Decorator Profile
Levi’s Tailor Shop in the Regent Street, London, store The king of customisation
Today’s world of fashion and retail is heavily influenced by a culture of individualism. Leading the way in this current trend is YR Store with its unique approach to in store and online customisation and personalisation. P&P editor Melanie Attlesey sat down with co-founder Tim Williams to find out more.
YR Storeʼs UK headquarters. I say UK, because in the short six years
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that YR Store has been operational, the business has expanded overseas with offices in Japan, Hong Kong and the United States.
YR Store as a business was founded in 2013 by Tim Williams and Tom Hogan. The pair had a strong background in technology and a love of streetwear and urban fashion and were passionate about finding a way to combine the two. And so, the pair set about creating a piece of software that would enable the user to design their own unique T shirt design live in front of them, as Tim explains: “We believed that if people could see that you could reinvent the retail experience and do everything live, i.e. coming into the store, making a design and seeing it printed out, it would be amazing! That was the birth of YR Store.” YR Storeʼs first foray into the retail world was a seven-week pop-up store in
| 62 | September 2019
ituated down a rather non-descript Shoreditch street is where you will find
Carnaby Street, London. This was a huge success and word quickly got around among high-end retailers in the Oxford Street and Regent Street area of London. By the end of 2013, YR Store had permanent installations in Topshop, Topman, Selfridges, as well as a YR Store-branded pop-up shop in Box Park, Shoreditch.
“Suddenly everywhere you looked there was a YR Store,” exclaims Tim.
Change in direction However, this bubble was about to burst
as Tim explains, it was very difficult to be profitable by working in this format. “In the heady days of when we were running our own stores, we were selling up to 150 T shirts a day in Topman. When we first launched, it was like a crazy ramble of people trying to get their own product made.
“How we sold ourselves at the time was that we were a custom fashion brand. Everything we did was customised. We were turning fashion on its head in the sense that the whole point of the brand
was that everything was customised. It wasnʼt a case of weʼre a custom T shirt shop, weʼre a fashion brand and everything is made just for you uniquely. “The problem was we were ahead of our time. We were the new to the fashion part and that was the issue. We were approaching it from a tech point of view, but with a love of streetwear and all over prints. Perhaps someone from a fashion background would have curated it better. “From a management point of view, on one hand we were a software, tech type business that had opened a brand to showcase what we did and then we effectively had to diversify into becoming a retail store, which was tricky in terms of managing staff and all the other aspects that go with running a retail store. This was not just a retail store, but was a new concept that people did not necessarily understand or had seen before. “From a money making point of view, we relied heavily on volume. If you imagine Topshop, we had a 3x3m space where we did the printing, Topshop could have filled that with denim and T shirts, but we
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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