Green Street Vault’s eye-catching lime-green truck will be the star of an episode of Travel Channel’s “America’s Best” airing in March.
The mobile clothing company, which started its engine in Boston less than a year ago, features “high-end street wear” and “fresh kicks.”
The Travel Channel interviewed owners Howard Travis and Derrick Cheung for a few hours on Tuesday. The channel was interested, Travis and Cheung said, because Green Street Vault is one of the fastest growing companies in the Northeast.
Travis said Green Street Vault has gained an immense following since the time of its inception, adding, “Sales increase 20 percent each week.”
At the interview, the owners said, fans came out to support the company, surrounding the truck when it was parked at its Newbury Street location.
They discussed their business plans for the summer with the Travel Channel, and said they plan to take their business on the road.
Travis and Cheung said Green Street Vault will travel to several towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. The company also hopes to expand the breadth of their merchandise to include women’s clothing, they said.
“The few times we have sold women’s apparel, they [women] have been much faster at buying items than guys are,” Travis said.
Right now, however, the company generally sticks to men’s apparel. Travis and Cheung started Green Street Vault to kick street fashion into “high gear,” they said, by bringing local Boston brands to public prominence.
Originally, the partners planned to start a traditional brick-and-mortar shop on Newbury Street.
“We planned on using the truck as a way to market the sneakers,” Travis said, but after calculating expenses and overhead, they found that opening a conventional shop would have cost “at least a quarter million dollars.”
The two partners decided to turn the business idea on its head, they said, and operate the company from a truck. Travis and Cheung’s efforts paid off quickly, despite their lack of public relations representation.
“Although we have had many PR offers, we didn’t want to bring in some third-party who knew nothing about us and our brand,” Travis said.
Instead, Green Street Vault relies on word-of-mouth to bring in business. The company originally attracted a predominantly male college crowd, but now customers come from all over Massachusetts, owners said.
“We have customers from Newton, New Bedford, Worchester, who take a day trip into Boston on the weekends, just to see what we have,” Travis said.
Green Street Vault launched an online shopping website last week “for friends who like our brands but can’t always make it to the truck.”
Travis and Cheung said they balance their consistent attention to customers with their connections to the brands they sell. Although they started out with Boston-based companies, they now receive emails weekly from larger brands that want to work with them, owners said.
Despite the attention, Travis said, “we only sell brands and styles that we like and that understand what we do.”
The most popular products are sneakers and snap-back hats. They said they hoped to bring these popular items to other cities as well.
Although they consider loyalty to Boston a priority, Travis and Cheung said they also hope to expand the business by introducing trucks to both New York and Los Angeles. They also plan to add a smaller truck to their Boston routes.
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