style in progress 1/2023 – RETERNITY

CREDIBILITY IS KEY!

Their Donald Duck print featuring the F-word on a t-shirt as a political reference to the former US president garnered 14,000 likes. This happened shortly before the release of the first collection. It was the media kick-start for Reternity. Lauren Riedel and Tom Schmidt have expanded their brand significantly over the past four years and are about to take their next major step.

Text: Isabel Faiss. Photos: Reternity

The motto of entrepreneurs Lauren Riedel and Tom Schmidt is: “Join the Family”. Her team comprises around 20 people with an average age of 25.

Lauren, is being labelled a social media brand a curse or a blessing?

The simple fact is that we were formed and matured through social media. To this day, this is virtually our only medium of communication. We do not have a B2B background, but we have developed our own content language. That is why it is so important to us to keep evolving, not least in order to differentiate ourselves.

As a D2C brand, do you address your customers exclusively via your own online store?

Up until now, at least. We only operated via our own online shop for a while, but we hosted our first event at Oberpollinger in Munich, including our own individual space, at the end of last year. That was our first offline experience and it worked out really well. It allowed us to meet our fans in person for a change. Experiencing this sense of community live was incredible. A like on Instagram is a completely different proposition than someone boarding a train to check out the brand. We intend to enter the wholesale market this year, and a retail store in Hamburg is also conceivable. However, we do not consider B2B as our most important sales market, but rather as a marketing tool for positioning and branding. That is why we have chosen a selective approach.

Streetwear authenticity on the one hand, growth via B2B sales and more commercial channels on the other. Will this be a balancing act for you?

Credibility and authenticity are both incredibly important and challenging, especially in the streetwear cosmos. Neither of us are media trendsetters like Achraf of 6pm Season or Justin Fuchs of Peso. They are personalities who polarise on social media and build their brand on that, leverage their reach, and give their business a face. We come from a completely different background and want the brand to function independently of us, not be perceived as our merchandise. Nevertheless, we frequently observe that perception and association depend heavily on the people behind the brand – especially in the context of social media. We have discussed the idea of becoming more visible from time to time. But that is not who we are, and we wish to remain true to our identity. What we focus on instead is our slogan: Join the Family. Familiarity is a common thread running through our company. Instagram, for example, offers the “Closest Friends” feature, which we use to keep our regular customers – our Reternity Hooligans – particularly close. We invite them to join our Discord channel and even include them in decisions.

Forging a bridge from online to offline: as a release promotion, Reternity distributed posters in cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, and Venice.