In the 2017-18 financial year, the company posted a profit increase of 94 per cent, to US$5.8 million, while sales rose 77 per cent year-on-year to US$49 million.

Launched in 2005 as an English-language sneaker blog from founder Kevin Ma’s bedroom in Vancouver, Hypebeast is now a pop culture enterprise that employs almost 300 people, with foreign-language websites in traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and French.

The group includes Hypebae, for women; Popbee, a Chinese-language women’s fashion site; the Hypetrak music site; HBX, an e-commerce site; a quarterly print magazine; Hypefest, a consumer festival; and a majority interest in The Berrics skateboarding site.

There is also Hypemaker, the company’s new creative advertising agency which accounted for 67 per cent of its 2018 revenue.

In the first nine months of the current financial year, traffic on Hypebeast’s websites averaged 12 million monthly unique users and 77 million page views, up 18 per cent and 62 per cent respectively year on year.

Hypebeast’s English-language website is the company’s hero editorial platform. According to a company representative, it accounts for 70 per cent of the web traffic, with the top markets being the US, the UK, Canada and Australia.

Li heads the English-language editorial team of 45, who make up just over half of Hypebeast’s global editorial team. The English-language team pumps out 90 to 100 posts every 24 hours, with 50 to 60 per cent of the content still focused on sneakers. Only a small percentage of content is sponsored, according to Li.

“Anything that is English content is in my jurisdiction – that spans social media, video and print,” Li said last week in Sydney, where he was a guest speaker for Bauer Media Australia at a presentation for its luxury advertisers. “We have a lot of people in the editorial team split across Hong Kong, London and New York, just for English. To get that all running cohesively, it takes a lot of calls and meetings.”

Li speaks with a strong British accent, a legacy of the 18 years he spent growing up in Cheltenham, a town of 115,000 in the county of Gloucestershire in the west of England.

Born in Hong Kong in 1993, he was three when he moved to the UK with his mother and older brother Eric, his parents having separated.

He graduated with a bachelor of law from the University of Westminster in London in 2014. However, instead of undertaking a further year of study to obtain his legal practising certificate, he decided to apply for an editorial internship with Hypebeast at its Hong Kong head office.

This was much to the chagrin of Li’s mother and, notably, his accountant brother, who at the time had tried to persuade Arby to enter the Swire Management Trainee Programme.

“I just went against everyone’s advice,” Li says. “I think still to this day they are not completely familiar with what exactly I do. Obviously back then it was maybe quite a strange career choice.”

His Hong Kong connection played a role in his decision to apply for the internship, he says, as well as his teenage obsession with the site, which he stumbled across in 2007.

“I literally read every article pretty much every day,” Li says. “I even remember quoting to the person who interviewed me one of their articles verbatim. Even in my [university] lectures in the morning, I made sure I would read the articles that were published the night before.

“I was a fan of the website, first and foremost. I really enjoyed all the information. For someone who grew up in a really small town, it really opened my eyes to a lot of the world that I wouldn’t [otherwise] get the chance to see.”

Li joined Hypebeast two years before its stock market flotation – a time when, he says, the staff headcount was around 60 to 70 and there was no research and data division, social media department, or even verification badges for Hypebeast’s social channels. Today, the latter boast an audience of 21 million across platforms including Facebook, Weibo, Instagram, Twitter and WeChat, with numbers up 31 per cent in the first nine months of the current financial year compared with last year.

After three months, Li was offered a full-time position as an editorial assistant. Ten months later he started working as a social media analyst, before being promoted to senior social media marketing analyst in January 2016.

In that role he set up Hypebeast’s first social media department. Among Li’s initiatives and achievements during this time, as confirmed by a company representative, he helped fuel 150 per cent traffic growth on Instagram and 50 per cent growth on both Facebook and Twitter. Combined with SEO optimisation, this led to 90 per cent growth in overall website traffic in six months.

Beyond a natural analytical bent and his legal training – which he concedes taught him the value of patience and research – Li had no prior digital training or experience.

Nor did anyone else, as he tells it.

“It was just everyone on the editorial team I guess uploading articles onto Facebook with an Instagram [post],” he says of the company’s early social media strategy.

“Back then there were a lot of what I guess you would call ‘growth tactic’ tricks. Increasing the [posting] frequency, using hashtags to our advantage. Also, giveaways were a much bigger incentive back then as well, so we were trying to align that and really structure it, really make sure every week we knew exactly what we were going to do and also be on top of the news, very quickly.

“Anyone who was taking photos of their sneakers as well, [we would] encourage them to hashtag #Hypebeast or #sneakers. It was just a much more community-driven thing and still is. I think that’s also reflected in having such an active comments section within the site. It’s very hard to find that in fashion publications nowadays.”

In July 2016 he returned to the editorial division as managing editor, before being appointed editor-in-chief in January 2018.

Among the biggest changes Li has witnessed in streetwear during his time at Hypebeast have been the explosion of interest from the luxury sector in streetwear and the growth in young people’s spending power. The latter is notably evident among Asian millennials – a phenomenon he confesses he is still at a loss to understand.