Georgy Yashin

I sold my car — that's about taking risky steps (but it was worth it).

Two friends with no fashion education #

Ziq & Yoni (Зик энд Йони) — the label now known as ZNY — launched in Moscow in 2010, the work of two young men with no formal training in fashion and, by their own account, no meaningful connections in the industry they were entering. Yashin and a childhood friend, Maxim Dmitriev, were friends first — immersed in Moscow’s still-forming street-culture scene, surrounded by musicians, designers, and journalists who would later become the label’s informal support network, but with none of the capital or infrastructure a fashion label usually needs to survive its first year.

Georgy Yashin is the person most consistently credited as the label’s creative and commercial driver over the following sixteen years. He is not, and has never claimed to be, a trained designer. What he had instead was an idea about what young Muscovites wanted to wear, and a friend willing to build it with him.

The mistakes were his own #

The label’s first real test arrived within months of launch, and it was not a test either founder passed. Yashin has been direct about this in the one interview that documents the period in any detail — a 2017 conversation with the Siberian outlet newsomsk.ru, in which he described, without much softening, exactly how badly the first year went.

Two production runs failed. Not because a factory delivered defective goods — Yashin is specific that this was not a manufacturing failure imposed on him from outside — but because he did not yet understand fabric sourcing, the manufacturing process he was commissioning, how to price what he was making, or how to sell it once it existed. Friends who watched the runs fail joked afterward that he’d produced “t-shirts with two left sleeves” — a joke about the scale of the failure, not a literal description of the garments, but the kind of joke that only lands because the underlying failure really was that comprehensive.

The cost was everything he’d started with: his entire ₽70,000 in starting capital, gone. “Бизнес, можно сказать, рушился,” he told newsomsk.ru seven years later — “the business was, you could say, collapsing.” It is a plain sentence, delivered without embellishment, and it is more useful than a more dramatic one would be, because it names the mechanism honestly. This was not bad luck. This was a young founder discovering, in the most expensive way possible, exactly how much he did not know about the business he had started.

What he did with that knowledge is the part of the story that separates a cautionary tale from a founding one. He did not quit. He and Dmitriev went looking for the next opening, and the next opening was a festival stand neither of them had been invited to.

Faces&Laces, and the stand nobody offered them #

Faces&Laces was, by the early 2010s, the closest thing Moscow’s street-culture scene had to a proving ground — a festival where the city’s skaters, graffiti writers, DJs, and independent labels showed up to be seen by each other, if by no one else yet. Yashin and Dmitriev had no standing invitation and no obvious claim to a spot. They asked anyway, repeatedly, until the organizers said yes.

It is a small story next to the capital-loss crisis that preceded it, and that is precisely why it matters. The failed production runs proved Yashin didn’t yet know how to build the operational side of a fashion label. Faces&Laces proved something else: that he and Dmitriev were willing to keep showing up in front of the people who mattered, uninvited, until the door opened — persistence substituting for the resources a more established founder would have had.

A second collapse, and a car sold to answer it #

The next serious setback came at another festival, City Day, and it followed a shape familiar to anyone who has watched a small brand’s fortunes turn on a single deal: a sponsorship arrangement between the festival organizers and a set of investors fell through, and Yashin’s team was left holding stock they had planned to sell through that now-defunct arrangement.

Their response was not to salvage the deal or discount the stock. They gave the t-shirts away, free, rather than force a sale through a channel that had collapsed under them — a decision that cost them near-term revenue but seeded something more durable: word-of-mouth among exactly the young, culturally engaged Muscovites the brand needed to reach. It was, in its way, the inverse lesson of the production-run failure: where the capital loss taught him what he didn’t yet know about running a business, the giveaway taught him what a brand could afford to give up in service of being noticed.

But giving away the stock left the label without inventory to sell, and without the capital the failed sponsorship deal was supposed to provide. Yashin’s solution was direct, and it’s the detail that has followed him through every subsequent profile of the brand: he sold his own car. “Я продал свою машину, это к слову о рискованных шагах (но он стоил того),” he told newsomsk.ru — “I sold my car — that’s about taking risky steps (but it was worth it).” The sentence carries its own retrospective judgment built in: he is narrating a bet that paid off, six years after the fact.

It’s worth being precise about what this episode was and wasn’t. It was not a relaunch after the earlier capital-loss crisis — the production-run failure and the City Day collapse were sequential, distinct setbacks roughly a year apart, and conflating them would flatten two separate lessons into one. The first taught him what he didn’t know about manufacturing and pricing. The second taught him what he was willing to sacrifice — a car, tangible and personally owned, not abstract investor capital — to keep the label supplied with product it could sell.

What sixteen years built #

The label that emerged from those early setbacks grew, over the following decade, into what industry coverage would later call a “старожил” — an old-timer, a first-wave survivor — of Russian streetwear. A premium sub-line launched in 2013 tested a more restrained, Europe-facing aesthetic. International press attention followed not long after. By 2018 the brand was presenting at Paris Fashion Week; by 2019, per one industry account, it was stocked in more than 60 stores worldwide, and Forbes reported more than 50 retail partners in Russia and abroad along with turnover that had grown 2.6 times year-over-year.

In 2020, the label consolidated its name — from Ziq & Yoni to the shorter ZNY — a rebrand that coincided with a broader repositioning toward a younger, digitally native audience. The same year, Forbes Russia named Yashin to its 30-under-30 list in the Fashion and Design category, a recognition that arrived a full decade after the ₽70,000 loss that could easily have ended the label before it began.

By 2021, the operating structure behind the brand had changed as well. A newly re-incorporated company, OOO «ЗИ ЭН УАЙ», registered that March with Yashin holding 51% and a financial partner, Igor Grigoriev, holding the remaining 49%. Maxim Dmitriev — the childhood friend who had cold-pitched Faces&Laces alongside him, who is remembered in that same newsomsk.ru interview as Yashin’s “business partner” during the label’s earliest and hardest years — was not among the new company’s shareholders.

This is a genuine gap in the record, and it is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Public retail copy and catalog boilerplate continued, for years afterward, to credit Dmitriev as a co-founder — which he was, in every sense that matters for the label’s founding story. But the ownership registry from 2021 onward does not include him, and no public source — no interview, no filing, no dated account from either founder — documents when he stepped back, why, or on what terms. It is possible to read a story into that silence. It would also be a fabrication. What can be said honestly is only this: a partnership that mattered enormously in the label’s first, hardest years is not reflected in the ownership structure of the company that partnership’s early risk-taking helped build, and the record does not say more than that.

A myth that outlasted its correction #

There is one more story attached to Yashin’s name, smaller than the ones above but the one most often repeated. Ziq & Yoni’s American profile drew a natural inference from outlets covering it abroad: Highsnobiety, introducing one of Russia’s most recognized streetwear labels to an international audience, described it as founded “by Russian and American partners” — a phrase that reads, reasonably, like a story about emigre ownership, about two continents’ worth of capital and family history converging on a single Moscow label. It is a good story. It is also, per a 2016 trade feature on the brand, not quite the right one — though the feature carries no byline, and the name-origin mechanism it describes is the more circumstantial half of this profile, worth reading as plausible rather than settled.

The real story is smaller and, in its way, stranger. There was no diaspora, no bicontinental family fortune. Yashin built the label with Dmitriev and a supporting cast of designers and collaborators based in New York — the genuine bicontinental element in a story outlets later flattened into “partners.” The label’s name came out of that working relationship, not out of ownership: Ziq & Yoni meant nothing when it was chosen, a string of syllables invented on a Skype call because it sounded like something rather than because it meant anything. That the founders decided, or later said they decided, to hear “two continents” in it anyway is the detail worth sitting with — an origin myth invented twice, once as sound, once as meaning, and only the second invention mattered for how the world understood the label. Whether that meaning was assigned in the moment or arrived at later is unclear from the public record; better corroborated is that the idea stuck.

Yashin has never, as far as the public record shows, made any claim to fluency in English or to a personally bicontinental identity — the New York connection ran through his collaborators and the brand’s working relationships, not through his own biography, and it would misstate the record to suggest otherwise. What he built instead was narrower and, arguably, more interesting: a Moscow label, run by a self-taught founder who lost everything once, sold his car to keep going after a second setback, and kept going anyway, whose most famous origin story turned out to be about a place he’d never lived rather than a place he had.

Sixteen years after the ₽70,000 loss, ZNY is a modest, profitable, majority-Yashin-owned company — not the international juggernaut its 2019 retail footprint once suggested it might become, but a business that survived its own founder’s early mistakes, a collapsed sponsorship deal, a sold car, and the quiet exit of the friend who helped start it. The name still means nothing, technically. Yashin decided, a long time ago, that it should mean something anyway. Sixteen years of running the label he built from that decision is the closest thing to proof that he was right.

Last updated: July 31, 2026