Thinking Worldwide From a Bedroom in Madrid

Martina Merry and Andrés Varela were twenty when they started Cold Culture in Madrid in 2021. They were held together by music, travel and city style. By 2024 the brand was reported past twenty-five million euros in revenue, with stores in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Milan and London, having built almost all of it online first.

Their phrase is Thinking Worldwide, and unlike most brand philosophies it does actual work.

A streetwear brand normally belongs to a city. That is a strength and a trap: it gives the clothes a home and it ties their relevance to whatever is happening in that place. Cold Culture took its references from everywhere instead, from Seoul to Morocco, so the brand belongs to a generation rather than to a postcode. A brand tied to one scene ages with that scene. A brand tied to an attitude can keep moving as its audience moves.

The mechanism underneath is the small limited batch, and it deserves an honest accounting because it is the most copied and least understood decision in this category.

What you get: very little cash exposed at any moment, almost no markdown because nothing is left over, and a release that feels like an event rather than a restock. The brand never has to hold a sale, which means it never teaches customers to wait for one.

What you pay: a worse price per unit, because small runs sit near the factory's minimum where pricing is at its worst, and a group of people every single time who wanted to give you money and could not. That is a real cost, incurred deliberately. The model works while the people who missed out come back, and it stops working the moment they decide it is not worth the effort.

Then the stores, and the order is the interesting part.

They grew online to a following in the hundreds of thousands before opening anywhere. The shops came afterwards, into demand that already existed, which is close to the opposite of how a fashion brand traditionally develops. Historically you took a lease, the shop was your distribution, and the audience was whoever walked past. Now the audience comes first and the shop is something you add once you know who is coming.

That inversion is worth sitting with, because it explains all three of these Spanish brands at once.

Nude Project in 2019. Scuffers in 2018. Cold Culture in 2021. Three brands, one country, founded within three years of each other, all bootstrapped by people in their teens or early twenties, all now opening stores in cities their founders probably could not have afforded to visit at the start.

That is not three lucky accidents. It is what happens when distribution stops being something you have to buy.

For most of the history of clothing, reaching people required a wholesale account, an advertising budget or a lease on the right street, and all three were gatekept by people with capital. A phone and a genuine point of view now do part of that job. It does not make building a brand easy, and it does mean a nineteen-year-old with six hundred euros can reach more people than a well-funded wholesale brand could a generation ago.

The gate is open. What is scarce now is having something to say once you are through it.