Another renowned northern store is Manchester’s Oi Polloi. Their success has not been through expansion, although they did open a London location in 2015, but rather through branding.
Oi Polloi sell clothes through making their communication tasteful, aspirational and distinctly Mancunian. The tone of voice that is used in their marketing communication feels northern, sarcastic and interesting. Each cool guy menswear store regularly updates a part of their site that shows new product on shot on a model. Oi Polloi’s is the called the Deck Out and features captions that start “On Sunday afternoon, in a distant parallel world, ITV2 will no doubt be showing the classic hit musical, Fleece.”
Oi Polloi has been so successful in peddling this particular brand of northern good taste that Oi Polloi is a popular search term on eBay. ‘Pica Post’ is the title of their print magazine which regularly creates aspirational content inline with the aesthetic; expect to read about Italian brand Iceberg being worn by football fans in Blackburn, the subculture of B-boying or Battenwear’s Shinya Hasegawa interviewing Daiki Suzuki of Engineered Garments.
Smaller cities can have a cool guy store too but note the correlation between a smaller population and a smaller number of cool guys. Let us take the bastion of the east midlands that is Derby. Having grown up there I can attest to the number of cool guys, not very many, and the number of standard blokes that you’d find in the pub, many, who would laugh at anything outlandish you might be wearing. To put this in to context: floral trousers no, Superdry yes. Canopy Menswear is the cool guy store in Derby and it is great. Well selected product and a slightly country outfitters feel to it; I’m always tempted when I visit. The website however isn’t all that great; a trick has been missed.