Montauk General Store can’t be found on a map. And yet thousands of people—many of them young adults in coastal cities like New York and Miami—own a cap with its logo and have stood in long lines for its signature matcha drinks. Founder Kate Diament describes it as a lifestyle brand that captures the summery spirit of the Hamptons, and she’s grown it through partnerships and year-round pop-ups hosted around the country.

After living in the Hamptons full time during the pandemic, Diament vowed to figure out a way to never leave the beachy locale where she spent summers as a child—if not physically, then metaphorically. Similar to leaders in innovative brand world-building (think: Madhappy and Aimé Leon Dore), she developed the concept of a “fake” general store. Instead of opening her own physical space, she started with merch. In June 2023, she released the brand’s first-ever item—a $55 Mermaid Cap that remains a bestseller—on the Montauk General Store website. Two months later, she brought her general store concept to life. Working with local Hamptons businesses, like the café Doubles and the hotel Hero Beach Club, she hosted a handful of one-day pop-ups, selling the cap alongside other clothing items, $8 house-made matcha drinks, and a small curation of goods from other brands, like Rocky’s Matcha.

In recent years, upstart companies such as New York City-based chain Fini Pizza and fashion label Dôen have set up shop out East, no doubt hoping to court the well-to-do New Yorkers who frequent Hamptons towns in the summer season. Diament saw that evolving retail landscape as an opportunity. In the summer of 2024, when she started working on Montauk General Store full time after leaving her job in the music industry, she pitched her general store pop-ups to retailers looking to engage with the local community and keep their brick-and-mortar customers entertained and coming back throughout the season. That summer, Montauk General Store hosted weekly pop-ups with brands, including Alice + Olivia, Solid & Striped, and Jones, on varied terms. In addition to getting a physical space to sell its goods, through these pop-ups, Montauk General Store gained roughly 5,000 Instagram followers thanks to its partners promoting the events and their customers—many of whom happened to be influencers—posting the drinks and merchandise that featured the brand’s logo on social media. These symbiotic relationships have been a major driver of Montauk General Store’s growing merch sales, which the founder has achieved without receiving any outside funding. Diament declined to share the company’s annual revenue.

When the local traffic died down in in the fall, Diament took Montauk General Store to New York City and worked with brands, like Magnolia Bakery, on pop-ups featuring co-branded merch and treats. “I grew up eating their banana pudding, and once I tried pairing it with my matcha, I knew it had to happen,” she explains. When Diament pitched her recipe, the bakery picked it up for a one-day pop-up in November at its Upper West Side store in New York City. Montauk General Store’s pop-up with Magnolia Bakery. Photo: Courtesy company The Magnolia collaboration also included a limited-edition merch capsule featuring both brands, ranging from $55 trucker hats to $150 hoodies. The pop-up event was so successful that Magnolia held a similar one at its Los Angeles location in March. This May, Diament hosted a three-day pop-up in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood produced in collaboration with travel brand Fora. It featured Montauk General Store merch, drinks, and Diament’s personal curation of products from 20 brands, including Masha Tea and Skin By Ella Rose. With roughly 3,000 people attending the event, Diament says her brand’s Instagram saw nearly one million impressions that weekend.

This summer, Montauk General Store has a more permanent physical presence in the Hamptons. In collaboration with footwear company Brunch, it is selling its signature matcha drinks and merch and hosting a number of brand activations at the store’s Amagansett outpost. Montauk General Store has hosted 15 pop-ups so far this year, and ironically, there has been much more appetite for the brand’s products and experiences in places far from Long Island, like Texas, which Diament says was responsible for 25-30 percent of its early online merch sales. The number of people who visit Montauk General Store pop-ups in cities like Austin, Miami, and New York is roughly four times the amount of people it serves on a busy day in Amagansett, Diament adds. Unlike other lifestyle brand founders, like Emily Oberg of Sporty & Rich—a seven-year-old wellness-inspired business that opened its first brick-and-mortar store in 2023 and reportedly generates $30 million in revenue annually—Diament says she doesn’t aspire to build a clothing line, hence why she refers to her brand’s products as “merch.” She adds that she could see a brick-and-mortar store in her company’s future, as the business is “constantly evolving,” but for now, that’s not her priority. Instead, she teases an upcoming release of a fragrance and a matcha powder that will be sold both online and through retail partners.

Montauk General Store’s merch. Photo: Courtesy company “I want whatever I am building to change over time as I grow over time because it’s such a reflection of me as a person,” Diament says, as she continues to create and iterate on products and experiences that capture the Hamptons lifestyle. Luckily, it sounds like its allure outlasts a weekend getaway and well transcends the South Fork, just like Montauk General Store transcends a physical brick-and-mortar space.