Today Rawr Denim posted an insightful interview with the founder and producer of superfuture. I always pay homage to superfuture (and forum culture in general) because the website has been a key influencing force in the evolution of my own personal style. I think forum communities have really played the role of effective middlemen between brands and their consumers. Through the creation and maintenance of communities such as supertalk, members around the world have been able to share and aggregate a wealth of information on everything from avante garde fashion brands to Japanese dry denim.
An except from the interview is found below
Rawr Denim: superfuture just celebrated its 13th year anniversary (congratulations!) and has grown in leaps and bounds since its initial launch back in September 1999. What’s the story behind the site and company? How did the founding team come together and what keeps you all going?
Wayne Berkowitz: Thanks! leaps and bounds? More like spurts and setbacks. We have periods when it booms then times when it flatlines. Growth is never constant. Google analytics sometimes looks like a stock market chart – usually due to search engines dumping us every time we upgrade versions of the site or have major crashes. It tends to recover over time.
Despite this the uniques [visitors] have actually stayed pretty constant over the past few years. Anyway it’s never been a popularity contest from our perspective. I’d prefer quality posts over quantity any day.
The remarkable thing is that it is still going at all. can you name 5 websites you were viewing in 1999 and still are? I can’t. There was a nightmare period [one of many] around the end of 2010 when our tech manager at the time sold all his computers, started a yoga school in the french countryside, and left us with no one running the website. supertalk was so broken and unfixable that a crash and burn around that time would have wiped the forums off the internet.
At that point i made the rather radical decision to rebuild the entire site from ground up which is what we did for most of 2011 and is the current version 5 iteration. Pleased to report that this time around it’s working the way it’s supposed to .
This is a must-read for anyone’s who spent any amount of time on superfuture. You can read the entire feature HERE.
For a terrific primer on the influence of forum culture on menswear/style, click through to this Complex Feature on the matter.
Via Rawr Denim
