The fashion industry has an incentive problem. A product that costs $100 to make routinely sells for $800 through a wholesale-based business. Almost every third garment produced goes unsold or sold at a discount. And every brand that built its audience on social media eventually learned the same hard lesson: a million followers isn't a customer relationship. It's a tenancy.
Erik Zetterberg, former creative director at H&M, Net-a-Porter, and Amazon Fashion, co-founded Singular Society with Daniel Herrmann to fix all three problems at once.
The answer was a membership model: customers pay a monthly fee (€9.5), products are sold close to actual cost, and the business earns its profit from subscriptions rather than markups. Renewals depend entirely on whether members feel the value.
The challenge: A new business model that couldn't afford the wrong infrastructure
Erik's clearest lesson didn't come from starting a company. It came from working at H&M.
"We started taking Instagram seriously, spent a lot of time and money, and grew at a rapid pace. When they changed the algorithm, reaching your audience suddenly came with a price tag," says Erik.
The feed that had been linear, and free, became pay-to-play overnight. Organic reach fell to between five and ten percent of what it had been. The lesson was clear: distribution built on someone else's infrastructure isn't owned. It's rented.
The membership model was the fix. A paid subscription creates a direct relationship. Profit tied to renewals, not volume, removes the pressure to overproduce.
But solving the industry's problems couldn't also mean building and maintaining complex technology. With a team of 15, every hour spent on platform management was an hour taken from product. "We wanted to focus on creating amazing products," says Erik. "We can't also build amazing tech."
The solution: A platform that stays out of the way
Singular Society chose Shopify at launch, and has grown consistently since. The choice wasn't built on features. It was built on what wouldn't become a distraction.
"It saves you the time of looking into the technicalities," says Erik. "It means you can focus on your product."
Working with agency partner Woolman, the team went from concept to a live site in three to four months. No off-the-shelf membership solution existed in 2020, so Woolman built a proprietary app on top of Shopify that manages subscriptions, member accounts, and the logic that connects in-store purchases to online membership profiles via QR code. The custom layer sat alongside Shopify's checkout and payment flows.
Shop Pay and Klarna handled transactions, with Klarna particularly suited to the Nordic market. Fraud through Shop Pay has been low. "I think Shop Pay worked really well," says Taeeun Lee, Singular Society's ecommerce manager. "Security has been good. Very low fraud."
Peak season tested the platform too. Gifting drives Singular Society's biggest windows for new memberships each year. On some platforms, running out of stock during peak translates directly to ranking drops and rising warehousing costs. A strong season becomes a liability. On Shopify, it stays an opportunity.
The result: New market launched in weeks
Singular Society today manages 3,000+ SKUs across the EU and Norway with a team of 15. "It's just amazing how simply and how small of a team we can be and efficiently operated," says Erik. That leanness isn't a constraint—it's the model.
Expanding to Norway tested how quickly a new market could go live. The answer: under a month. "Super easy," says Taeeun. "The only complexity was a tax level—from a Shopify perspective, it was very smooth."
Physical stores, concentrated in Stockholm, now drive more new memberships than any other channel. The loop is simple: customers scan a QR code in-store, memberships activate online, sometimes with an offer to track the conversion. Physical retail is now a growth channel.
The UK might be next. Singular Society launched there once before, then closed after Brexit disrupted operations mid-stride. Erik describes it as the brand's biggest untapped market. The barrier to re-entering isn't the platform. "I think it has very little to do with Shopify," he says. "The main challenge is logistics and taxation." The infrastructure is already mapped. When they're ready, the platform will be the least of their concerns.