The items displayed inside The Heavy Market are an escape from style standards generally seen around Atlanta.
It’s a shop that treats its fashion wares the way people treat their own clothing when selecting an outfit to wear in the morning. High-quality Japanese denim, vintage varsity jackets, military-grade duffel bags and more exclusive wares are arranged in a manner that feels like entering a friend’s walk-in closet.
The décor is minimal. Jeans are laid out on a large wooden table in the center of the main showroom, with a corner of the space filled with antique tin popcorn cans. A wooden table displays leather belts featuring colorful metallic studs — some of which encourage onlookers to get away from the wearer, in colorful (read: explicit) language.
Credit: Mike Jordan
Credit: Mike Jordan
Camouflage drapes hang above the entrance to the dressing room area. Just beyond the showroom is an outpost for Blue in Green, a highly popular rare Japanese menswear shop.
Aside from the neon “Blue in Green ATL” sign, there are no other markers explaining which section of the store you’re browsing, pushing customers to explore and discover whatever fits the body or mood.
Credit: Mike Jordan
Credit: Mike Jordan
It’s a curated experience that offers a peek at what’s on the mind of store owner Jason Geter.
“I wanted to have a store in my hometown,” says Geter, creator of the Vintage Heavy clothing line, sold inside The Heavy Market. He also wanted the sort of fashion he couldn’t find in Atlanta, such as the collection of Peanuts-branded clothing Vintage Heavy sells through a license, including a jersey of beloved Black character Franklin.
Credit: Mike Jordan
Credit: Mike Jordan
“I really, truly felt like there was a void, to the point I just stopped even thinking about shopping in Atlanta for myself, so I’d just shop when I travel,” Geter says. “I felt like it had to be at least 200 people that felt like me in the city.”
Those shoppers, he believes, were looking for Japanese brands like Kapital and Snow Peak — easy to find online but not so much in stores in Atlanta, or even America.
Geter theorizes these shoppers are likely among the influx of newer and younger residents who have moved to Atlanta over the last four years, bringing their own tastes and style perspectives to the city.
He also estimates that such fashion “hypebeasts” tend to have disposable income and an appreciation of luxury clothing, but not always the kind that comes with logos broadcasting how much they may have paid.
“For me in 2020, it was clear that this city was headed toward a threshold of before pandemic and after pandemic,” says Geter, a New York City native who moved to Atlanta in the late '90s to pursue a career as a music executive.
“You can see the growth of the city now with all of the new restaurants, hotels and companies moving here. I think it’s dope because it brings more diversity and more things to discover. Those thoughts made me feel like maybe it’s the right time to do a store in Atlanta in this way.”
The Heavy Market was inspired by the Japanese store-in-store retail concept, where multiple vendors and brands are housed inside one space, like Blue in Green’s area. It’s not completely unlike a flea market, but in this case the products are far more boutique than bootleg.
This space-sharing concept allowed Geter to bring hard-to-find clothing to his store, simultaneously building a community.
It’s all the result of Geter’s decadeslong process of building relationships with Japanese designers, starting with his first visit to Japan during a mid-2000s tour run with rapper/entrepreneur T.I., whom he used to manage. He later served as co-founder of T.I.’s company Grand Hustle Entertainment.
“During the downtime, I’m running around and started getting into denim culture, and the more I learned, the more it started shifting my thought process,” he says of the time. “In the beginning, I was like everyone else, saying “Damn, that’s expensive.” But I wanted to know why and how I could afford these things more.”
What Geter found was that the quality of the clothes was different from what he experienced in the States. This, in his mind, justified the steeper prices.
He breaks it down explaining that buying one $300 pair of high-quality jeans that can be worn daily for years on end is a better investment than spending 50 or so dollars multiple times on numerous pairs. Those, he says, will either get lost in the closet, take up space or get tattered over time.
Credit: Mike Jordan
Credit: Mike Jordan
“So you have to kinda shift your mentality a little bit,” says Geter, offering some perspective to people who may see a price on a tag in his store and think it’s a serial number. “Realize that quality-wise, it holds up.”
Before opening The Heavy Market, Geter had already experienced ups and downs in the fashion industry. Back when Grand Hustle hit its gold and platinum stride in the aughts, leading up to T.I.’s 2007 album “T.I. vs T.I.P.,” starting a clothing line felt like a natural progression.
The duo began consulting with a number of fashion insiders to develop designs for their pending brand, AKOO (A King Of Oneself). For his July 2007 XXL magazine cover shoot, T.I. wore one of only a handful of AKOO T-shirts they’d printed, hyping the brand when it barely existed.
When AKOO officially launched in 2008, it came at a time when rapper-endorsed brands were losing their luster. The company found an audience with lovers of graphic tees and polo shirts, leading to a deal with wholesale manufacturer RP55 Group, helping AKOO scale and find shelf space in stores nationwide.
However, as AKOO grew into a larger fashion brand, Geter’s personal tastes began to grow more niche. Wanting to create something reflective of his evolving style preferences, he created Striver’s Row, his own clothing brand separate from T.I., in 2010.
Striver’s Row leaned into Geter’s fondness for classic Americana, pairing leather and Army fatigue palettes with the denim he already loved. The company’s original storefront in Virginia-Highland was also Geter’s first foray in owning a brick-and-mortar to showcase his affinity for collecting antiques. Following a move to Bennett Street in Buckhead, the shop landed at its current location at 3115 E. Shadowlawn Ave.
Looking back, he admits that it seemed to confuse people when they walked in.
“I wanted to bring warmth and texture to the store,” he says. “But having all of these antiques around took the conversation away from the clothes, and people started treating the store like it was a museum and not buying anything.”
Geter closed the flagship location in 2013 as he saw his wares were selling more at stores in New York, Los Angeles and Japan. At the same time, producing these one-of-a-kind goods was becoming difficult as manufacturers began to prefer brands order 200 or more pieces per order, at minimum.
Geter notes the e-commerce clothing landscape was not as robust as it is now. “That’s a lot of pieces, and now you’re sitting on this inventory and that forces you to make decisions you may not really want to make.”
Among those decisions was having to put his brand in stores that didn’t match his vision. It also meant altering the look of the brand, scaling down from the mature, buttoned-up and stitched-down material to graphic-driven, colorful casual wear.
While he says the pivot was initially painful, it wasn’t necessarily a failure. Striver’s Row, similar to AKOO, wound up in partnership with RP55 and continues to be sold and sought today.
Geter remains a partner and adviser to the AKOO and Striver’s Row brands, although he’s relinquished daily control of them. The decision freed up time for another attempt at bringing his specific vision and tastes to life with his newest fashion company, Vintage Heavy.
According to its website, VH is for “Heritage enthusiasts” who “believe in quality over quantity” and “less is more.” Vintage Heavy also offers upcycled hats and other accessories, in efforts to “produce products in a progressive and conscious way.”
Credit: Mike Jordan
Credit: Mike Jordan
“I don’t even claim to be a minimalist for real,” says Geter. “But what I do know is it’s smarter for me to have only things that I really like in my closet.”
So far it looks like Geter is connecting with the people he hopes share his vision. In addition to hosting occasional music listenings, The Heavy Market also hosts fireside chats with independent designers ranging from Tobi Egberongbe of Mifland to Mikiharu Tsujita of Full Count.
On July 21, The Heavy Market will host a grand opening party, with designers and founders of Japanese fashion brands such as Samurai Denim and Pure Blue Japan visiting, in what Geter sees as an occasion for cultural import-export.
He’s also recently launched a weekly hiking trip where interested parties can join him trekking Atlanta-area forests, which he posts on social media channels, showing he isn’t shy about showing the world these 200 fashionable people like him are also into wearing their clothes in real Atlanta life.
“I think it’s dope just to kinda show the customer base because for us, those are our stars,” Geter says about his intentional decision to post photos of regular people who shop at the store, not just celebrities.
“If it ain’t for them, we’re not in business, you know?”
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