This article has been edited since it first appeared in print.
(From left) Ap0cene founders Ariel Arakas, Sam Walker and Elissa Rumford (Photo courtesy Ap0cene)
Talking to the founders of Ap0cene — Ariel Arakas, Elissa Rumford and Sam Walker — is a crash course in fashion e-commerce and digital authentication processes, the challenges that were prominent in their minds when they incorporated in January 2022. “The designers that we are serving … get ripped off constantly,” Rumford explains. “What we are doing is creating [intellectual property] protection for them to fight against counterfeits.”
Ap0cene (ap0cene.com and @ap0cene on Instagram and TikTok) is an ultra-high-end fashion brand based in New York City, but because Arakas and Rumford are Virginia Commonwealth University alums, they are also bringing fashion jobs to Richmond. After incorporating the business in New York, the trio decided to expand production facilities here and opened a warehouse facility in the city in August.
Thanks to Rumford’s proclivity for attracting high social media engagement with campy, fashion-forward TikTok posts, Ap0cene is sought after by high-profile celebrities including Olivia Rodrigo, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Miguel, and by stylists looking to pull pieces from their inventory.
On the surface, customers see a curated online designer platform selling items resembling the Jean Paul Gaultier pieces seen in the sci-fi film “The Fifth Element.” On the back end, Ap0cene seeks to help emerging sustainability-focused designers reach customers in the global digital luxury marketplace. They use data to help designers with marketing tactics, logistics decisions, international shipping and customer service.
Ap0cene places microchips that ensure authenticity into high-fashion clothing pieces. “We build crypto protocols, especially in the NFT [nonfungible tokens, i.e., unique digital identifiers] space,” Walker says. “We originally saw this opportunity with the way people were collecting NFTs and that people were collecting luxury fashion. We have this authentication protocol that uses chips we put in the garments that work with blockchain [technology] to authenticate these garments.”
Ap0cene’s executives have been traveling worldwide raising funds for their garment ID chips. Arakas says their globe trekking helps them to build a sense of trust with customers. After working together under another fashion brand, the three recognize that the way people are making fashion choices is changing; they want their spending to reflect their values regarding all aspects of sustainability: environmental, social and economic. “Being able to authenticate those pieces and where they are coming from is really valuable these days,” Arakas says.
The brand’s name is drawn from “Anthropocene,” a word used to describe the current geologic time in which human activity is the dominant influence on the environment. The zero in the name stands for “0%,” a nod to fashion’s zero-waste movement, which seeks to minimize textile waste. While Ap0cene is nowhere near that goal now, the company wants to be known for its commitment to a sustainable future as it expands its in-house design offerings.
