Standard & Strange

Standard & Strange, located in a 440 sq ft shop in bustling Temescal Alley in Oakland, CA, consistently punches above its weight when it comes to interesting, high quality, storied menswear and accessories.

(Neil Berrett, left, & Jeremy Smith, founders of Standard & Strange & Cedar Cycling.)

In 2011, Standard & Strange co-founders Jeremy Smith, a product manager who works with some of silicon valley's biggest startups, and Neil Berrett, a Radiation Cleanup expert who has worked on Superfund sites all across America from a particle accelerator teardown in Berkley to a recent stint refueling a nuclear plant in Minnesota, - who met in the Bay area’s tight-knit bicycling community - formed Cedar Cycling, which produced small runs of high-quality cool-weather biking apparel.

Since then, they’ve seen their interest in better men’s apparel turn towards domestic-made casual wear, and, more lately, into higher end Japanese and European denim and theoretical work-wear.

At it’s inception, Standard & Strange opened in half of their current space with a handful of made in California denim brands, several of which - including Rogue Territory and Tellason - they continue to carry.

Over the last couple of years they’ve gradually acquired a quirky mix of niche brands that have a massive appeal to US denim heads, such as Kapital, Tender, Filson and Red Wing Heritage, some contemporary formal/casual crossovers, like Private White VC, Viberg and Monitaly, modern European moto-style from the likes of  Indigofera & Eat Dust - and recently have been expanding their selection of Japanese denim into the nose-bleed altitudes of OOE Yofukuten and (soon) Freewheelers, both of which are presently US exclusives to S&S.

From the original shop staff of just Jeremy and Neil, they’ve added General Manager Jonathan Hewitt and Sales Fellows Henry Parsons and Willem Smith-Clark.

Standard and Strange has also lately been working on a store brand of made in USA clothing. Spurred by their experience in fabric development and garment production at Cedar Cycling, they’ve been paying a lot of attention to sourcing fabric, hardware, and production.  They released their first batch of shirts this spring with more shirts to come this fall.

(from left: Willem, Henry, Neil & Jeremy)