Urban Legends

While Karmaloop’s MO ensures a certain degree of insider-ness—the company’s Kazbah page, for example, keeps small, home-grown labels in its retail mix by using design competitions to put unknown talents in touch with the broader site’s vast audience—the operation’s size and scope make maintaining underground grittiness increasingly difficult. Selkoe is well aware of the challenge. “As we get bigger, we want to stay as close to the street as we can,” he says, describing how the Kazbah connects customers in Oslo, for instance, with kids making T-shirts in Brooklyn.

Part of Selkoe’s effort to capitalize on the following that Karmaloop has generated online—even from scary, embarrassing places like Minnesota—involves directing that momentum into other outlets without repelling the early adopters, the hunters, who made the site so popular to begin with. The company’s biggest gambit is the newly launched KarmaloopTV, which features original online television content: interviews with musicians, designers, artists, and actors, as well as plenty of shows Selkoe’s still figuring out. Extending to cover more than simply clothes was a natural, Dina explains. “People come to the site not just to buy stuff, but to see what’s cool and just check out trends,” she says. The pair is not averse to calling on their famous friends for help. “A lot of people are starting sites like this”—streetwear sites Commonwealth (cmonwealth.com), Digital Gravel (digitalgravel.com), and Krudmart (krudmart.com), for example—“but they can’t touch us because everyone already knows us,” Selkoe says. “If I call Kanye’s manager, he’ll say, ‘Sure we’ll do something with you guys.’ We have access, and that’s the difference.” Celeb endorsements on the site’s trailer confirm this: “KarmaloopTV, you know what time it is” (hip-hop collective Hieroglyphics); “Nobody reps it better”; and, less concretely, “350 carats in this motherf*&#er” (rapper Ben Baller). Russell Simmons also makes an appearance.

Selkoe would like to think Karmaloop has been a catalyst for Boston’s ongoing streetwear boomlet, which has seen new stores Laced, Bodega, Concepts in the Tannery, and L.A.B. Boston opening in the past two years alone. But although that scene is increasingly respectable, Karmaloop’s influence may well be incidental. One of the less heartwarming reasons that Karmaloop has flourished here is that its ’Net-centric business isn’t tied to Boston any more than it is to anywhere else. Still, while this city maintains an ambivalent relationship with fashion—do we care, or don’t we?—no matter how big Karmaloop grows, or how much the move might help its street cred, Selkoe vows he’ll never relocate. “Boston’s not even in our top 10 [sources] for revenue,” he says (that group includes Manhattan, Brooklyn, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, London, and San Diego); still, he says with pride, “it’s my hometown.” Selkoe is hoping to tie Boston to Karmaloop’s success, proving that the city can foster cutting-edge fashion as well as anywhere else. Or, at least, that it’s not prohibitively unstylish.

“It would have been easier in New York in a lot of ways, but it matters to me that I’m doing it here,” Selkoe says. “The thing that’s been the hardest, however, is keeping our employees. Creative people don’t want to stay in Boston. The type of people we want to work with are cosmopolitan—they like cities, they like things to be open late, to get food after 10 p.m.—and unfortunately a lot of people we have just don’t want to be here.” (Selkoe also has a bone to pick with the local clubs and bars that won’t let someone in even if he’s wearing $350 sneakers and $100 jeans, but will let in the guy in “$30 Dockers and bad loafers from JCPenney.” Dina agrees: “It’s the most retarded thing.”)

Despite Selkoe’s complaints about the city’s talent bleed, Karmaloop seems to be doing more than all right. Over coffee in the company’s sparsely decorated downtown office, the Chihuahuas scurrying at his feet, Selkoe repeats, “We’re the biggest in the world in what we do.” In the background, there’s a quiet hum: busy employees with plenty to do. All of them are beautiful and carefully dressed. Many are domestic and international transplants who’ve come to Boston for the sole purpose of working for Karmaloop. Selkoe didn’t have to recruit them; he didn’t have to wonder where he was going to find suitably cool help. They just came. Just like that.