Since taking over in late 2022, Wyness, Derrick and their team have delivered on a number of highlights, our favourite one perhaps being The Joke Shop. Launched in February 2024 and situated in the Selfridges Corner Shop, it incorporated classic joke-shop tricks and curated products from Selfridges’s funniest designer friends. The idea was conceived to be accessible to all, with price points working for a pocket money purchase starting at 99p and extending to one-off pieces at more elevated price tags. The project also featured a window commission by artist Max Siedentopf and an art block commission by Mel Brimfield.
The team also ideated Selfridges’s new concept space within the beauty hall called the Beauty Spot, built for residencies and concepts that push beauty retail, as well as the campaign that celebrated the general revamp of the London Selfridges Beauty Hall, with images by Sam Youkilis.
Most recently, Sportopia, billed as “a storewide celebration of sports”, offered a reaction to the Olympics as London geared up to attract the luxury consumers that would usually occupy Paris at this time of the year. The project included a 10-metre climbing column in the London store designed by Playlab. Neither of these are things one would expect to find in a shop in 2024.
Theo El-Kattan and Henry McNeill-Njoku
Co-founders | Known Source
Both avid thrifters in their youth, Theo El-Kattan and Henry McNeill-Njoku became frustrated with the oversaturation of low-quality goods and the impersonal nature of popular resale platforms. In 2019, the duo quit their respective careers in finance and medicine to launch Known Source, a curated fashion resale platform centred around a network of sellers who specialise in various brands and aesthetics, from techwear to Vivienne Westwood. This summer, El-Kattan and McNeill-Njoku will open a year-long pop-up store in London’s Westfield Stratford, with the aim of encouraging high street shoppers to invest in secondhand pieces. The plan is to provide an experience similar to traditional retail, with expert store staff who can provide style advice and constant product refreshment to create the feeling of newness.
Ben and Joe Gallagher
Co-founders | Luxe Collective
Gen Z entrepreneurs Ben and Joe Gallagher launched luxury resale platform Luxe Collective from Liverpool, UK, in January 2018, when Ben was 17 and Joe was 21. The business turned over £7 million in 2023, driven by the brand’s clever TikTok strategy and modern approach to marketing. Ben started posting educational fashion TikToks during the pandemic, teaching audiences about the history behind key fashion figures like Karl Lagerfeld and Elsa Schiaparelli, garnering tens of millions of views. While the videos weren’t direct marketing for Luxe Collective, they drove the business and built trust and authority around its products. To date, Luxe Collective has 1.6 million followers and 78.1 million likes on TikTok. This year, the company became one of the first luxury resale platforms to join TikTok Shop, and so far has made thousands on TikTok live, selling bags from the likes of Bottega Veneta, Louis Vuitton and Hermès to TikTok audiences, paving a new future for luxury resale.
George and Michael Heaton
Co-founders | Represent
Brothers George and Michael Heaton launched contemporary menswear brand Represent from their dad’s garden shed in 2011, where they printed T-shirts and sold them online. Today, it’s a global contemporary brand — selling graphic tees, hoodies and trousers — that’s shooting for £250 million in revenue by 2025. Some 70 per cent of its business is direct-to-consumer, reflecting the brand’s die-hard community of fans, which the Heatons have cultivated around Represent and its sportswear offshoot Represent 247. The co-founders have documented the journey of establishing the brand from the very beginning via Instagram and YouTube, with honest and open communication about the challenges of scaling a business, the process of designing the product, and their fitness journeys and personal achievements. In a market struggling with the turbulence of multi-brand retail, the Heatons have carved a community-first path to fashion brand building.
Sherry Huang
Founder and CEO | ENG Concept Store
Understanding, and better still, predicting the retail consumption trends of China’s young consumers is shaping the strategy of C-suites all across the world. And it’s exactly her intuitive understanding of youth culture that puts Sherry Huang, founder and CEO of innovative business model ENG Concept Store, at the front and centre of this pursuit. Huang has devised a retail-by-day, club-by-night blueprint that positions itself as a hub for cultural exchange that is galvanising the country’s fashion-forward communities around it.