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Supreme is changing hands again — and the buyer has raised some eyebrows. VF Corporation, which bought the streetwear behemoth in 2020 for $2.1 billion, has announced that it’s unloading the brand to eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, which owns and licences more than 150 eyewear brands, for the knock-down price of $1.5 billion.
“While they own and licence a huge number of [eyewear] brands, they’ve never owned a brand that does true fashion,” says fashion attorney and law professor Douglas Hand. “It’s a bit of a head scratcher.”
So why has EssilorLuxottica made a play for Supreme? And how did the previously untouchable New York skate brand end up being passed from one conglomerate to another so soon — in relative terms — after its initial sale?
Supreme’s lore is well documented. Founded in 1994 by James Jebbia, the company carefully built a devoted following; it could have cashed in and sold into malls across America during the early-2000s streetwear boom, says long-time collector and friend of the brand Ross Wilson, but instead, Supreme “took the slow and steady route”.
The tactic paid off: Supreme’s skate credentials built credibility, and its limited product runs stoked a feverish level of demand. Fans would camp overnight to get their hands on the most coveted items from each weekly drop, with police famously called in a number of times to manage the chaos outside its stores.
By 2017, we’d hit peak Supreme. Scores of celebrity fans, collaborations with Louis Vuitton, enough shops for the brand to achieve global reach yet few enough for it to retain the exclusivity that made it so sought after. But in recent years, cracks have begun to show. Having consistently been the most-traded brand on online streetwear marketplace StockX, in 2022, Supreme was bumped off the top spot by independent label Fear of God. For the fiscal year ending March 2023, the brand pulled in revenues of $523.1 million — $38.4 million less than the year prior.
In May 2024, WWD reported that VF Corp had hired Goldman Sachs to explore a sale, citing “financial sources”; VF said its policy was not to comment on market rumours or speculation. Announcing the sale to EssilorLuxottica on Wednesday, VF Corp CEO Bracken Darrell said it had carried out a strategic review of its portfolio and concluded that there were “limited synergies” between VF and Supreme’s business model. The company added: “While we will always look to adjust the VF portfolio from time to time, this transaction gives us increased balance sheet flexibility. It also supports our overall programme to better position the company for long-term growth and more normalised debt levels.”
Onlookers point to a few possible reasons as to why Supreme may be losing its sheen.
“Brands have cool early adopters, then get subsumed by the greater machine of fashion,” says Hand. “And when the laggards start wearing it all over the place, that’s often when the cool kids know they should be moving onto something else.”
In Supreme’s case, it was clear who was wearing the product. During the mid 2010s, when the brand started to spread from hypebeasts to high schoolers, the logo was king; young men in particular were intent on telling the world exactly where they bought their tees. While logos will always have a place in fashion — Corteiz (with whom Supreme collaborated in late 2023) is a notable success story from recent years — the ostentatious logo-mania of that era has fallen out of favour.
Of course, there’s more to Supreme than just its logo. The brand often drops attractive knitwear, trousers and outerwear with either subtle or no visible branding. But as Ollie Cox, fashion writer at Gen Z-focused publication Culted, points out, “Someone who’d buy a mohair cardigan from Supreme might also shop at Our Legacy. They’re not as loyal, because they’re not making their choices based on a logo.”
The effect the VF Corp acquisition had on Supreme’s popularity is contentious. After spending close to three decades nurturing its authenticity, says Cox, “that counterculture narrative feels a bit at odds with billion-dollar acquisitions”. Nick Thommen, who’s been running the Instagram account @supcommunity for the last decade, saw this sentiment echoed in his comments. “Followers felt like the brand had sold out, commenting ‘Supreme is dead’,” he says.
Mind you, Thommen says his “love and dedication for Supreme remain unchanged”, and as Wilson points out, “both VF and Supreme were careful to continue growing the brand slowly”.
An unexpected new owner
In any case, the acquisition clearly didn’t work out as VF had hoped, which begs the question: why has EssilorLuxottica — whose expertise is in eyewear brands such as Ray-Ban and Sunglass Hut — decided to have a stab in the streetwear space?
Hand suggests two possible motivations: first off, customer acquisition. “$1.5 billion is a lot to pay for a customer list, but these days it’s a very noisy, crowded field to gain new consumers,” he says. “The Luxottica brands hit certain consumer pockets for eyewear, but I don’t feel they have a viable window into that high-end luxury streetwear customer.”
Secondly, the deal provides an opportunity to exploit the margins of the industry Luxottica already dominates. “What they could be doing is picking up the Supreme IP and sticking it on as many pairs of glasses as they can make,” he continues. “Despite how much they try to prove that a label on the side of your glasses is worth $400, they’re really not expensive to make. I think only perfume and cosmetics beat the margins on eyewear.”
That move in itself could bear more fruit further down the line. “Eyewear represents an entry point for consumers into luxury, [and younger customers could become] lifelong brand loyalists after buying their first branded pair of frames,” says Natasha Cazin, senior consultant at Euromonitor.
“We see an incredible opportunity in bringing an iconic brand like Supreme into our company. It perfectly aligns with our innovation and development journey, offering us a direct connection to new audiences, languages and creativity,” said EssilorLuxottica chairman and CEO Francesco Milleri, and deputy CEO Paul du Saillant in a statement. “With its unique brand identity, fully direct commercial approach and customer experience — a model we will work to preserve — Supreme will have its own space within our house brand portfolio and complement our licensed portfolio as well. They will be well positioned to leverage our group’s expertise, capabilities and operating platform.”
What exactly the future holds for Supreme remains to be seen. But after this deal wraps up in late 2024, who knows, you may end up spotting a gaggle of young men in expensive sneakers queuing up every week outside your local optician.
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