FOUNDERSNude Project
Two nineteen-year-olds in a Barcelona student residence, a few hundred euros between them, and a print run of T-shirts. That is how Nude Project started — not with a business plan, but with a feeling that the brands their generation was offered did not speak for them.
Bruno Casanovas and Álex Benlloch did not come from fashion. They came from their own community: friends, group chats, and the internet culture they grew up inside. So instead of guessing what young people wanted, they asked them. Every drop was built with the community, not just for it. Scarcity was not a marketing trick at the beginning — it was all they could afford. It became the model.
THE SEQUENCE
What makes Nude Project worth studying is not the hoodies. It is the sequence. First they earned trust — drops that sold out because people felt part of them. Then they turned that trust into a universe: a podcast that became one of the most listened to in Spain, events, and eventually physical stores, starting with Madrid in 2022. The brand stopped being a clothing label and became a place their generation gathers.
They did not scale a product. They scaled a relationship. The clothes were the excuse. The community was the company.
THE ALGORITHM
Most brands treat content as advertising. Nude Project treated it as the product. Bruno and Álex documented everything — the chaos, the production problems, the wins, the losses — and their community grew up inside the story. Then they did something almost no European brand had the nerve to do: before opening a single store outside Spain, they opened five TikTok accounts in five countries — Portugal, England, France, Germany, Italy — each run by a local creator making content in their own language, in their own culture. Six months later, the numbers picked the market. Italy won. Milan became their first store abroad in 2023. They repeated the test for every country after.
That is the part worth copying: they did not decide with opinions, they decided with data — and the data came from real people making real content, not from an agency deck. TikTokers did not get paid to wear Nude. They bought it, posted it, and built the brand's international demand before the brand ever shipped a store to them.
NEW YORK
This month, that demand got an address. On September 12, Nude Project opened its first New York store at 42 Greene Street in SoHo — a 4,000-square-foot space they call an "Ephemeral Store," open through December 31. It is not a rack of hoodies in the back of a café. It is a downtown takeover: open castings, film screenings, a vinyl café session, and a run club through the city. The United States is already their second-largest market after Spain, built almost entirely online and through pop-ups in Miami and Los Angeles. New York is the test before the permanent move.
42 GREENE ST
SoHo, New York — the “Ephemeral Store.”
A brand that started in a Spanish dorm room now has a line outside a SoHo storefront. No investors' runway show. No celebrity campaign. A community that showed up.
WHY THEM
Most brands spend years trying to buy what Nude Project had on day one — people who actually care. Bruno and Álex proved that if you build with your community instead of marketing at it, the community builds the brand for you.
That is why we are looking at them. Not because they are the biggest, but because they did it right: started with nothing, listened first, let the data and the people choose the map — and turned a dorm-room T-shirt into a culture that just landed in New York.