Epicenter
Sneaker boutique opens in Dogpatch.
When he was envisioning his new Stashed boutique in Dogpatch, one of the key elements for Steve Stoute was that the space tell a story about this changing San Francisco neighborhood.
Standing in the airy central room with its long displays of sneakers, he recalls “this was an art gallery first. When I took over the building, it was much more contemporary. I wanted to change it up, bring in some steel, some natural woods.”
The advertising veteran and former president at Interscope Records walks into the store’s “night gallery” space, divided from the main gallery and “rust gallery” by black grated metal dividers, all designed by Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., firm West of West. Stoute compares the room’s metal work to the mesh lining of a T by Alexander Wang jacket.
“We could have made it slick and polished but we wanted to keep it nice and raw,” he says. “That’s what this neighborhood is all about.”
Stoute, 47, is the CEO of Translation Enterprises, which incorporates his music startup UnitedMasters and his advertising firm Translation the Creative Agency. (It recently raised $70 million in Series A funding, led by Google’s Alphabet and joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Floodgate and 20th Century Fox.) As the author of “The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy” (2012), Stoute is all about telling stories across his businesses.
Stashed, in which he is a partner, is just the latest chapter in a career that’s included crafting marketing strategies for the NBA and State Farm Insurance as well as adapting his book into a fourpart VH1 documentary. The new men’s store, which opened in December with a party attended by tech CEOs and NBA players, calls itself an “elevated retail experience” dedicated to designer, street and hype apparel and footwear, including Adidas Consortium, Yeezy, Fenty, Puma, Nike Lab, Pierre Balmain, Y-3, New Era, Off-White, Stone River and Rick Owens DrkShdw.
During the month it’s been open, Stashed has already become touted as a hot, new sneaker destination, with a recent Yeezy drop attracting an estimated 200 people who were notified via an Instagram story on the store’s account @thestashed.
The bicoastal Stoute, whose offices for United Masters are on the floors above Stashed, has been coming to the Bay Area regularly for the past eight years from New York “to get to know the guys down in the Valley, the Sand Hill road guys” as well as spending
time in San Francisco. Noticing “a need in the market for a fresh boutique that carries a lot of the preferred clothing that we want, plus the right sneakers,” he sought to fill it.
“There’s this whole notion that guys are making money in tech but they can’t dress cool because they don’t have the joint,” Stoute says. “I think it’s really a fact of there’s not enough (options). The market is so right, there’s so much opportunity out here in the market, and yet no one’s spent the time to curate and build something that’s beautiful.
“I want to bring with me what I can from the years I’ve been building my career. For me to build a beautiful shop like this and call my friends, whether it be Virgil (Abloh of Off-White), Kanye
(West) or Pharrell (Williams) and say ‘Give me your stuff, let’s get it in,’ I think that’s an important contribution to the culture.”
It’s a moment where the culture is perhaps catching up to Stoute, who has long been touting the synergy among music, fashion and lifestyle and how music videos and social media influence how people dress and what they buy. He notes that although fashion and retail have struggled to redefine themselves in recent years, menswear has seen a renaissance via streetwear-brand collaborations with major houses and a widening of style influences.
Among recent examples of creative crossbreeding that Stoute is proud is Gucci’s spring collaboration with Dapper Dan (Daniel Day), the Harlem designer to the O.G. hip-hop world. Stoute helped facilitate the hookup after Gucci showed an inflated coat on its 2017 cruise runway that was widely seen as derivative of one of Day’s signature pieces. Stoute says that Stashed will be a carrier of the Gucci/Dapper Dan capsule collection in San Francisco.
“The fashion industry are really good at telling their fashion stories to fashionistas, and that’s a niche market,” says Stoute. “The interpretation of fashion, or what’s fashionable, from hip-hop to the NBA to sports and entertainment allowed the whole thing to open up and invited more people in. The truth is, there is no stereotype of who is fashionable, there is no cookie-cutter version of fashion. It should be shared and democratic.”
Stoute wants Stashed to be part of that new wave of democracy. Part of Dogpatch’s appeal? It hasn’t been known as a traditional fashion retail destination in San Francisco. In addition to his friends in the venture capital and technology worlds in the Bay Area, it’s also been important to him to build relationships in the neighborhood with fellow business owners as the landscape along Third Street continues to evolve. As he spends more time in the Bay Area, he’s also looking for a new home in San Francisco, probably in Dogpatch.
“I feel like I’m part of the fabric of the city and like the city has embraced me,” says Stoute. “I think it’s important to be a citizen of any city you’re a part of. If you’re going to come to San Francisco you can’t just fly in, take a few meetings and leave; you’ve got to be part of what’s going on.”