Karmaloop Opens Flagship on Newbury Street

Two years to date, Bostonist was engaged in a fury of online shopping in quest of a retro Julius Erving T-shirt (turns out they’re hard to find). After an exhaustive search, the sought after T emerged in the shining light of Karmaloop.com. Perusal around the site revealed Karmaloop to be a purveyor of unique graphic Ts, distinctive hoodies and other fashion forward urban gear. Bostonist signed up for Karmaloop's newsletter and has been keeping tabs ever since. But it wasn't until a Globe article last summer that the best kept secret was revealed: Karmaloop is a Boston-based company, its world headquarters tucked back into a forgotten corner of Downtown Crossing.

Last week Bostonist sat down with CEO Greg Selkoe to check in on the latest and greatest Karmaloop happenings, notably the Grand Opening of their flagship store, Karmaloop Boston.

How are the plans for Karmaloop Boston coming along? Tell us more.
Karmaloop Boston is located at 160 Newbury Street. We’re set to open Saturday, September 10, but are putting together an official Grand Opening party for later in the month. It's a great 2200 sq.ft. space. We’ll have couches, a cappuccino bar and we’re bringing in two artists to do graphic treatments for the walls: Nick Z, a local Boston-based grafitti artist and Amelie Chabannes, a Paris-based pop artist. That’s really symbolic of where this store is going; we want this to be a meeting place and a center for creative collaboration. We'll promote the cool cultural events happening in Boston, while introducing new outside elements.

Will Karmaloop Boston offer different inventory than the online boutique?
It’s going to be our lab. We'll test out new lines and offer limited edition items before they're available on Karmaloop.com. And we'll offer higher end brands than we have in the past, because it's Boston and there’s a market for it. The store should only be 5-10% of our total sales, which gives us room to experiment.

We’ll also carry several magazines that have been unavailable or hard to find in Boston until now: Streetwear Today, Sportswear International, Tokion and Beautiful Decay.

What are a few of the fashion brands customers should look forward to?
Los Angeles Denim Atelier, Carpe Denim and Howe are new premium denim lines that you won't find anywhere else in the city. These brands are just getting hot in New York and L.A., so it’s exciting to bring them to Boston now, rather than two years from now. Last week we were at a trade show in Vegas and no one could stop talking about Howe denim.

We’ll carry Adidas Originals, We Clothing, Triple Five Soul, Gsus, Fornarina, Minx, Gentle Fawn, Boxfresh and Yo Japan among others. We realize we’re selling to the influencer market and have made a concerted effort to listen to our customers. We were bombarded with requests for Gentle Fawn from our female customers, so we responded and will begin carrying the line this Fall.