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ZNY
By 2019, ZNY had earned what few Russian streetwear labels ever do: 60-plus stockists worldwide, including Selfridges, and turnover up 2.6× in a year. In 2022, sanctions closed that channel in months. Rather than fold, the Moscow house rebuilt around its own flagships and a 2024 Spartak Moscow capsule — reaching a stable ~₽59.66M, smaller but standing.
Selfridges to Spartak: a Western footprint that lapsed
A decade-old Western retail credential, closed by a border
Georgy Yashin’s brand had made it. By 2019, ZNY — then still trading as Ziq & Yoni (Зик энд Йони) — was stocked in more than 60 stores worldwide, including London’s Selfridges, with turnover running 2.6 times its 2018 level. Few Russian streetwear labels had earned that kind of Western prestige-retail footprint. Three years later, geopolitics closed it in months.
The Moscow house had not stumbled into that standing. It had been built, deliberately, over a decade — and the story of how it was built explains why the brand survived losing it.
Two continents, one name
Ziq & Yoni was founded in Moscow in 2010 by Georgy Yashin and Maxim Dmitriev, two self-taught friends with no formal fashion education, working alongside a New York creative team that shaped the label’s earliest designs and go-to-market strategy. The brand’s name — deliberately meaningless syllables coined on a Skype call with the American side of the team — is, per a 2016 trade feature, one the founders came to read as signalling a connection between two continents. It was, from the outset, a brand built by a bi-continental team rather than a single national identity, and that structure would matter later: a Moscow-based house with an early foothold in how New York’s streetwear scene talked about product.
The founders were undercapitalised and self-taught, and the label’s first year very nearly ended it — a story told in full in Yashin’s own founder profile. What matters for the brand’s institutional arc is what came out the other side: a stubborn refusal to treat a closed channel as a verdict. Yashin later summed up the posture bluntly: “We didn’t want to work for ’the man,’ so we became ’the men’ ourselves.” It describes the company’s later behavior at scale as much as its founding: when a channel closed, ZNY did not wait for someone else to reopen it.
Building the case for the West
What followed through the 2010s was a methodical accumulation of the credentials that eventually opened Western doors. International streetwear press began covering the brand — Highsnobiety in 2013, Hypebeast the following year — the same 2013 in which a premium sub-line called Z.N.Y. launched: a more restrained, Europe-facing aesthetic built on Japanese fabrics, testing whether the label could hold a premium register alongside its streetwear core. The brand’s earliest trademark dates to June 2015, the same year a fifth-anniversary capsule and New York presentation with MISHKA NYC deepened the transatlantic tie. Collaborations followed with Nike, Vans, BEAMS, and others — the growth engine of the brand’s visibility. One of them, the Nike “МИРОВОЙ” (“Worldwide”) collection, was a football-fan tribute — undated in the record, though its framing around “the world championship days” points to Russia’s 2018 World Cup — not a global sneaker release, but it signaled the kind of partner attention the label could now command.
By 2018, ZNY was presenting seasonal collections at Paris Fashion Week — a marker few Russian streetwear brands reached, and one that placed the label in company usually reserved for names with far larger production budgets. The following year brought the peak: the 60-plus-store global footprint, the Selfridges, LuisaViaRoma, and BEAMS placements, the 2.6× turnover growth.
In 2020 the brand formalized its maturation with a full rebrand, collapsing “Ziq & Yoni” into the concise “ZNY,” alongside an augmented-reality shopping app called ZNY NOW and a b2b buyer portal — infrastructure aimed at scaling as a Gen-Z lifestyle hub rather than a graphic-tee label. Yashin described the ambition to Forbes in terms of retail growth and wholesale infrastructure, not just design: a company beginning to think in platforms, not seasons. That same year, Forbes Russia named him to its 30-under-30 list. In 2021, the operating company was re-incorporated as OOO «ЗИ ЭН УАЙ», with Yashin holding 51% and financial partner Igor Grigoriev the remaining 49% — a bootstrapped structure with no outside investment. Co-founder Maxim Dmitriev is no longer a shareholder; his departure is not dated in any public record, though retail boilerplate continued crediting him as co-founder for years afterward. That gap in the record is real and unresolved — worth stating plainly rather than papering over.
Not every strain in that decade was existential. In 2019, Yashin discussed cash-flow gaps — “кассовые разрывы” — on a Russian fashion-industry podcast, describing the ordinary friction of scaling buyer relationships and an American-market push. It is a growing-pains account, not a survival story, and it predates the pandemic by months. The distinction matters: ZNY’s real crisis was still three years away, and it would not come from cash flow at all.
The border closes
None of that history offered protection from what came next. Following the sanctions-driven exodus of Western retailers and brands from Russia in 2022, the channel ZNY had spent a decade building closed to new Russian-origin stock — including the 50-plus retail partners and 60-plus stockists the brand had spent a decade cultivating, gone as a matter of policy rather than performance. Selfridges and LuisaViaRoma pages for the brand persist online today, but only as legacy listings — a searchable trace of a relationship that is no longer active, not evidence of current stocking. The closure was not a slow negotiation; it was a structural fact of the sanctions regime, and it applied to ZNY exactly as it applied to every other Russian-origin label with Western shelf space. A brand’s retail relationships, however genuinely earned, do not survive a closed border on the strength of the relationship alone. Nothing ZNY had done wrong caused this; nothing ZNY could have done differently would have prevented it.
No dated statement from Yashin narrating this specific loss survives in the public record — a real gap, not a story left out by choice. What can be documented is the outcome: a company that, by every visible measure, had been built for international scale found that scale suddenly inaccessible, with no negotiation, appeal, or workaround available to a single mid-sized label caught in a sanctions regime aimed at an entire country’s export relationships.
What the closure tested was not whether ZNY had earned its Western standing — it plainly had — but whether the brand had also built something durable at home. It had. ZNY owned its design and brand identity outright, and it had never depended on the Western channel for its domestic retail presence. The pivot that followed was not improvisation under pressure; it drew on infrastructure the brand already had.
Rebuilding at home
The visible proof point arrived in April 2024: a capsule collaboration with football club Spartak Moscow — T-shirts, hoodies, joggers, shorts, raincoats, scarves, bottles, and wallets in black, white, and red — that read as a deliberate statement of domestic identity rather than a consolation project. It anchored a broader redirection toward the brand’s own flagships in Moscow’s Khlebozavod complex and on St. Petersburg’s Ligovsky Prospect, its own e-commerce, and a slate of collaborations calibrated for a Russian audience rather than an export one.
The financial results of that rebuild are modest by design, not by failure. OOO «ЗИ ЭН УАЙ» posted 2023 revenue of roughly ₽59.31M with profit of ₽6.34M, and in 2024, revenue of roughly ₽59.66M — about $0.64M at the year’s average exchange rate — with profit of roughly ₽8.88M on a headcount of 14. These are single-LLC figures, almost certainly a lower bound on the brand’s historical scale at its international peak, when wholesale and export volumes ran through the business as well. But they describe a company that is stable and profitable two years after losing the retail channel that had defined its international identity — not a business in retreat, but one that found a smaller, sustainable footing. Year-on-year, the numbers barely move — revenue essentially flat, profit up — which is itself the point: after the shock of 2022, ZNY reached a steady state rather than a slow decline.
That steadiness rests on a business model the export collapse could not touch. ZNY owns its brand, design, and seasonal collection strategy outright, and never depended on Western buyers to keep its own retail operation running. The company’s own flagships and e-commerce operation generate revenue the same way whether or not a London department store is stocking the line. That is a distinction easy to miss from outside the business and decisive from inside it: a brand that owns its retail infrastructure has a floor under it that a brand dependent entirely on wholesale placement does not.
What the old-timer proves
ZNY’s position within Russian streetwear today is that of a first-wave survivor — a “старожил,” in the industry’s own term — among peers like Gosha Rubchinskiy (Гоша Рубчинский), whose international luxury crossover took a very different path through COMME des GARÇONS production and a Paris runway presence; RASSVET, which built its identity on skate authenticity; and Kruzhok, an art-collective label built around a Soviet-science aesthetic. Newer names — Sputnik 1985, Outlaw Moscow, Volchok, Yunost — occupy narrower graphic- and logo-driven niches. ZNY’s distinguishing trait is neither international crossover nor a tight aesthetic niche: it is a decade-plus operating history combined with a genuinely earned, now-lapsed set of Western retail credentials, and a collaboration-driven lifestyle model that gave the brand something concrete to rebuild around once the export channel closed. A 2024 trade-press survey of streetwear influence listed ZNY among 44 brands shaping the category — recognition of longevity as much as of any single collection.
There is no dated quote from Yashin narrating the 2022 loss directly — a genuine gap in the public record, not a story that was suppressed. What is documented is the shape of the recovery itself: two owned flagships, a stable e-commerce operation, and a domestic collaboration calendar that culminated visibly in the Spartak Moscow capsule. The earlier cash-flow account from the “Худсовет” podcast, discussed above, belongs to 2019 and a different kind of pressure entirely; conflating the two would misdate the brand’s real test by three years and misattribute an ordinary growth strain to what was, in 2022, a geopolitical rupture no growth strategy could have anticipated.
What ZNY’s decade demonstrates is a distinction worth drawing precisely: earning a Western retail channel and owning the infrastructure that channel depends on are not the same achievement. A brand can spend years cultivating buyers, press, and runway slots in markets it does not control, and lose all of it the moment those markets close their doors — not because the brand did anything wrong, but because the channel was never truly its own to keep. ZNY had both the earned placements and the domestic design and retail base; when the first was taken away by forces entirely outside the brand’s control, the second is what kept the company standing, profitable, and — on a smaller stage — still building.