Heron Preston to Relaunch Brand After Repurchasing Name, Trademarks

Heron Preston has learned a very important life lesson: If you want to have creative control of your brand, don’t sell it.

The Brooklyn-based designer, who worked on the streetwear brand Been Trill with Virgil Abloh and also consulted for Kanye West, started to create product under his own name in 2014. Two years later, New Guards Group acquired the Heron Preston brand, bringing it into a company that also owned or licensed Off-White, Palm Angels and other influential streetwear brands.

But after a couple of changes in ownership — Farfetch and Coupang — New Guards filed for the Italian version of bankruptcy last year. This opened the door for Preston to buy back his brand, and that’s just what happened in June when he regained full and exclusive ownership and title to the trademarks bearing his name.

On Tuesday, the Heron Preston label will relaunch. But it won’t be beholden to the traditional rules of fashion. Instead it will reveal an entirely new way of releasing product. Rather than create one large collection, he’ll release blocks of seven items each. Block 1 will be available Tuesday and Block 2 on Thursday. After that, the cadence will remain to be seen.

In an interview on Monday, Preston acted like a man given a new lease on life. And while he doesn’t have a lot of nice things to say about his former owners, or working for a large corporation focused on the bottom line, he does acknowledge that he’s learned a lot.

“I learned artists should own their own work. Artists should control their own creative vision and creative outcome. Artists should own their name — designers should own their name,” he said. “That’s kind of where it all starts. If you don’t have control of your vision, then you’ll just become an employee for someone else. You will find yourself on the receiving end of other people’s ideas. That’s where I found myself. It wasn’t necessarily me controlling my own creative vision. It was, ‘Hey, you work for us now. This is what we want to do,’”

He said New Guards would come to him and ask him to create products under the Heron Preston name that replicated pieces performing well at its other brands. And most of the time, they didn’t match with his brand’s vision — but if he resisted, he was told to do it anyway.

“How am I supposed to be excited about that? How am I supposed to be proud of the work and want to speak about it with my friends? How am I supposed to want to have people come and work with me and collaborate,” he said.

So as the years went by, his passion and love of fashion fizzled and faded away, he said. “At first it was a twilight zone because the brand is your name, but you slowly start to find yourself not having the decision-making power that you thought you did, and all of a sudden you start to lose your creative interests and inspiration and you just become this operator, or executer.”

This led Preston to stop showing up at fashion weeks, stop going to events and parties. “They became triggers to remind me of things that I wasn’t doing,” he said. “The brand really slowed down because I didn’t control it. I’m a creative that’s just super excited to get my ideas out and connect with the community. And I didn’t have that green light to press ‘go.’ It was always an approval process that had to do with the business, and it was a business I didn’t have much visibility into.”

He said he felt like he was always being controlled by “backseat drivers, but the backseat drivers literally had their hands on the wheel. I had to figure out a way to get out of that situation, to continue working as a creative, as my authentic self.”

So he spent months not really leaving his house while he talked incessantly to lawyers and advisers on how to buy back his brand. “I found myself isolated in Brooklyn during the separation. I was on lawyer calls, adviser calls, banker calls, all the time from sunrise to sundown, Monday through Friday. I was just so mentally exhausted I would just lock myself in my house on the weekends to recover for the next week.”

It ultimately paid off and Preston said he’s now back in the driver’s seat. “This guy has his hands on the steering wheel and is driving the bus,” he said of himself with a laugh.

This time around, however, the brand is self-financed. And although Preston knows how hard it is for an independent designer to succeed, he’s confident that he’s learned enough to buck that trend. “I have really smart people around me,” he said. “I’m a very smart person. I have a really great team of business advisers, I have a really great tax guy, a bookkeeper — these are the real foundations of the business that keep the lights on and without them, it would be a very sort of scary.”

It’s also easier to make it work when the collections are smaller. “We aren’t making as much as we used to, because I didn’t really believe that every single piece we were making was meaningful to my story. It was just a really bottom-line driven business. This is about less-is-more.”

The first drop, Blue Line Edit, will feature two hoodies, sweatpants, a button-down shirt, a camo jacket, body suit and a belt. Block 2 will offer camo leggings, cargos, jeans, sports bras, a bracelet and other pieces. Prices will range from $195 to $945.

“I sprinkled in some camouflage pieces, because my entire experience over the past years feels like I’ve been at I’ve been at war,” he said. “I’ve been going through a boot camp to prepare myself for this next chapter of my life.”

Overall he likened it to the foundation of a home. “This is not a collection. This is a reset. This is a teardown. A return to the beginning. A rebirth. The house stripped down to its base,” he wrote in a new brand manifesto. “Small batch, limited runs. A time to listen, to test, to evolve together.”

He characterized the items as “core staples — very wearable, for the everyday person.” They are being manufactured in Italy and Portugal in the same factories that had made his line in the past, and the prices will be slightly below that of his former collections. “We have really great relationships and my CEO helped negotiate really favorable payment terms.”

That chief executive officer is a Stockholm-based global retail and real estate executive, Fredrik Hjalmers, who Preston said was a friend with a strong “business brain” that he often approached for advice. His background includes PVH, Ralph Lauren and H&M.

“We have a bunch of strategies in place as far as storing the product, keeping it in Europe, selling direct-to-consumer on our website that doesn’t cut into margins,” he said. “So there’s a lot that we have in place that we believe will turn us into a profitable business.”

Going forward, Preston said he will explore a number of building blocks for his house: “a mixture of women’s, men’s, no logos, graphics, accessories, upcycled pieces. I really want these blocks to set the tone for the world that I’m rebuilding. Some blocks may just be a color palette. Maybe everything is black, or everything is white, or everything is heather gray. Some blocks may be all upcycled pieces. Some blocks may just be accessories. They haven’t really fully been defined yet, but I am giving myself this sort of structure to really have fun and play with how we release ideas.”

He’ll follow this path for at least a year, he said, before considering a full collection and perhaps a return to the runway. Until then, he will inform customers of new drops through his newsletter.

But while a lot of the relaunch is still fluid, there will be one constant: the new Heron Preston label. It will continue to be orange, his signature color, but it will be inverted and blank. He said he started playing with the idea last year when he discovered some deadstock pieces from his popular Department of Sanitation project. “During a time when I didn’t own my own name, flipping the label became my survival workaround,” he wrote.

So now that he’s back, he’ll continue to use the inverted orange label “as a symbol of that journey. It’s an homage to the personal struggle of keeping my voice alive even when faced with the most difficult challenges. It represents perseverance, freedom, resilience and never giving up. It’s proof that when systems try to limit the artist, the artist will reinvent the system.”