SKIMS opened its first standalone UK store at 245-247 Regent Street in London on 24 July. It is a corner unit of 1,115 square metres spread over two floors, the largest store the brand holds in Europe. The landlord is The Crown Estate, the lease ten years. The corner had sat closed ever since Ted Baker walked out of it in the summer of 2024.
1.Opening day was Friday 24 July. 245-247 Regent Street, 1,115 square metres across two above-ground floors. It is the first standalone store the brand has opened outside North America and the biggest in Europe. The lease was signed last May and runs ten years. The landlord: The Crown Estate, owner of most of this street.
2.Ted Baker was here before. The UK arm went into administration in April 2024, and when the remaining 31 stores closed together that August, this flagship corner emptied with them. For nearly two years no rent came out of it, in the middle of Regent Street. An American online underwear company founded in 2019 took the space for ten years.
3.Walk in and the sculpture arrives before the clothes. A female torso by Vanessa Beecroft stands inside a curved partition with a circular light well open above it, and the light does not drop from the ceiling so much as run down the walls. Product is pushed back into the rooms behind.
4.The designer left no 90-degree corners. Rafael de Cárdenas says every right angle was filleted and radiused to mimic the softness of the body. Surfaces are Glassine Corian and Ultrasuede, and the palette holds to a single greige. Run a hand along the wall and nothing catches, and no shadow stands as a line.
5.Each floor gets one circular light at its arrival point, a muted nod to the London Underground roundel, the designer says. The fitting rooms sit against the Regent Street windows on the upper floor. The room most stores bury at the back is pressed here to the most public edge of the building.
6.UK high street rent applies its top rate only to the first 6.1 metres of depth from the frontage, halving and quartering as you move back. On Regent Street that front zone runs at 800 to 1,200 pounds per square foot. Worked through that way, annual rent on this unit lands around 2 to 3 million pounds. The terms were not disclosed.
7.To hold rent at 15 percent of sales, the store needs about 17 million pounds a year, roughly 30 billion won. Spread over 12,000 square feet that is about 1,400 pounds per square foot. Apple stores are reported to sell in the 5,000 dollar range per square foot, so this sits at about a third of that.
8.And yet eight in ten of this company's sales come from online. The underwear category runs exactly the other way, eight in ten bought in stores. Jens Grede believes the store share can be pushed to half. Those 12,000 square feet on Regent Street are the price put on that reversal.
9.As of last November the estate was 18 stores in the United States and one in Mexico. The company has flagged 55 by the end of this year and more than 100 by the end of next. Grede says another 200 to 300 tier-one locations are still out there. Dubai opened around the same time, with Delhi and Mumbai waiting.
10.The money arrived last November. A 225 million dollar round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives valued the company at 5 billion dollars, taking the total raised to 956 million. Revenue went from 500 million dollars in 2022 to more than 1 billion last year. A company priced at roughly five times sales.
11.During opening week Primark parked a mobile billboard outside the store to advertise a 9 pound shaping bodysuit. The Seamless Sculpt Thong Bodysuit selling inside that same week was 84 pounds. A ninefold gap was pinned to the doorstep and the queue still formed on this side.
12.So what sits between 9 pounds and 84 pounds. Size and colour. The back rooms hold bras and bodysuits arranged along a ladder of skin tones, the mannequins are not one body but many, and every device there exists to let a shopper point at the box that matches her own body and her own skin. The 9 pound bodysuit has no ladder.
13.NikeSKIMS, built with Nike, released its first collection on 5 February. Seven lines, 58 styles, priced from 20 to 188 dollars. The Rift satin shoe sold out on release day, and the campaign was fronted by LISA. Korea got it at the end of February.
14.Did they come because the street is doing well. It is not. Regent Street footfall is still 15 percent below pre-pandemic levels, and the big spenders thinned out after VAT refunds for non-EU tourists ended. Even in that year The Crown Estate signed more than 60 retail leases at an average 4 percent above estimated rental value. The pitch has not shrunk. The tenants have changed.
15.A 12,000 square foot corner that had been shut for nearly two years went on a ten-year lease to a brand that makes eight in ten of its sales online, and an 84 pound bodysuit kept selling with a 9 pound billboard parked at the door. The 2 to 3 million pounds of annual rent on this address buys not the garment but the act of choosing a size with your eyes. The same sequence is hard to repeat in Korea. A brand that grew online cannot walk straight into 12,000 square feet of street frontage without tying up a deposit and key money in one go, and going through a department store instead attaches an effective commission of 22.9 percent on apparel and accessories. Which is why the route Korean shoppers meet this brand through is still not a store, but a single line brought in by Nike.