Aries Wants Retail to Tell Their Brand Story

Aries Soho Store London — Retail arises: Aries's first London store. Courtesy of Aries

LONDON — Aries arises in London’s Soho.

The cult streetwear label has opened its first flagship on Great Pulteney Street with 4,000 square feet of space over two floors.

“We always felt that we needed a store. We would have done it before had it not been for lockdown. As a brand, you do need to have your physical space to showcase how you want your brand to look — without a physical store, it’s really, really hard to do that,” Sofia Prantera, founder and creative director of Aries, told WWD on a Zoom call with the brand’s chief executive officer, Nicki Bidder.

The store was designed in collaboration with an old friend of Prantera and Bidder, Adam Brinkworth, who has worked with the likes of Supreme, Belvedere’s brutalist pop-up bar in Selfridges, Marni, Asics and Size?. Creative studio Wilson Brothers also had input in the project.

“We really want this to be a place that can house exhibitions and bring a lot of the content that we spend enormous amounts of time on. One of the things about digitization of our culture is it makes it quite limiting in some ways what you can do with all this amazing content, imagery and level of contribution we work with,” said Bidder, who wants the space to come to life with the Aries community via various activities.

Retail for traditional luxury brands may be slowly wilting in London, but for streetwear brands it’s robust with a slew of stores such as Axel Arigato, Supreme and End. carving out a niche of dedicated fans that will attend parties, talks and special collaboration launches.

“Streetwear and street culture are really interdependent; you cannot have successful cultural values as a brand and not have a place to connect the tribe of people that want to connect with you,” said Bidder.

“It was happening before, but it’s sort of sped up that fear that what we want as cultural and physical consumers is a mixture of entertainment and inspiration, as well as consumption. If you can bring into a space an experience, excitement, a sense of community and connection, that’s a really powerful thing,” she added.

Aries revenue sits just under 20 million pounds, supported by the brand’s independence, Bidder said, which allows the brand to collaborate with its friends.

Bidder admits that the wholesale environment is tough right now with the business cutting down its footprint from 200 to about 170 wholesalers with hopes of reducing it more in the coming few years.

“We’ve grown about 100 percent in the last two years. The next steps forward are investing in our cultural output and balancing between our wholesale and own channel,” said Bidder.

“The system of growth that we used as a brand was to start with wholesale because in the past it’s how I’ve done my business and it allowed us to communicate with a wider audience. At this point with the store, we feel that maybe it’s time to rein some of the distribution in,” added Prantera.

Last month the brand launched a capsule collection with Tommy Jeans, and for the inauguration of the Soho store, it brought in Parisian-born coffee shop Paperboy with its own special entrance on Bridle Lane.