Gender fluid brand Wildfang is teaming with retailer Urban Outfitters for the Portland apparel company’s first wholesale partnership.
Under the new deal 20 Urban Outfitter stores, including in New York, Seattle and San Francisco, will carry a curated selection of Wildfang products, including five exclusive items. Wildfang will be in the retailer’s marketing, featured in its online store and on social media, said Wildfang founder and CEO Emma McIlroy.
“This is a big deal for us. The last few years have been a wild ride — Covid and retail and the crazy inventory problems post-Covid,” she said. “I am psyched that we are here and bigger and better than ever. This was part of our focus coming out of that period.”
Wildfang operates two stores in downtown Portland and Los Angeles. It closed its New York location during the pandemic. It also sells direct to consumers on its website. However, the team has always seen wholesale as a channel to add to create a truly scalable business.
This deal with Urban Outfitters will put the brand in front of millions more people who may not have seen it otherwise, said McIlroy.
There is also a full-circle element to the partnership. McIlroy points out on her social media that the initial idea for Wildfang and its gender fluid fits came from a shopping trip to Urban Outfitters. She and co-founder Julia Parsley had been looking for fits that they could only find in the men’s department. That got the two Nike alums thinking about how to build a brand they wanted.
This Urban Outfitters deal has been in the works for nearly two years, said McIlroy. She noted it takes at least a year and a half to build infrastructure needed on the back end and the product inventory to ensure a successful channel.
The company also had to figure out the strategy, funding and gain board consent.
“Coming out of Covid, we knew this was important for us,” she said.
In 2021, Wildfang inked a partnership with Nordstrom to help that retailer create apparel for its BP brand. McIlroy noted that unlike the Urban Outfitters deal, that partnership wasn’t Wildfang clothing but a collaboration that helped grow awareness for the brand.
“They paid us to work on one of their brands,” said McIlroy.
The brand Wildfang is 10 years old, but the company only started making its own apparel in the fourth quarter of 2019, said McIlroy. Then there were two years of Covid that set everything back. She noted the company has made it through some of the hardest times and this deal is a testament to that work.
She expects to roll out more wholesale partnerships in the back half of the year and into early 2025. She can’t name any brands yet but said they are large and mid-sized players.
Wildfang has added three new executives to the team as this part of the business has solidified.
This Urban Outfitters deal also gets Wildfang into malls where the retailer has stores. And malls, McIlroy said, are recovering better than retail locations like downtowns. She added that the company’s flagship store in Portland is seeing its lowest traffic in five years, excluding 2020 when it was closed for Covid restrictions.
