Before Selling Streetwear, He Decided to Open a Store That Looked Cool Enough | 100 People With Ideas

For Lewis, the store ALL SH matters for one reason only: it sells things with ideas behind them — or, put another way, it offers ideas unlike anyone else's.

Many people who walk past the store called ALL SH, on Wuxing Road in Shanghai, assume the renovation isn't finished.

There is no storefront wall in the usual sense — just one pane of glass serving as both door and display window. Through it you can see the rough, mottled interior walls, and take in everything for sale at a glance. It is a streetwear store, carrying sneakers, T-shirts, sunglasses and other apparel from overseas streetwear labels.

ALL SH co-founder Lewis Chang stands by the register near the entrance in casual sportswear, baseball cap turned backward — the perfect model for his own store. QDaily's conversation with Lewis began with the store's design.

ALL SH is only 20 square meters. Linehouse, the studio that designed it, made clever use of mirrors and angled surfaces: the store still has room for a storeroom and fitting rooms, and the eye is fooled into reading the space as bigger than it is.

Several thin white metal panels are set at matching angles to serve as display shelves, and the goods on them are the brightest color in the store. A mirror sits between each pair of tilted panels, and the storeroom and fitting rooms hide behind those mirrors.

The front of the ALL SH store

Thin white metal panels set at matching angles as display shelves, with a mirror between each pair

Unpolished walls, their texture plainly visible; the stainless-steel racks both hold clothes and work as decoration

The design is spare. It strips away decoration that isn't needed and brings out the plain, raw side of the building; and because nothing is sanded smooth, the surfaces inevitably carry the marks of time. Alex and Briar, the designers, who were in the store that day, said this contrast was exactly what they wanted: one side raw, as if recounting the building's history, the other bold, assertive and futuristic.

Lewis says the design insists on surprise and on being impossible to copy — an attitude he thinks young people today share. "I don't want anyone to think, 'you look like so-and-so.' I don't copy, and I don't want to be copied."

Lewis, who comes from Taoyuan in Taiwan, is working at understanding Shanghai. He has picked up the way locals talk, and his simplified characters keep getting better. In fact he has been in the city only about a year. Before the store, Lewis, who studied law, "went with the flow" into legal work after graduating. When a childhood friend in the sneaker business came to ask him to join ALL SH, he said yes almost at once — because this was the career he had imagined and hoped for as a boy, one about design, beauty and ideas.

The "ALL" in ALL SH comes from the first letters of its three founders' surnames. One of the other two is a sneaker obsessive who sells sneakers for a living; the other is a businessman, pure and simple. If those two sit at opposite poles, Lewis is the one in between, the partner who steers the store's creative direction. He also runs the Shanghai store, and picks and buys the goods it carries himself.

Lewis Chang himself

He has loved clothes and sneakers since he was a boy, almost as an inborn habit. "I think they look great. Even the smell of a shoe makes me happy. There's a word for that smell — deadstock," Lewis says, picking a new pair off the shelf. Deadstock refers specifically to sneakers that have never been tried on.

Lewis regularly trawls overseas websites for information on sneakers and T-shirts. He cares about more than whether a product looks good: he follows news across the whole market and where the industry is heading, and reads the earnings reports of big companies like Nike and Adidas. In the past, once he had gathered enough information, he simply bought the sneakers and clothes from the brands he liked. After opening the store, he began going abroad to talk to brands himself, looking for ways to bring their products in and sell them here.

Lewis thinks that once a place has enough spending power, consumers first go after luxury goods, buying brands with unmistakable logos and icons, like Givenchy and Chanel; their interest then shifts to goods that are useful, well thought out and interesting; and in the last stage what wins praise is understatement, refinement and expertise — close to the artisan-made goods the Japanese admire, expensive but still selling well.

Mainland China, as he sees it, is in the middle of that shift, moving from a taste for luxury toward goods that are well made and have ideas behind them. That is especially true of streetwear, which he calls a young market with room to grow and a wide base of buyers. "It's time someone stepped up and gave them properly sourced goods."

Some of the goods on display

The market and its room to grow are both very large. Plenty of people on Taobao and among WeChat-based sellers are already selling this kind of product, but they may not be able to give buyers enough assurance.

He wants to change how people here shop — to let customers try, touch and feel a product. Because e-commerce is so developed and physical stores so few, the customers ALL SH is after, young mainlanders who love streetwear, still buy overseas streetwear brands online out of habit. The ALL SH store opened this past May, followed by its own online shop and a Taobao shop; a few months on, more customers were buying online than walking in the door.

"The whole point of my marketing is to get people out shopping. But plenty of customers who have already come in and touched the clothes still ask whether I have a Taobao shop, because they'd rather buy there," Lewis says, sounding resigned.

The biggest difference between streetwear brands and high-end fashion, in his view, is that streetwear doesn't stress a particular fabric or cut. It puts the weight on expressing a brand's attitude toward the wider world, toward life. "Most of these brands have a story, and we're the storytellers — our job is to tell customers about the brand's culture. Not to sell someone a loud, gaudy shirt that grabs them at first and comes off for good a little while later."

ALL SH carries mainly American streetwear labels, among them Publish Brand, Belief, Ripndip, Golden Denim and Nectar. Ripndip, for one, is a Los Angeles brand founded by the skateboarder Ryan O'Connor, built around a green-headed alien and a cat with a smug little face named Lord Nermal; their poses, expressions and gestures are all mischief and mockery.

Talking about Ripndip, Lewis happily shows off the T-shirt he has on, the store's best-selling single item: Ripndip's "pocket cat" tee. Nermal hides in the pocket with only his eyes and half his head showing, his mood hard to read — but pull the pocket down and you find his nasty, contemptuous greeting underneath.

Ripndip and Nermal the cat

These American streetwear brands take promotion seriously, and they care just as much about what kind of person a distributor is. Even if there is a lot of money in it, they won't hand their products to a distributor they don't trust. "Basically, the most basic point is, you need a store. And that store has to look cool."

Attracting a brand really is hard. Even with a brand as small in the United States as Ripndip, it took Lewis no fewer than ten emails back and forth, plus phone calls, to talk them round. He now goes to the United States at least two or three times a year, which stores of the same size rarely manage.

Lewis "asked his way" into the brands' trust with a store that looks cool and a plan for where he wants to take it

ALL SH has no products of its own, but for Lewis its point is to give customers things with ideas behind them — or, put another way, to offer ideas unlike anyone else's.

The store's unusual design is ALL SH's biggest calling card. At night the lights stay on to catch the eye of people passing. Walk by late and you can still see, through the big panes of glass, row after row of sneakers, and the concrete walls that look as though the painting was never finished. Lewis has already decided that he wants to use the glass wall as a display window one day, with distinctive, individual window displays — something small clothing stores usually don't bother with.

Lewis takes France's Colette and Britain's END as the direction to aim for, hoping that one day ALL SH will be like them: not only with first-rate store design and buying that draws high-end luxury labels in, but a gathering place for designers and a cultural landmark for streetwear.

Images courtesy of Linehouse and ALL SH.