Yunost

Anton Tyulenev (Антон Тюленев) and Maxim Ivanov (Максим Иванов) had spent years making merchandise for bands and other brands before they built one of their own. The bet paid off fast: their debut collection, roughly 600 pieces, sold out within a week of its 2014 Faces and Laces showing. But early success brought a problem neither founder had priced in. Their own production line, still running out of what Tyulenev has described as a two-by-two-metre stockroom, was also printing work for other labels – including, in 2014, a debut tee for a designer named Vasily Volchok, whose own brand carried an entirely different name but whose shirt design carried a stylized print of a rival “Yunost.” A couple of years later, that tee was itself counterfeited by unrelated third parties, and by 2016 Ivanov was in a public dispute – alongside Volchok, not against him – over whose “Yunost” the market should trust, playing out in front of a market where counterfeits of the confusingly similar print were already for sale.

Yunost didn’t answer the naming confusion with a lawsuit. It answered by making its own identity harder to mistake for anyone else’s. The mascot – Ivanov’s cat, part of the idea he’d proposed back in 2013 – became the brand’s fixed point: a graphic mark distinct enough that no amount of name confusion in the market could attach itself to it. Around it, the founders built a collaboration strategy rather than a legal one, layering a Soviet-meets-American sportswear sub-line (Turnir) onto the mascot’s growing recognition through 2017, the same year a Japanese wholesale buyer’s proposal for a 58-store order forced the founders to confront whether their own production could actually deliver at that scale – a fear serious enough that Tyulenev later described it as his main worry about the whole deal.

That fear was not abstract. The brand’s production was, by the founders’ own account, still a young and undersized operation – one built, as Tyulenev has put it, by two friends with no light-manufacturing base to lean on in the first place. Scaling to meet a 58-store order or a national fast-food partner meant scaling a workshop the founders had built themselves, largely without the domestic supplier network a streetwear label in a more developed manufacturing market could assume existed. That gap – not competition, not capital – was the real ceiling on how far the mascot’s growing recognition could travel.

The answer arrived in April 2018, when Yunost partnered with KFC on a 6,000-unit capsule collection, produced entirely on the brand’s own capacity in Kirov and launched with a show at a flagship restaurant. The collaboration formalized a Cyrillic “KFS” spelling and put the brand in front of national media for the first time. It also proved a business model: rather than compete for shelf space, Yunost had turned a mainstream partner’s reach into distribution it couldn’t otherwise afford, using its own uncopyable identity as the thing worth partnering with. Multi-channel retail – its own e-commerce alongside wholesale placements in Russian multi-brand stores and shipping worldwide – matured in the collaboration’s wake.

The formula repeated. A 2021 capsule with the STS Love TV channel targeted a guilty-pleasure fandom directly; a Glavkosmos collaboration the same year put the mascot into a Roscosmos-branded capsule, carrying the brand’s identity into a domain about as far from streetwear as Russian institutions get. Neither required the scale of a KFC-sized production run – each simply asked whether the mascot could travel into someone else’s world without losing what made it recognizable in the first place. Each collaboration also did something the original naming dispute couldn’t: it made the mascot itself the asset a partner wanted to borrow, rather than a mark the brand had to clarify.

That shift changed the business more than any single deal did. Where the brand’s early years were defined by a rival’s name being confused with its own, its later years have been defined by institutions asking to be associated with it – a fast-food chain, a state space agency, a TV network. None of those partners needed Yunost’s production scale; they needed its visual signature, the very thing the 2014-2016 naming dispute had left unsettled in the public’s mind. Every collaboration since has quietly closed that question.

By 2023, the underlying business remained modest by revenue: a registry aggregator, cited via trade press, put the founders’ reported entity, OOO “Timeg,” at ~₽9.16M in turnover that year, roughly double the ~₽4.3M the same source reported for 2022 – growth, but growth at a scale that still describes a small operation, not a national retailer. The underlying registry filing itself has not been independently pulled, and ownership of Timeg is founder-attributed rather than registry-confirmed. Yunost has not chased a second location or a mass-manufacturing pivot; it has kept its production in Kirov, the same capacity that once strained under a 58-store proposal and a 6,000-unit capsule alike. What the brand secured with its own name – once entangled in someone else’s naming collision – was not scale. It was the ability to be recognized, and sought out, in rooms a small Russian streetwear label doesn’t usually reach.

Last updated: October 10, 2026