The business of building a brand like Represent

It was back in 2024 that Represent landed a coveted spot on The Sunday Times Hundred 2025: League table. Founded in 2011 by brothers George and Mike Heaton, Represent was recognised as one of the fastest growing brands in the UK, with annual revenues of around 80 million pounds. Not bad for a brand from Bolton, right?

The Heaton brothers are the masterminds behind the scaling of Represent. Together, they’ve turned a college project that was being designed out of George’s bedroom, into a nationally recognised brand with nearly 150 employees. Starting with graphic T-shirts while both studying graphic design at Salford University, Manchester, the brothers officially launched the business in 2014, registering it as a limited company after a couple of years working in their dad’s garden as they got the brand off the ground.

Represent, which is heavily inspired by the brothers’ love of rock music and LA skate culture, is known best for its band tees, varsity jackets, trainers and its tech-heavy 247 offspring, which you’ll see every 20-something man wearing in the gym or to flex his style chops at his weekly run club. It was in 2022 that they hired their first CEO, Paul Spencer, who has a history of working with brands such as Adidas and Puma. With Spencer, the Heaton brothers want to turn Represent into a multi-billion-pound brand.

Today Represent has a vast presence and store in Los Angeles, where the brothers are now based, a store in Manchester and, as of last month, one in the heart of Soho, London. We sat down for a Zoom call with George Heaton, who was on hand from his home in LA, to discuss Represent's impressive growth.

Gentleman’s Journal: Where did your passion for design come from?

George Heaton: Ever since me and my brother were like toddlers, all we cared about was art. All we wanted to do was draw and paint and build things. Throughout our childhood, I would build Warhammer and just paint them, and Mike would just be all over canvases. Whenever we'd go out for dinner with our family, it'd be like, bring pens and pencils and just draw all over the tablecloths and stuff like that.

George and Mike Heaton

How did that translate into starting a brand?

Naturally we just fell into this creative way of expressing ourselves and because my brother was a little bit older than me I kind of wanted to be him as the younger brother always does. He really grew into rock music and skating and it was very different from where we were brought up in Bolton. Everyone wore tracksuits and had shaved heads and listened to donk music. We were listening to heavy metal, had long hair and baggy jeans and skated around. We just became obsessed with California and the rock scene and that really influenced the brand so when we started, I was looking at big streetwear brands like Diamond Supply and Obey. It started as a college project - I was doing graphic design and one of the projects was to actually sell our art. As I was looking at those brands over on the West Coast, I felt like this was my chance to try and do something similar to them and at the time there was a lot of band printing going on. So you could print merchandise and get really small quantities on T-shirts and so we made a Big Cartel website and off we went.

How did that then turn into a fully-fledged brand?

So for the first three years I was at university and Represent was a side project. So in the mornings, I would take parcels to the post office, and then in the evenings, I would design and speak to suppliers, just to try to build something for myself that when I finished university, I had something to do that wasn't going into like a graphic design job because I knew I didn't want to go and work for someone else. The first three years were kind of like a runway to test if it was going to be possible.

Did that help with learning how to build a brand?

Yeah, it really helped me to learn all the processes of how you build a brand. From packing parcels to speaking to suppliers to the logistics to shipping - I was doing that and not really realising I was building this brand over those three years. At the end of university I'd made quite a bit of money out of it for what I'd done, and then Mike came on board and he was doing all the graphics, and another friend was helping with suppliers, and it just snowballed.

Represent London

What ignited the snowball effect?

Big Cartel and Instagram had really just started, and so we essentially had this free platform where we could get the brand out to the world, and we were getting orders from all over the globe. And I'd met Mac Miller at the time, and I'd put some clothes on him, and we had a good relationship with the Rizzle Kicks guys. They really spoke about the brand well, and wore it in music videos, and it just helped catapult us to like such a good level. 2015 was a year where we'd done more than a million in sales and I had like a little team of friends with me working on the brand and it felt like a real business.

Was it as easy as it sounds?

We had ups and downs and from 2017 to 2020 we really struggled. We flatlined and we couldn't grow the brand bigger than what it was, so we completely restructured the business around that time and that's when we grew exponentially really. It got to a point where we felt like the brand was at the bottom of the mountain. We couldn't grow our revenue. Stores didn't want to buy us. We were trying to chase trends and look at fashion calendars. We were trying to do runway shows and we were trying to become a brand that we weren't. We just looked in on ourselves and at what we actually wanted to wear. That was really how the brand started. It was just me printing T-shirts that I thought were cool. So we really went back to our roots with that and completely changed our whole supply chain. We moved everything out of the UK and went into Portugal. We adopted a completely new design process.

How did that result in such dramatic growth?

Well, then COVID happened. There were only 10 of us in the team at the time. We booked around two million in wholesale, the best season we'd done, but then we had to cancel all those orders. Instead, like other brands, of leaving factories in the shit, we decided to go direct to consumer. We dropped something new every single weekend, and so we kept the customer really engaged with us whilst they were sat at home during the pandemic. We were just blasting them on Instagram with like one new product every week rather than a collection of 50 things and then nothing for six months.

How did that help in the long run?

Well, at the time we were mainly dropping T-shirts and hoodies. I didn't want that. I wanted Represent to be this luxury level, fully-fledged brand that does every category, including trousers, jackets, outerwear, leathers and hats. That run during the pandemic was great, but I was reading this book from James Kerr about the All Blacks and he essentially said when you're on top of your game you've really got to change your game and I think so many times in the past we've been on top of our game with something and just not changed and then it slowly starts tailing off and then eventually it's too late to change it. So, we managed to bring our trousers category up and then our outerwear category up, and then turn back into being able to deliver seasons for the wholesalers again as the pandemic ended.

Represent London

Where is the brand right now?

It’s in a great position. We’ve got three stores, which we didn’t think was ever possible, and London has just opened. For me personally, the goal for what I'm doing over in LA now is to really grow the US market. I’ve been here 18 months, and it’s been hard but we’re getting there. The LA store is doing well and we're getting so many more sales online. We're just slowly chipping away at the US market and I think this time next year we'll be in a much stronger position here. I think the main thing for us is being local. We had to be here in Los Angeles to understand how the consumer buys. We had to understand how the trends move and speak to customers. We then let that influence the brand.

What brands have done that well, do you think?

What’s important is having a physical presence. You have to be showing up and putting community events on and really doing things to get that consumer engaged. Doc Martens did it really well - we just took on Kenny Wilson who was the CEO there for a long time. All Saints also smashed it, when they tapped that market and were making sure everybody was wearing their stuff.

Will you expand across America?

California itself has a bigger EDP than the UK, so like I don't want to open a store in LA and then a store in New York and a store in Miami, I want to do 10 in California, really crack that state, then I'll move on to the next one, wow, okay, so that's the plan is to basically do that. people, even from state to state, they're completely different consumers.

Where do you position Represent?

We are able to sit in retailers amongst the best of the luxury brands, with Balenciaga and the Dior. We're able to sit there in terms of quality and product, but our price point is much more attainable. I'm not going to say we paved the new way ourselves, but us and a few other brands really managed to carve out a new mid-tier bubble. Consumers that don't want to spend £1,000 on a hoodie have shopped down to us.

What do you think is the power of like a collaboration?

It’s part of the brand. Like, for me, if you look at the Belstaff collaboration from a few years ago, that wasn’t a money-making collaboration for us. My dad always rode bikes and we used to wear Bestaff jackets when we were kids. It’s so intrinsically linked to the lifestyle of what Represent is as a brand. We've used so many bikes in our campaigns in terms of the communication to our customer, and that collaboration continued that communication. We've done a collaboration with Mötley Crüe. We worked with their team. And we even did Ozzy Osbourne back in the day, and Motörhead. And they're just because myself and Mike love rock music. It’s brand-building, and we’ve become known for our rock T-shirts. Collaboration allows us to convey our DNA. It works really well for us and I like to do at least one big one of those every year

The 247 division is huge for Represent. Does that surprise you?

It still feels like the first time I ever saw someone wearing one our T-shirts; it still gives you that thing inside of you that's like, "Oh, this is so sick to see." 247 is so much driven by community and obviously marathon events and things like that. 247 is for the guy that cares about the way he looks and who is really into fitness. It's just more prominent than what you'd see in the main line, and so that side of the business is something that's growing like crazy for us. I came back home a few weeks ago and I saw six people on my drive from the airport to the house all out running in 247.

What has been, and still is, difficult as you scale the brand?

There's so much going on in the business all at once that you're trying to keep your hands on everything and remain in control of everything and you just can't be like that. So that's all like on a personal level. You want to try and hold on to the DNA as close as you can and make sure every single thing is up to scratch as you want it. Sometimes you've got to let that slip and you've got to let other people take control.

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