12 | How Brands Use Heritage

👇🏼 some nice examples

Grey Days by New Balance 👟 The shoe brand appeared in this letter before for their work with creative director Joe Freshgoods that elevates issues faced by people of color — both at their brand and in the communities they serve. But this week’s focus on them is on an absence of color or, rather, a celebration of their distinctive non-color: grey. Their 7-minute black and white film (shot on 16mm) is split into seven short stories, Each vignette extolls both the color and New Balance history in a breezy, sometimes opaque narrative that reminds us that not every brand needs to take its heritage so seriously. Perhaps most striking is the style. There’s some predictable brandspeak in the conversations between disparate characters, but the visual expression takes center stage, and feels like a Jim Jarmusch film, or the cinema verite in La Haine. And boy does its tight shot approach work well on TikTok. They could’ve taken a different approach and deployed archival footage, old slogans, campaign materials, etc. They could’ve showed straight knives carving out foam sole silhouettes in stately factory settings in an ode to craft. Instead, they showcased their past by creating something modern-feeling, using a storytelling style that recalled the avant-garde — a period no one would associate with a shoe brand.

Levi’s Strauss & Co. 👖 created the position of brand historian in 1989. The job title appears unique in the fashion landscape, even as brands increasingly recognize the importance of archiving their pieces and the marketable value in re-issuing iconic looks (good Vogue Business piece on this trend here). But only Levi’s can lay claim to birthing a garment that, to hear current archivist Tracy Panek put it, “revolutionized garments all over the globe.” Visitors to the brand’s San Francisco headquarters can slip on white gloves and handle some of the collection of jeans and jackets and workwear stretching back more than a 100 years. A more comprehensive digital vault of denim is regularly accessed by brand designers as they create new collections. Levi’s, of course, has deployed heritage in its brand storytelling for decades. Last year, their tribute to 150 years of the 501 jean included wonderful short pieces of video inspired by true stories of Levi’s customers (including this banger on people who get buried in their 501s). But I really like the unique and simple deployment of Panek in this series where she explores the subcultures and people that have built the story of the brand.