barcelona just over a year ago.
Despite its young age, SSSTUFFF is one of the most important protagonists of the international streetwear scene. Formed by a group of young creatives led by Ho and Jepi, tired of the already existing commercial offer, the collective has very high ambitions: to illuminate the consumer market, through a product that is much more than a simple object to wear, but functional and exciting experience. The brand has just opened its first pop-up store in Barcelona, the city where a new generation of creatives is slowly making its way into the industry, and it's "a full-on 360 riot of colour, sound, and retail madness all set to the theme of an east Asian supermarket", as the two founders told nss magazine.
Present both with a retail platform, but above all with hilarious e-commerce (the SSSTUFFF SUPERMARKET, or rather, "more than a supermarket", as one can read on their Instagram), SSSTUFFF boasts a very specific selection of streetwear brands, all brought together by a single principle: transgression. In the store, the brand hosts Bape, Supreme, Palace, OriginalFake and AntiSocialSocialClub. But the original items are the real deal: a collection of objects that are nothing short of extravagant, from T-shirts that change colour according to UV rays to the Self Paint t-shirt, sold together with a marker that invites you to customize it, up to the simplest Tie Dye and a branded shopping cart. Everything that the SSSTUFFF brand bears are an explosion of creativity and provocation, inspired by the pop aesthetics of Chinese culture, immortalized to perfection in the images of its first editorial.
SSSTUFFF has not just confined this way of thinking to the product," explains Jepi; "We make sure the experience from initial marketing to the virtual and physical action of buying the product leads to a more experimental and artistic experience." And Ho continues: "We bring in ideas and inspiration from our crazy reality, childhood memories, and everyday items we come across on our travels.
The secret also lies in the brand's social strategy. "[...] we hope SSSTUFFF can talk with customers, not just a cold brand," explains Jepi. "We can laugh, use emojis, memes, and of course, we can be angry. We use our own language to explain a Europeanized (or Americanized) Asian culture." "I'm a filmmaker, so what we are doing, just the same as a film's production," says Ho; "We create a personality then convey it to our clothes to communicate with our customers, from the first time they see the clothes posters until they open it and wear it."