How a Masterfully Curated, Collab-Centric Retailer Celebrates Its 20th Year
A lot has changed since Callum Hill, senior collaborations design manager at END., first started shopping at the UK-based streetwear boutique at age 16.
Armed with his EMA money (that’s an Education Maintenance Allowance, designed to help students continue in education post secondary school), he made his first purchase after spending many a weekend browsing the shelves. “I remember going in and spending all that [EMA money] on a Stüssy jumper, which was around £70 but seemed like the most expensive thing ever,” Hill, now aged 33, tells me over a video call.
At the time, around 2008, END. was still a tiny boutique on a cobblestone street in Newscastle, a city on the other side of the country to London, where the fashion industry is centred. It’s grown significantly since then.
END.’s latest Newcastle flagship opened in 2021 is a shiny three-storey emporium with sleek stainless steel and white marble fixings nestled in a Grade II listed building. And this is one of five equally glitzy locations worldwide, the others being in Glasgow, Manchester, London, and Milan.
Inside each of the sizeable stores, you’ll find a mix of streetwear heavyweights, niche Japanese labels, high-end brands, and the finest sneakers. That distinct curation has been there since the early days — “I went in looking for Stüssy and walked out knowing what WTAPS is,” says Hill of his first visits to the store. However, as the shops have gotten bigger and more plentiful, so have the offerings inside.
Initially a menswear boutique, END. now has a considerable womenswear selection as well as a varied homeware offering (ranging from Seth Rogan's handmade smoking accessories to Vitra toolboxes). Plus, there are exclusive END. collaborations. Lots of collaborations.
This is Hill's remit: Choosing and executing the retailer's many co-branded releases. And this year, for END.’s 20th birthday, he’s pulled out all the stops.
You might’ve seen some of the initial anniversary celebrations — a big wedding-themed drop with regular collaborator adidas or a pair of limited edition Salomon XT-6 sneakers, which Hill tells me were two years in the making — but that’s only a small taste of what’s to come.
“We tell lots of stories and work with lots of brands, but nothing really links back to who we are and where we’re from,” says Hill. “With it being the anniversary, we said it’s a good idea to drill into who we are. I wanted to create collections that link back to the roots of END. and our initial customer base, which has become a globalized customer base.”
A trio of new collections centers around a trio of British cultural experiences. It begins with a trip to the coastline, finding inspiration in fish and chip shops, coastal arcades, and beach outings for capsule drops featuring the likes of British streetwear heavyweight Aries alongside foam clog specialists Crocs; then the theme switches to corner shops, a cornerstone of many local communities, where it’s a sportswear heavy line-up, Italian brand C.P. Company bringing its distinct garment dying into the fold with long-term END. partners Salomon, adidas, and ASICS all contributing their athleisure expertise; finally, it’s time to go to the pub with labels such as Stone Island, PUMA, and Nottingham-based menswear label Universal Works delivering collections spanning heritage casual wear, vintage-style football kits, and music-inspired graphics.
All three collections have around two months dedicated to them throughout the year and will be interspersed with yet more collaborations. Some of these are already announced, like an exclusive New Balance 2010 sneaker, while others are yet to be made public. And most surprising in the lineup is a series of local, fledgling English brands new to END.’s vast collaborations roster.
“Who can we work with that’s not really worked with anybody before? What brands are people wearing when they visit our store that we don’t already stock?” These are some of the questions Hill and his team were thinking about when selecting collaborators such as Manchester-based Local Space, known for its rope hats with thick embroidery, or elevated streetwear label about:blank. “It feels a bit more like what collaborations used to be before people started making hundreds of thousands of units. It was about making a meaningful connection and doing something unexpected,” continues Hill.
Having a varied mix of brands has always been core to END.’s business. It was always more than a typical streetwear store, offering the likes of Japanese label visvim, known for its artisanal craftmanship, from the early days. It might seem obvious now, bringing together brands from all corners of the earth and fashion industry, but it was a pretty novel idea at the time. Remember, this was before streetwear exploded to become a globalised movement aligned with high fashion, and it was in Newcastle, which doesn’t have a storied history of boundary-pushing retail.
In my 40-minute-or-so conversation with Hill, a number of other retailers we frequented in our teenage years come up. For me, growing up in Coventry, Kong was the local purveyor of all things cool, while Hill remembers a trip to London to visit The Hideout (he says the atmosphere, where shop staff were cold and everything felt intimidatingly cool, was a sharp contrast to his shopping experience back in Newcastle: “END. always had that Northern warmth.”). Unfortunately, many of the stores we speak about are no longer around, and certainly none of them have expanded to having stores on the continent.
In that sense, END. is an anomaly. It’s weathered the storms of economic crashes and pandemics that shuttered many of its contemporaries, and it’s become more than a retailer, now being almost equally known for its many great collaborations. Largely powered by its genre-bending curation, where cutting-edge norda trail running shoes, minimalist luxury menswear from Jil Sander, and baggy skate-wear from Polar Skate Co. all live together, it’s become a one-stop-shop for much of England’s fashion scene.
“You can go down to END. and you'll see a kid wearing like a Drama Call tracksuit, another guy in Cole Buxton, a 50-year-old wearing selvedge denim and red wing boots, and then there's some guy dressed in head-to-toe Rick Owens,” says Callum, a vast spectrum of menswear architypes are catered for by its stores. That’s a big part of what makes END. distinct, and why it has managed to expand in the past twenty years. And it’s probably the reason why it’ll still be around two decades later.
