Concrete Matter

Concrete Matter is an Amsterdam menswear and concept store trading from Gasthuismolensteeg 12 in the Nine Streets district, selling curated vintage alongside recent make labels including Pike Brothers, Cathcart London and Pendleton plus its own line. The catalogue runs to jackets, pants, knitwear, shirts, vests, coveralls, hats, gloves, books, eyewear and a Mantiques category of objects. The store sets its position as “premium quality goods and rare finds for the everyday man”. Built on Shopify, with this English storefront served from an eng subdomain.

Website Design

One typeface across the whole site. Cabin is set as the primary font, the header font and the button font, at weights 400 and 700. There is no display face and no serif.

A near neutral interface. Body text sits at #333333 on a white ground, with #f5f5f5, #ebebeb and #e0e0e0 for panels and links held at a low contrast grey #a9a9a9. The single accent is the button green #5a774c, which deepens to #68815c on hover.

Navigation splits new make from vintage. The mega menu runs three columns: Concrete Matter’s own categories, a Vintage column that breaks jackets down to Leather, Leisure, Military, Varsity and Work, and a Recent make column organised by brand.

The grid does the work. The homepage is almost entirely product: a What’s new in store grid, a Departments row of Hats, Varsity jackets, Gloves and Leather Jackets, then own-label goods, with a single Our story paragraph near the foot.

Shopping Experience

Sizes are printed in the product title. Because most stock is single-piece vintage, titles carry the size in brackets, as in “Polo Ralph Lauren Tweed Blazer (L)” or “Vintage Duck Camo Hunting Vest (S)”. Prices are shown in euros with a comma decimal.

Sold out is left on display. A large share of the new-in grid is marked Sold out rather than hidden, which reads as a record of what the buyers found as much as a shopping list.

Product pages are four accordions. Product, Specifications, Brand and Shipping. The Brand accordion carries a full history of the label rather than boilerplate, and Shipping states the tiers directly: 5 euros in the Netherlands free over 50, 11 to 22,50 in Europe free over 150, 25 for the rest of the world free over 200.

Brand Storytelling

The About page is a timeline of addresses. It runs from a 2012 idea and a Haarlemmerdijk pop-up through the 2013 store, the 2016 move into the Nine Streets, the 2017 closure of the first shop and a pandemic-era opening in Haarlem.

Vintage is framed as a position, not a category. The closing section calls the demand for curated vintage “a counter movement to the wasteful practices of fast fashion and over consumerism”.

Notable Features

A View in your space AR viewer. Product pages offer an augmented reality preview, unusual for single-piece vintage stock.

Tax free refund policy and a loyalty programme. Both get their own footer pages, aimed at the store’s walk-in tourist trade as much as online buyers.

A country switcher without currency switching. Every destination in the list is priced in euros, so international shoppers see one currency throughout.