Passing through Paris a few days ago, we had the chance to meet Shaun Neff, founder and CEO of NEFF brand. We asked questions about his brand, its evolution, various collaborations he realized, the expansion of the brand in Europe and next collab. Check out below.
Can you tell me a bit more about you?
I started, I grew up in California, a little outside of Los Angeles and when I was younger my goal and dream was to have a lifestyle brand. So when I was in college, 14 years ago, I started selling T-shirts with my last name on it, out of my backpack. So I sold a couple thousands T-shirts out of my backpack and got a little buzz around the brand around my college town.
it was NEFF?
Yes, it was Neff. And then I met, up where I was living, There were a lot of pro snowboarders and kind of a snowboard culture. So I met those guys and I was trying to get them to wear my T-shirts, but they couldn’t ‘cause they had clothing deals. So we found a little niche in headwear and I thought: dollar beanies, 99cts headbands and beanies, I wrote my last name on it with a sharpie. That’s where we started focusing on headwear.
How did the image of the brand evolve over time? You said it was for snowboarders at first, then it became more about lifestyle?
Yes, the first couple of years I was living in Utah, where I went to school, and there was a big snowboard culture, so we started there. And then, about 4 to 5 after I started the brand, I became friend with Snoop so our first collaboration was with him. He was the 1st guy who did a Neff x Snoop collection. And at that time that’s when Lil Wayne – all of his beanies were Neff, Kid Cudi, the whole hip-hop movement started wearing Neff beanies. So we started snow, went skate, surf, and then the last 7 or 8 years have been very lifestyle, with collaborations like Snoop Dogg, Deadmau5, Wiz Khalfia, Mac Miller, Kate Upton… The brand now is very lifestyle, we have NBA players and Scarlet Johansson beanies so we are linked to youth culture now. We make tons of different products, started with beanies but now we’ve got apparel, and watches, a pretty wide collection.
How would you describe the design
Unique, fun and different. That’s what we try to do : always do something a little bit different, we’ve always been pretty loud, bright and colorful. But currently with what trends are, it’s not really the vibe of today’s culture but I think we’re still staying unique and different and still wild whenever we can.
You said you met Snoop and then you became friend with you. Then you asked him to wear your product and make a collab’ with you?
Yeah, initially we created a lot of buzz in America and a lot of artists just started to wear Neff. So a lot of their stylists were hitting us up and said “hey, Lil Wayne is shooting this video, can you send us some beanies?”. So it naturally started being this cool, unique beanies headwear company. From there a lot of artists and stylist started wearing it and then over the years, collaborating with people who are cool and relevant with the brand.
Who would you love to work with, outside of the music industry?
We’ve worked with a lot of the people we wanted to get down with, and that’s the cool position of the Neff brand. We’ve done so many collaborations at a such a high level. I was just talking with Young Thug last week and a bunch of other guys who want to get on. But personally, well, you know Pharell is a buddy of mine and I’ve known him for years, and we were going to do a Neff Ice Cream Watch a couple years ago but it didn’t actually work out. If I could collaborate with anyone it would be Mike P. “the Big Homie”.
Can you tell us about your next collaboration?
Well, I don’ t think we’ve signed the contract and I’d hate to say anything too soon because of the big names. But let’s see… Future was the last one, and it was only a month ago, and I can say we’re talking with a handful of different people. So… Young Thug we’re talking, I also got an email from Brooklyn Beckham’s manager this morning and we’re talking about potentially doing some kind of a signature hat collection, beanies collection. Yeah a couple names …
Now, do you plan on developing your brand in Europe, especially in France? Would would you work with there?
Yeah, we’ve been selling in Europe for 7 or 8 years and to be honest the brand has been growing to big in the US that a lot of the energy and focus has been on the US and really getting the brand established there. But recently we hired a handful of new people, Olivia is now running Europe, and I also hired a new president who now runs the company and has a big international experience with a company making over a billion $. So internal infrastructure is what we are setting up now, making sure we deliver on time, meeting the needs of the European market. So as a brand Europe is definitely a big focus for us now. And we’ll start spending the dollar doing European type collaborations and working with other artists. That’s the uniqueness about all the big artists who we’ve collaborated with, we can hit the different countries and if they don’t have a global name a lot of them also want to do collaboration with us based on the stars that we’ve got down with. We’ve got a couple things that we are working on for Europe but it’s still secret for now.
Thank you Shaun
Merci… thanks a lot.