How Hypebeast went from a sneaker blog to global streetwear force
- One of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on streetwear, Hypebeast employs almost 300 people and gets 77 million page views a month
- Its 25-year-old editor-in-chief Arby Li explains his role in the website’s rise and how joining the company was an unpopular decision with his family
In another era, Arby Li might have been working in an entry-level job in a London law firm by now. Instead, at 25, he finds himself at the epicentre of the streetwear industry.
Five years after joining as an intern, Li is the editor-in-chief of Hypebeast, a website considered one of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on streetwear.
The website is operated by a media and e-commerce start-up of the same name listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange. It was Asia’s best-performing debut stock of 2016 and appeared on Forbes’ 2018 “Best Under a Billion” list of the top 200 Asia-Pacific companies with less than US$1 billion in sales.
In the 2017-18 financial year, the company posted a profit increase of 94 per cent, to US$5.8 million, while sales rose 77 per cent year-on-year to US$49 million.
Launched in 2005 as an English-language sneaker blog from founder Kevin Ma’s bedroom in Vancouver, Hypebeast is now a pop culture enterprise that employs almost 300 people, with foreign-language websites in traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and French.
