Mike Cherman's Market Survived the Pandemic and a Name Change. Now the Streetwear Brand Is Opening Stores. Here's How.

After eight years in business, MARKET is venturing into brick and mortar retail for the first time.

The company is opening FISH MARKET, a New York City concept shop located on Broadway and Canal that will be open on July 20th through the end of the summer. The pop-up will then travel to MUSINSA, a fashion retail store in South Korea. After the Korean showing, there are plans to open a permanent shop on LaBrea that will be inspired by a Japanese convenience store and also house MARKET’s offices.

“Retail just personifies the brand in a more real way,” says Cherman, the founder of MARKET (which was originally named Chinatown Market before a name change in 2021). “We needed to start planting our flag. And as we get bigger, you need to control the voice.”

The shop, which was designed by Sculpture Robotics and led by Gustavo Barroso, is modeled after a fishing and hunting store. It plays on the fun, unexpected tone MARKET has cultivated over the years. Once entering the space, customers are greeted with skeletons wearing ghillie suits, a six-foot Sasquatch, very realistic-looking tree trunks made from foam, a rock wall, an astroturf floor, and a seating area of stone chairs surrounding an aquarium. The space is sprinkled with images of celebs like Mike Tyson, Allen Iverson, and Snoop Dogg (an AI image) fishing.

“I wanted it to feel like going into the Rainforest Cafe when I was 12,” says Cherman.

He gets back to his bootlegging roots with the Secret Club room—a wood paneled space that’s been tagged by graffiti artists including Ozbe/0283, who also did the FISH MARKET logo on the store's front gate, Fore, Since, Fly5, Stu, Scram, Dek, TD, Blaze, Poes, Cab, Toke, Toske, and Colo. Gilberto Soto, MARKET’s retail manager and a fellow graffiti artist, brought this concept to life and wanted to honor the neighborhood’s rich artistic history. The room also features apparel and accessories from the MARKET archives like a “Born Again Christian Dior” hoodie, along with new styles like a camo T-shirt with a play on the Balenciaga logo.

Another room features MARKET product like mugs, shark plushies, along with a curation of second-hand fishing-themed pieces from Fish N Thrift, custom pieces from Father Figure, and other novelty items from New York-based creators like ALL CAPS, LQQK Studios, Only, Frog Radio, IGGY NYC, Toya Horiuchi, and Towndust.

“This isn’t wholesaling,” says Cherman. “We just wanted to bring in the homies in New York and make some fun novelty products for the space.”

Cherman recently brought on Vinod Kasturi as the CEO of MARKET. Kasturi previously worked as CEO, Americas at Kitsune, a Tokyo and Paris-based fashion brand that’s also moved into hospitality. Kasturi said the goal with retail is for it to always be profitable, and in order to ensure that he finds spaces where he can do creative deals. The FISH MARKET is located in a space that was abandoned and will be demolished soon and turned into luxury condos.

“When you do that, we can get flexible with the landlord on rent structure and flexible options to extend,” says Kasturi. “The reason we can do retail is because Mike and the team have done a great job of growing the brand on a national scale with 40 to 50 wholesalers like Nordstrom. We’ve built a healthy business to take some of these swings.”

“We’ve been missing a person to help corral some of that ADD energy and synthesize that into something that can be productive for the business and for the brand,” says Cherman of Kasturi. “I would have gotten an expensive space and signed a huge lease and been in an expensive situation. The lesson is, you don’t need to spend a bunch of money for retail, you can be creative if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and do some work.”

Cherman has been on a journey with MARKET. He launched the brand at ComplexCon in 2016 based on bootlegs before partnering with brands like Puma, Lacoste, and The Grateful Dead on collabs, as well as working with the Smiley license on products that were sold at Urban Outfitters. In 2021, Julian Han Bush started a Change.org petition for Cherman to change Chinatown Market’s name, stating, “The concept of Chinatown is not for sale, especially not by a white person who only uses the word Chinatown as a synonym for bootleg.” Cherman and team quickly responded by acknowledging that Chinatown wasn’t their name to use. He will donate proceeds of the store profits to New York organization Welcome To Chinatown’s “The Longevity Fund,” which provides monetary grants to assist Manhattan Chinatown small businesses.

“Speaking as a vulnerable creative, it was a challenge to figure out how do you brand things? How do you do a text layout when you used to have two words and now you have one and then, you know, finding the right voice coming out of the pandemic? I think everyone had that challenge whether or not they changed their name,” says Cherman.

Cherman has also gone through different aesthetic phases with the brand at one point moving more into ready-to-wear, then discovering his customer expects graphic T-shirts from his line. And early on he made the decision to forgo being the cool guy, hype brand.

“We decided to let more people in and to be more of an inclusive brand, which ultimately did hurt us being in the cool guy zeitgeist,” says Cherman. “Kids were, like, ‘I can't resell this on Grailed.’ But the reality is that we want to make something that is inclusive of more people. And while we might miss out on that customer, we do believe that the MARKET universe can service the right type of customer. And it's not someone who is just there for today, gone tomorrow.”

Aside from moving into retail, Cherman, who took on investment from The Chernin Group, says there are plans to reenter the Japanese and Korean markets, build a larger relationship with retailers like Nordstrom, and introduce more brands under MARKET Studios.

“I can't say the exact projects, but we're launching three brands that are gonna come out of this world,” says Cherman. “MARKET Studios is going to become this house of brands that we're really excited about. We've done this for so many people for so many years and now it's time for us to actually step out and just start flexing that muscle for ourselves.”