A Bellingcat investigation has found that a far-right fashion brand affiliated with the white supremacist Active Club movement has its products designed by a streetwear shop in the Bulgarian city of Stara Zagora.
The decentralised Active Club movement was founded by American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo. It focuses on using fitness, fighting and fashion – particularly Will2Rise (W2R), the fashion brand Rundo founded alongside Active Clubs – to recruit young men and boys into the far right, normalise fascist ideas and prepare them for physical violence against perceived enemies.
A 2022 Bellingcat investigation into far-right webshops detailed how fashion and merchandise sales can help promote racist ideas among youth, provide revenue for hate movements and help the far right strengthen bonds across borders and continents.
A geolocation by Bellingcat’s reporter in February 2023 led to our more recent discovery that the designs of almost all of the W2R brand’s recent merchandise – almost 20 separate products, ranging from fashion to flags and stickers – can be traced to a small streetwear shop in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria.
Bellingcat has also found that this Bulgarian streetwear shop lists other names from the international far-right movement as its clients. These include a Canadian far-right fashion brand, a 2024 far-right combat sports event that Bellingcat geolocated earlier in the year, as well as one of the most prominent Active Clubs in the United States.
W2R did not respond to Bellingcat’s requests for comment.
Old ID, New Story
In February 2023, Robert Rundo was a fugitive in southeastern Europe, evading US federal charges for violence at rallies across California in 2017 and 2018. He had already been the subject of several Bellingcat investigations into his activities in southeastern Europe; we had most recently geolocated him to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in November 2022.
But he wouldn’t stop posting. On Feb. 28, 2023, Bellingcat geolocated two photos that Rundo had posted on W2R’s Telegram channel several days before. Despite attempts to obscure the location, including blurring out background details, Bellingcat was able to geolocate the photos to Stara Zagora, Bulgaria’s sixth-largest city less than 100 kilometres from Plovdiv.
On Sunday U.S. far-right extremist and fugitive Rob Rundo posted these pics on Telegram, blurring what he thinks hides location (I’ve obscured branding with black circles)
Still didn’t take long to geolocate:
Stara Zagora, Bulgaria 🇧🇬42.4256, 25.62008; https://t.co/cHQDdeLFFX https://t.co/1jimp16pGV pic.twitter.com/kTZyTR4EU5
— Michael Colborne (@ColborneMichael) February 28, 2023
How We Geolocated These Will2Rise Photos to Stara Zagora
These photos might look nearly impossible to geolocate, particularly when background details including signage have been deliberately blurred out. It is also unclear if the photos show Rundo himself, as the person’s face has been obscured.
But there’s plenty of detail here. Here’s how Bellingcat found the location:
1. We hypothesised that the location was somewhere in Bulgaria since we had geolocated Rundo to the country several months earlier, so we started our search there.
2. We noticed that the streets in the second image appear to be laid out in a square grid pattern, with a one-way street. This allowed us to limit our search areas to parts of Bulgarian cities with similar grid patterns.
3. We reviewed Google Street View imagery from these parts of Bulgarian cities to rule out possible matches:
– Google Street View imagery from larger cities including Sofia, Plovdiv and Varna – cities we knew from previous geolocations and research that Rundo had visited – did not reveal similar-looking streets, which suggested that this location was likely in a smaller Bulgarian city.
– The city of Stara Zagora, however, had a similar grid layout – with one-way streets that include left-turn-only intersections – to what is visible in the second photo Rundo posted.
4. After searching Google Street View imagery of central Stara Zagora, focusing on intersections with left-hand turns into one-way streets, Bellingcat found a match for the location of the two photographs based on the placement of street signs and building features.
Just over a month after Bellingcat’s geolocation, Rundo was arrested in neighbouring Romania and eventually extradited back to the United States. In September 2024, Rundo pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles federal court to planning and engaging in riots across California in 2017. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for December 2024 and he remains in custody.
Upon revisiting this geolocation in mid-2024, Bellingcat found that more recent Google Street View imagery had become available. As of February 2023, a cafe was visible at the location in Google Street View. But more recent imagery, from August 2023, showed a self-described streetwear shop where the cafe had previously been. The shop, called “GK Style,” advertised its website and social media accounts on the front window.
‘For Our friends From W2R’
On its homepage, the Bulgarian streetwear shop says it has produced clothing for “more than 300 firms”, along with a large mock up showing logos of its clients. These clients, according to the website, include several football teams in Bulgaria’s top division as well as the Bulgarian Football Union (BFS), the FIFA and UEFA-affiliated governing body of football in Bulgaria. BFS did not respond to a request for comment.
The Bulgarian streetwear shop also boasts a few less ordinary “firms” among its clientele including:
- Will2Rise (W2R), the far-right fashion brand Rundo founded that has become closely associated with the Active Club movement;
- A far-right combat sports event in early 2024 that Bellingcat geolocated to a small town north of Dallas, Texas. The event was organised by W2R and hosted by white nationalist group Patriot Front, a group closely linked with the Active Club movement. (Bellingcat is not naming the event to avoid amplification);
- A Canadian far-right fashion brand affiliated with the Hammerskins, an international neo-Nazi group whose German branch was banned by authorities in September 2023 (as above, Bellingcat is not naming the brand to avoid amplification). Journalists and researchers have documented the Hammerskins’ strong ties to the Active Club movement. The brand’s logo is also visible on a screen in a March 2023 video posted on the shop’s Instagram page, as part of highlighted videos under the banner “Work process”; and
- SoCal Active Club, which in August 2024 hosted another far-right combat sports event in southern California with participants from the United States and Canada. SoCal Active Club did not respond to our request for comment.
Its Instagram posts indicate that it has also done work for the official shop of the neo-Nazi SW99 ultras group of Levski Sofia, as well as a neo-Nazi ultras group in Pirin that features a Nazi Totenkopf as its logo. This logo appeared on the jacket promoted on the Bulgarian shop’s social media, though blurred out to presumably avoid social media bans.
GK Style did not answer Bellingcat’s specific questions about its relationships with these clients apart from W2R. A representative from the Bulgarian shop claimed that the logos of these clients appear on their homepage because they “put company logos at random” on their website.
The representative told Bellingcat that the shop has “never made [W2R’s] products” and said they only took promotional photos and videos for design samples they created for W2R. The representative insisted that they “have nothing to do with far-right organisations”.
However, the streetwear shop’s Facebook and Instagram pages, particularly over the course of 2024, are filled with photos of clothes they claim to have designed for W2R. These include multiple references by name to W2R, including posts about products made for “our friends from W2R”. (The shop’s representative claimed to Bellingcat that “we call each of our clients friends who have come to us for anything”.)
The shop’s products for W2R include t-shirts, polo shirts, hoodies, shorts, flags and stickers that promote the Active Club movement. Bellingcat counted more than a dozen separate items on the shop’s social media pages that stated they were for W2R or featured W2R branding.
Looking at W2R’s website, Bellingcat discovered even more – almost 20 different products for sale on the website that appear to have been designed by GK Style, with most of these using identical or near-identical photos to those on the streetwear shop’s social media pages.
Several other products that were not promoted on the Bulgarian shop’s social media pages were visible on W2R’s website and Telegram posts.
Bellingcat has identified the model in these photos, based on his exposed tattoos, as Georgi Kolev, the owner of the Bulgarian shop GK Style.
These tattoos included a compass on the right bicep and a stylised “1878” across the right knee.
In several instances, W2R posted about or advertised a product for sale on its Telegram channel that had only days or weeks before been posted on the Bulgarian streetwear shop’s socials. On March 19, 2024, the streetwear shop’s Instagram posted photos of polo shirts they stated were “for our friends from W2R”. Ten days later, on March 29, 2024, W2R posted on its Telegram channel – using several of the same photos as the streetwear shop – that the polo shirts would go on sale on W2R’s website that day.
More recently, on Aug. 20, the Bulgarian shop posted photos that included a sleeveless hoodie and t-shirt for W2R. Four days later, on Aug. 24, 2024 – and using cropped versions of the same photos – W2R promoted these as “new items” that would go on sale on the website that day.
GK Style claimed to Bellingcat that the shop had only made photos and video promotional materials of clothing samples they had designed for W2R – a service they said they did not charge W2R for.
“We didn’t make their clothes, because when we asked [W2R] about invoices, companies, etc. they said they don’t want to work like that… to which we refused,” the representative from GK Style told Bellingcat.
“We don’t see anything wrong with making designs for them,” the representative said.
Several days after Bellingcat reached out to both GK Style and W2R for comment on this story, W2R advertised a new series of products for sale on its Telegram channel and its website. These included two new W2R-branded vests.
Bellingcat was able to identify the model of these new vests as the owner of GK Style again from his exposed tattoos, particularly on his right bicep. In addition, thanks to a large gate visible in the background in one the photos, Bellingcat was able to geolocate the photos, once again, to Stara Zagora.
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