Pop Trading Company

Pop Trading Company was founded in 2010 in Amsterdam by Ric van Rest and Peter Kolks as a skate-and-streetwear brand and skateboard-deck company specifically focused on what they described as 'a deliberately European-anchored alternative to the LA-and-NY skate-industry hegemony.' The brand's foundational thesis was specific: produce skate-anchored streetwear that drew explicitly on European skate culture (the Dutch, German, French, and Scandinavian skate scenes of the 1990s-2010s), rebuilt at the contemporary luxury-streetwear level rather than the polished-mass-skate-brand format. The Pop Trading Company vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: heavyweight cotton tees and hoodies with the brand's iconic 'POP TRADING COMPANY' typographic logo, deconstructed denim and workwear-derived skate trousers, the iconic skate-deck programme featuring graphics by European artists (Hans Tagger, Anne-Lise Coste, and dozens of European-based contemporary artists), the long-running Pop Trading Company × Nike SB, Pop Trading Company × Converse Cons, Pop Trading Company × adidas, and Pop Trading Company × Carhartt WIP collaboration capsules, and a colour palette anchored to washed-black, washed-navy, oxblood, ecru, and the brand's recurring use of saturated red-and-yellow accent combinations. The brand is independent and held by van Rest and Kolks. Pop Trading Company operates a flagship retail in Amsterdam (Spuistraat — the brand's home street) plus international wholesale through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, END., Dover Street Market, the broader European skate-and-streetwear specialty distribution, and a wide international skate-shop distribution network. The brand has been one of the defining post-2010 European-anchored skate-and-streetwear brands, with the European-skate-cultural-positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary 'skate-streetwear-luxury' conversation.