Herschel's owners merged two cult boutiques into one company — neither survived

Need Supply began in Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1990s as a vintage store and grew into an e-commerce force with its own label; Totokaelo was founded in Seattle by Jill Wenger in the late 2000s and became a destination boutique for Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons and Acne Studios, opening a SoHo flagship in 2015. In 2016, Herschel Capital Corp — owner of Herschel Supply Co. — bought Totokaelo and a minority stake in Need Supply, merging their operations into a holding company called NSTO. The brands stayed separate; the back offices became one. Wenger left within weeks of the sale.

The merged group ran local retail in New York, Seattle and Richmond while scaling global e-commerce out of Richmond — a structure that produced logistical bottlenecks and cash flow stretched so thin that past orders went unpaid while new seasonal deliveries had to be funded. Then 2020: US clothing-store sales fell 66.6 per cent between March and May against the year before, and niche luxury retailers found it hardest to shift stock. The group also drew public criticism that summer for what The Cut called a 'tin-eared and insufficient' response to the protests and calls for racial justice.

Staff were told on a company-wide call; on July 7, 2020, NSTO lawyer Corey S. Booker confirmed the retailers had 'made the difficult decision to wind down their businesses and operations in an orderly fashion.' Highsnobiety called them the first major retailers to announce closure in the pandemic. BoF's September post-mortem put the verdict in the words of NSTO chief executive Chris Bossola: 'There just wasn't a model that worked.' The stores and sites closed over the following months; Totokaelo's own label, Totokaelo Archive, ended with them.