Nude Project Rents SoHo for Four Months and Calls It a Beachhead

Nude Project has opened its first New York activation, a roughly 380-square-meter pop-up at 42 Greene Street in SoHo running from September 1 through December 31, 2026. It is the Barcelona-founded brand's largest US footprint to date, and it is deliberately temporary.

That temporariness is the strategy, not a hedge. A four-month lease in SoHo buys the brand a Manhattan address, a full holiday season, and an exit clause. Pop-ups in Miami and Los Angeles exceeded the company's expectations, and the read here is that Nude Project would rather rent proof than sign a decade of rent on a hunch.

The numbers explain the urgency. "We already knew that the United States was an important market for us, because it is our second biggest market in terms of sales," co-founder Bruno Casanovas has said. When a market is already number two without a single permanent store in it, the question stops being whether to enter and becomes how fast, and how expensively.

The launch campaign is the sharpest piece of the whole exercise. A viral film starring Casanovas opposite an actress playing a Devil Wears Prada-style editor riffs openly on American heritage houses — Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger. It is a tip of the hat and a positioning claim at once: we know whose neighborhood this is, and we are moving in anyway. For a brand with no American nostalgia to trade on, borrowing the reference frame is cheaper than building one.

The store itself is built to do more than sell hoodies. Programming spans music, film, and sport, including a premiere for the launch film and a run club — the same playbook that turned the brand's Barcelona flagship into a destination rather than a shop. Roughly a dozen stores globally and collaborations including Playboy, plus the halo of co-signs from figures like Madonna and Justin Bieber, have given the label cultural permission it did not buy with media spend.

The founding story remains instructive about how the brand operates. Casanovas and Alex Benlloch met on social media as teenagers and started the company in 2019 on a whim — "Should we start a brand?" The name came out of a failed trademark search, a hunt for words beginning with "NP" across several languages that landed on Nude Project. Nothing about that origin suggests a company that waits for permission.

The risk is the obvious one. SoHo is the most expensive place in America to test a hypothesis, and a viral film that name-checks Ralph Lauren sets an expectation the product has to survive at full price, in person, against shoppers who can walk three blocks to the real thing. Four months is enough time to find out. That is precisely why the lease ends in December.