True Classic to Open Three Stores by Year’s End
True Classic is bringing its retail efforts in-house.
The direct-to-consumer men’s basics brand that was founded in 2019 by Ryan Bartlett, Nick Ventura and Matt Winnick, currently has five stores in the U.S., but they’re operated by Leap, a platform that finds locations, staffs and merchandises physical stores for DTC brands.
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Although those stores perform well, True Classic recently made the decision to go it alone. Its first company-operated store will have a soft opening at the Houston Galleria on Wednesday, with two others slated before the end of the year.
To spearhead this new strategy, True Classic brought Brent Paulsen on board as vice president of retail in March. He had previously worked at Untuckit for six years as its head of retail and spent a decade at Bloomingdale’s.
“Last November we opened our first store with Leap,” Paulsen said, “and now we have five stores around the country. We interact with them daily and we’ve learned a lot, but I was brought in to open retail stores that will be operated by True Classic.”
He said Leap is “a great platform for brands without the expertise or bandwidth” to run their own stores, but True Classic decided it was worthwhile to make the investment to ultimately have more control.
Paulsen said the Leap stores will continue to operate and this decision doesn’t preclude the company from opening more stores with the platform. But for now, the focus is on growing its retail internally.
The Houston store will measure 1,600 square feet and will be located on “the Nordstrom side” of the Simon Properties-owned center. “It’s a powerhouse mall with great traffic and Simon helped us find a location that makes sense.”
The store will stock True Classic’s full range of product, which is centered around its hero product — T-shirts — but now includes long-sleeve crews, button-up shirts, activewear, jeans, pants, outerwear and accessories. There will be no third-party brands in the store, Paulsen said.
The design of the store will be more elaborate than the Leap-operated units, Bartlett said. “We’re investing in these stores. We didn’t go super-cheap or super high-end, but they’ll look better than the Leap stores.”
“They’ll be more understated,” Paulsen added. “And we’ll be bringing the humor of our advertising into them with digital screens.”
Next up is Boca Raton, Fla., at the Town Center, which will open in mid-November, followed by the Shops at Stonebriar in Frisco, Texas, on or around Dec. 1, Paulsen said. Both of those stores will average around 1,500 square feet, which is “our current model.”
True Classic intends to launch womenswear by the second quarter of next year and Paulsen said when that happens, future stores may have to be larger to accommodate the category. But until then, “we’ll have to figure out how to fit it into the space we have.”
Bartlett said that if these company-operated stores are successful, “the sky’s the limit — we’re open to scaling to hundreds of stores over the next couple of years.”
But the self-funded brand is taking it slow for now. “We may need to inject some capital if we decide to go fast, but we’ll see how it goes,” Bartlett said.
Los Angeles-based True Classic, which has also begun “dabbling” in wholesale, according to Bartlett, was named the 2023 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year in L.A. in June. Since its launch four years ago, the brand has grown into a $250 million business.
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