Hot Topic: Everything about the music
The Birth of the Loudest Store in the Mall
It all started in 1988. A ton of teen retail accessory stores littered the malls, but there weren't any cool, music-inspired accessory destinations for both guys and girls. Enter Hot Topic.
As 1990 rolled around, adding apparel seemed like a no-brainer. What better way than to bring in the ultimate music fan essential—band T-shirts. Customers flipped when they walked into Hot Topic stores and saw Bauhaus, The Cure, TSOL, and Depeche Mode rock tees at their fingertips. Within a year, we had about 50 different band titles, along with rock-inspired clothing lines like Lip Service and Serious. Today, Hot Topic has a growing line of apparel and accessories that includes music tees, band merch, shorts, swimwear, capris, pants, shoes, body jewelry, jeans and more.
As we expanded, we also discovered that customers were equally drawn to the underground cartoon, cult movie, and comic book scenes. It was a unique culture fans could call their own, so we brought the world of South Park, Care Bears, Superman, SpongeBob and tons of other pop icons right to them!
In 1996, with about 60 teen retail stores, Hot Topic became a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ stock exchange, under the symbol HOTT. The cash from our public offering allowed us to expand to the over 600 stores we have today. Check out our store locator to find the location nearest you!
At Hot Topic, you'll find a passion for music and pop culture in everything we do, and you'll see that our customers share that same passion. It's in our stores. It's at HQ. It's in our distribution centers. It's in our products.
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