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Driving up LA’s West Jefferson Boulevard in Culver City, you can’t miss the 15,000-square-feet HQ of esports and gaming fashion brand 100 Thieves. A giant black box emblazoned with the logo on the side of the highway, it has a basketball court, gaming room (with scores of screens), a content studio for podcasts, and a huge open-plan office for the 100-strong team.
When Vogue Business arrives, founder Matt “Nadeshot” Haag has just finished recording the ‘100 Thieves Cast’ podcast in the content studio with one of the company’s co-owners, Jack “Courage” Dunlop. Subscriber count: 107,000. In another room, 100 Thieves gamers practise Call of Duty or League of Legends for upcoming esports tournaments, each with headsets, shouting between their teammates online. Marketing, communications, product and design teams sit across the open space in the middle, where the walls are painted with logos of long-term sponsors, from Cash App (who sponsored the HQ building), to Lexus.
100 Thieves launched in 2017, equipping its customer base of young gaming fans with logo-printed T-shirts and hoodies. The business is now centred on three pillars: esports (with signed teams across games like Call of Duty and Fortnite); drops of 100 Thieves-branded hoodies and T-shirts, which range from $28 to $998; and hosting gamer events and physical pop-ups for the gaming community. In 2021, it secured $60 million in Series C funding, valuing the business at $460 million.
Now, the company is grappling with the necessary scale to reach profitability, while navigating a new gaming and streetwear landscape that’s normalised after a pandemic boom.
100 Thieves has previously been described as the “Supreme of esports”. Arguably the largest fashion-streetwear label born from the gaming community, it’s the first to go beyond mass producing T-shirts with simple logos. The brand is bolstered by a strong network of gaming talents who promote its drops and events — from TikTok mega-influencer Vinnie Hacker, who signed on in 2022, to co-owner Rachell “Valkyrae” Hofstetter. A gaming star with over four million followers on YouTube, Hofstetter in February became one of the first gamers to attend Milan Fashion Week, sitting on Gucci’s front row. Talents signed to 100 Thieves — whether as ambassadors or members of their esports teams — feature in apparel shoots and create content for the company’s YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and TikTok channels.
The early ambition wasn’t to become a fully-fledged esports organisation or even a business, says Haag, speaking from the compound’s design room, which is full of hoodies and printed tees from its recent Pokémon collab, as well as prototypes for an upcoming collab with Adidas. Haag, now 31, started out in esports, as a professional Call of Duty player aged 14. He reached World Champion status before moving onto gaming on YouTube via streams and vlogs, which proved more lucrative than esports back then. 100 Thieves started as a passion project so Haag could, like many gamers, sell merch to his internet fanbase.
“I just wanted to create apparel that ‘if you knew, you knew’. If you were in the fold of gaming, hopefully you were excited about it,” he says. “But the idea was if you weren’t, and saw somebody walking down the street, you wouldn’t know that it’s associated with gaming at all.”
Things got serious after Haag was introduced to Dan Gilbert, billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the NBA team the Cleveland Cavaliers, who had just invested in StockX. After meeting Haag at the 2017 NBA finals, Gilbert led a $10 million seed round to get 100 Thieves off the ground, believing in the platform’s potential as an entertainment platform and lifestyle brand. In 2018, rapper Drake and music manager Scooter Braun also invested and became co-owners; Hofstetter and Dunlop followed in 2021.
Navigating post-pandemic streetwear
For Haag, there was white space to fill for elevated gamer merch that wasn’t produced cheaply by third parties with low-quality fabrics. “I didn’t want it to look like gamer merch or YouTube merch. I wanted it to be something that people actually respected or took seriously.”
When 100 Thieves started its drops in 2017, it would typically sell $1.5 to $2 million of product in the first 10 minutes. “The roof would come off the place, my hairs are up on end just thinking about it!” Haag says. Naturally, the business responded by increasing the drop cadence, increasing the number of SKUs and inking more fashion partnerships. “People thought, ‘They’re trying to be like Supreme and sell out.’ And it’s like at first it kind of was that,” says Haag. “But with that demand, I was like, ‘Why would we stop?’”
Instagram content
100 Thieves often works on a year-long lead time, meaning it was challenging to foresee the slowdown in demand for streetwear post-pandemic. With new investor pressure after its huge Series C funding round, Haag began to spread the brand too thin, chasing scale and diversifying the business to include energy drink Juvee and a studio to produce its own games.
It over extended. In late 2023, 100 Thieves cut a third of its staff, mainly those across Juvee and the games studio, to refocus the business on its three aforementioned pillars. “Now, we’ve had a chance to recalibrate and we know how much is too much,” says Haag. “Before, we oversaturated. We sold too much, too quickly.”
Apparel remains a core driver of revenue, turning over millions a year, but now it’s necessary to drum up more interest between drops and be more creative in the design and collaborations, to capture people’s attention. 100 Thieves is being more mindful, reducing its drop cadence from every six weeks to be more flexible, sometimes with longer gaps in between, says the brand’s VP of apparel Patrick Hill. “We haven’t seen declines in terms of the sales, just wavering interest,” Haag explains. To offload excess inventory, 100 Thieves created mystery boxes where you would pay a flat fee and then receive a random selection of pieces from the year’s drops, some of which were oversaturated or undersold.
The gaming consumer required some education on the difference between 100 Thieves garments and regular merch sold by other pro-gamers or esports teams. 100 Thieves hoodies are largely cut and sewn, which means they’re better quality than a standard mass-produced garment, Hill says, hence the longer lead time (100 Thieves manufactures in the US and China). The gaming community has been conditioned to expect merchandise to look and feel a certain way and cost a certain price, which poses an ongoing challenge. “We’re doing it differently. We want it to feel different: every single detail, like the tags, the embroidery, everything that we do.”
Brand collaborations: Elevation and education
Brand collaborations are a key way for 100 Thieves to build credibility and also align with gamers’ growing, varied interests outside of gaming and esports. In the 100 Thieves design room, prototypes of an upcoming two-year partnership with Adidas line the walls. It’s the first time Adidas has signed a global partnership with an esports organisation, and it will be the first time 100 Thieves product is available in physical retail.
For 100 Thieves, hoodies remain the bestseller, though trying new styles like nylon jackets and logos or patterns as part of collabs helps keep the brand fresh, while enticing consumers back to its drops. In 2022, it collaborated with Gucci on a red, multi-pocket monogrammed rucksack, punctuated with a 100 Thieves logo badge and sold on both brand channels for $1,000.
Designed for a gamer to carry controllers and other wares, it’s proudly displayed in a glass case in 100 Thieves HQ, alongside the org’s many esports trophies. “That’s how we view it, as a trophy,” says Haag. “It’s a sign we’re not just an esports team… We don’t want to have a thousand dollar price tag on everything that we do. It wasn’t about turning 100 Thieves into a luxury brand per se. But it was important for us when Gucci gave us the tip of the cap.”
To align with the growing interests of gamers, as well as its fashion tie-ins, 100 Thieves has been partnering with sports such as Formula One (via driver Daniel Ricciardo) and golf (through a collab with golfing apparel brand Malbon). “The intersection between people’s interests are now so varied. We can really be a beacon that brings those worlds together,” says Haag.
The goal is to focus more on the community and less on driving sales. “Sometimes trying to make money just removes the fun,” Haag says. “I’m not saying a business where you bring on other people’s capital is supposed to be fun at all times, but if the people that are doing it and creating it and building it every day aren’t enjoying it, then you’re starting to waste your own time.”
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