Anton Tyulenev and Maxim Ivanov

Basically, Yunost is five people. Everyone else on the "staff" works for more than just Yunost.

Two founders, one complaint about the same industry #

His co-founder, Maxim Ivanov (Максим Иванов), described the same gap from a different angle: people don’t see streetwear as a serious business, he said, treating it as art instead. Between them, the two founders of Yunost (Юность) were describing the same problem from two directions – a country with almost no domestic light-manufacturing base to build a clothing brand on, and a domestic culture that didn’t yet take the attempt seriously either.

Building the missing industry themselves #

Tyulenev and Ivanov had six years of apparel and merchandise work behind them before Yunost existed – ad-agency BTL production, earlier independent projects, hands-on experience with what it actually takes to print and sew clothing at any volume. Ivanov proposed the idea in 2013, during a conversation about how thin the Russian streetwear market’s own supporting industry really was; that experience became the brand’s foundation the moment the founders decided not to outsource around the same manufacturing gap they’d just named. Instead, Tyulenev built his own capacity: printing, sewing, and eventually consulting for other Russian streetwear labels alongside Yunost’s own production. It was a bet that building the missing industry themselves, however small the scale at first, beat waiting for a supplier network that didn’t exist.

That decision put the founders in an unusual position for two people running a fashion label: they were also, functionally, running a small manufacturing business on the side, one whose clients were their own competitors. It is a detail easy to read as a distraction from the brand itself, and the founders’ own account treats it instead as the opposite – proof that the capacity they were building had value independent of Yunost’s own sales. By the time larger opportunities arrived, that capacity wasn’t a promise; it already had a client list.

That same arrangement is what pulled the founders into a dispute they hadn’t sought. In 2014, a designer named Vasily Volchok – whose own line carried an unrelated name – had a debut tee printed, by Ivanov’s own account, on Yunost’s production line, and that tee carried a stylized print nearly identical to Yunost’s own name. A couple of years later, that tee was itself counterfeited by unrelated third parties, and Ivanov found himself publicly defending, alongside Volchok, whose “Yunost” the market should trust. Seen from the brand’s side, this reads as a naming collision to untangle. Seen from the founders’ side, it was the direct, personal consequence of the same production capacity Tyulenev had built to solve Russia’s supply gap – work done for someone else’s brand that ended up entangling their own name in a dispute neither founder started. The founders didn’t retreat from the arrangement that had caused the exposure; they kept building capacity, and let the brand’s growing identity do the work of settling the dispute instead.

The scale was small at first by any measure. Early operations ran out of what Tyulenev has described as a two-by-two-metre stockroom, inventory stacked vertically because there was nowhere else to put it. That capacity, built by hand, also created an unplanned second business: prints Tyulenev’s line made for other labels sometimes carried consequences of their own – the tee printed for Volchok in 2014 carried a print confusingly close to Yunost’s own name and became a hit, and when that tee was itself counterfeited a couple of years later, the founders were tangled in a dispute over authenticity that neither had chosen to start.

A Japanese order tests the capacity they built by hand #

Growth, when it came, didn’t relieve the pressure – it multiplied it. By 2017, the stockroom had grown into a roughly 150-metre warehouse, and even that was no longer enough; Tyulenev has said the business was growing faster than it could adapt. The same year, a Japanese buyer’s proposal for a 58-store wholesale order forced the question directly: could a production line built from nothing, by two people with no domestic industry to draw on, actually deliver at that scale, on that timeline. Tyulenev’s own account of the moment is plain about the stakes – his main fear, he said, was that the production simply wouldn’t hold.

It held. The following year, when Yunost partnered with KFC on a 6,000-unit capsule collection, the entire run was produced on the capacity Tyulenev had built himself in Kirov – the same kind of production floor that, a year earlier, had been a 150-metre warehouse straining under its own growth. Nothing about the scale-up was outsourced or acquired; it was the direct, compounding result of a decision made years earlier not to wait for Russia’s light industry to catch up.

The naming dispute that had entangled the founders in 2014 and after is instructive here by contrast. That crisis was about a name collision someone else created, one their own production line had unwittingly helped print; the 2017-2018 test was about whether the founders’ own physical capacity – the thing they had spent years quietly building on the side – could hold up under real, sudden demand. The first threat was resolved by making the brand’s identity harder to confuse with a copy. The second was resolved by the founders’ own hands, on a production floor with their names on the client list before it ever had Yunost’s.

Staying small on purpose #

By his own account, Yunost today is still a small operation – “basically five people,” Tyulenev has said, with everyone else on staff working across more than just this one brand. That is a modest headcount for a company whose production has delivered a national fast-food collaboration and fielded a 58-store international order, and it reflects a choice as much as a limitation: the founders never scaled headcount to match ambition, relying instead on the same small production floor that had carried them through both crises. The industry Tyulenev and Ivanov once described as being at rock bottom is still thin, by their own account, and neither founder claims to have fixed it. What changed, for their own business at least, is that they built enough of it themselves to stop needing it to exist.

Last updated: October 10, 2026