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When Nate Checketts co-founded men’s sportswear brand Rhone, he asked other founders of online startups what their biggest regrets were. Their answer: waiting too long to sell their goods in department stores and other traditional retailers.

“The view was that department stores aren’t cool, and traditional retailing is dead,” Checketts said. “It was such a poor assumption.”

Those brands that Checketts spoke to built themselves on the belief that traditional retailers were relics of a bygone era. Now, they and their peers are becoming fixtures in the very stores that they had left for dead.