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Kith founder and CEO Ronnie Fieg says that, growing up, his mum was his biggest fashion influence, followed by his big sister. “She was heavily influencing me as I was going into the city and working in the Village, starting in ‘95 when I was 13,” he says. This female presence has fed Fieg’s interest in a woman’s point of view on fashion — be it women’s or menswear.
Fieg is now spinning that interest into a business goal, to get the US brand’s sales to an even split between womenswear and menswear. “The vision has always been to give the women’s category the same experience as — if not better than — the men’s,” Fieg says. “That’s where we’re heading now.” (Kith declined to share the current split.) On top of its own designs, Kith Men’s is known for its extensive roster of brand collaborations and curated, buzzy stores. To help get there, it’s opening its first Kith Women flagship at 644 Broadway; the site of the first Kith store (it moved to the nearby 337 Lafayette when it opened a flagship in 2017 because it outgrew the Broadway space). Fieg has also enlisted designer Daniëlle Cathari as Kith Women’s new creative director.
The new store will be centred around experiences. Fieg worked backwards from the Kith Women’s café and flower shop that feature in the space, in partnership with his friend Eric Mourkakos who runs florist Plantshed. “People will spend the day there,” he says. “That’s the goal.” The café will open two hours before the physical retail space, illustrating that these additional elements are core aspects of the store, rather than add-ons.
Kith launched womenswear in 2015, a natural way to grow the business that Fieg founded as a footwear boutique in 2011. Women were already shopping Kith menswear since it launched Kith-branded items as a way for its customers to signal community membership. The natural step, Fieg says, was women-specific products, which the brand has continued to build out since.
Kith isn’t alone in its venture to appeal to a female audience — and their spend. Categories traditionally tied to menswear (such as sportswear and streetwear) are prioritising women to grow their reach. Now, they’re doubling down. At Paris Couture Week, Nike debuted a Parris Goebel-choreographed performance to usher in a new era for its women’s offering, backed by increased investment and high-fashion collabs. And last year, street and menswear resale platform Grailed reintroduced womenswear, too.
Physical retail has been key to Kith’s growth. The new women’s store joins locations in Beverly Hills, Miami, Brooklyn, London department store Selfridge and, as of September, Toronto. Kith Treat bars, and Sadelle’s, a restaurant featured in the new Toronto store, add to the experience.
For the comeback, Kith is going in experience-first. “We work backwards from the experience,” Fieg explains, noting that it’s an approach he’s learnt works along the way. “We’ve always had that approach with any space that we’ve opened, since the beginning.”
Fieg opened Kith Women with this same ethos: that with desirable experiences comes business. “Today, you really need to put your best foot forward into what the experience is before you even start thinking about the money or the business portion of it. If you build the right space where people wanna come and hang out, the business will come with that.”
The Kith Women product, to date
At launch, Fieg tended to describe Kith Women as athleisure. Not anymore. “That’s changed a lot,” he says. “Now that’s a category within the women’s umbrella that we cover.” Kith’s women’s spectrum will be much wider than men’s, the founder says. To date, it encompasses classics (fleece and jersey; outerwear; knitwear; and soon-to-come loungewear), activewear and “Inline”, which is Kith Women’s fashion collection released four times a year.
It’s taken time to build out its category offerings. The focus for classics, Fieg says, is on timelessness: products that will remain relevant two to three seasons from now. Inline, on the other hand, is where the brand seeks to “move the needle”. Inline offerings include fitted knit dresses, structured Kith-branded pants and sunglasses. Kith also stocks womenswear brands including Area, The Attico, Christopher Esber and Sandy Liang.
“It took a long time for those things to feel right,” he says. “To build with the consumer so that they look at us as a credible brand and trust us for those types of products. Because there’s not a lack of product out there.”
There may be lots of products, but there’s a lack of clear options for where to shop quality pieces. Fieg believes Kith Women can break through the noise. “We’re positioned really well for where the market is heading right now. Before people are spending, they want to make sure they’re spending on product that has value: touch and feel value and that can live in their closets.”
As for how these new products will develop? “We’re being very thoughtful about what Kith Women already is, as well as what it will evolve into,” Cathari says. “You won’t see the first collection I work on for at least a year from now, but you will start to see shifts in the creative direction across the brand before this. And you’ll also notice growth leading up to this from the seeds the team here have been planting all along.”
Building the bridge
Kith is finally at a stage where it has the infrastructure to bring on a creative director, Fieg says. “It took many, many years to get here.” Kith now has the production development; the tech design fabrics; the accessories; the knitwear and activewear specialists. And now, it’s got the store.
“What was missing was the bridging of emotion between product and consumer,” Fieg says. “I realised I was good at building that bridge for men.” Kith Women lacked a leader who could “live, breathe, eat and drink” the brand. A front-facing figure to not just design the product, but to expand its identity; to wear it day to day. “I didn’t want it to be secondary to men’s. I didn’t want it to be a trickle-down effect from what I was doing in men’s.”
Cathari, Fieg realised (with the help of Aimé Leon Dore founder Teddy Santis), fit the bill. Kith had worked with Cathari before on her Adidas project (it was her biggest stockist). Now, she’s tasked with building that bridge between Kith’s female customers and product. “Plugging [Cathari] into the system, I thought, would generate some incredible results,” Fieg says.
Based on the last month and a half, it’s boding well. The goal, eventually, is for Kith Women to be Cathari’s prerogative. But Fieg isn’t in a rush to leave her entirely to her own devices, and plans to work alongside the creative director to ensure a mutual understanding of where the label stands in the market. “Having said that, the spectrum is really wide,” Fieg says. “So there’s not much she can do [that] I’ll disagree with because we’re aligned on aesthetic. That’s why I hired her.”
On their current collaborative process, Cathari says: “Right now it’s a mix of calculated growth, a hyper-awareness of who our women’s consumers are and what they want, and a type of raw, shared intuition that’s difficult to describe but unmistakable when it’s felt.”
Fieg’s plan for Cathari’s role is informed by his own creative director growth trajectory. “Just how I am integrated into different arms of the company to make sure that I still have creative control, I’m putting myself in a position where everything will have a red thread of consistency,” he says. “And I think that that’s such an important element in building a strong identity for a brand.”
This aesthetic double down, Fieg hopes, will pave the way for future collaborations. Kith Men’s is known for its collabs, with brands from Adidas and Asics to Versace and Tommy Hilfiger. On the women’s side, the brand has collaborated with the likes of PH5 and Estée Lauder, but hasn’t developed this area of the business nearly as much. Fieg thinks this opportunity is, to date, largely untapped.
“I haven’t really exhausted any of the opportunities in collaborating in the woman’s space because I didn’t think I had this person in place to protect and build a strong enough brand identity,” he says. “When showing up in a collaboration, you have to be a true 50 per cent partner and not get overshadowed by the brand you’re working with.” This was a major reason for Cathari’s hiring, he notes: enabling collaborations without losing a piece of the brand identity he’s been slowly building over the past eight years.
As for the next eight, and beyond? Fieg doesn’t have a game plan — at least, not one that’s set in stone. The hope would be more collabs, more physical spaces and a cemented Kith Women brand identity. But Fieg won’t get into specifics. “I never put the cart before the horse,” he says. “I want to see how it’s received. I want to see how we can maximise the potential of that experience for her when she’s shopping in the store, and take it from there and see what else we could do.”
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