REBLOG! A Visit to Herschel Supply Co. HQ

The Hundreds: What are your respective roles at the company?
JAMIE: I look after design and production, and oversee a small amount of marketing
LYNDON: Yeah, so Jamie and I share a marketing role, and I look after mainly sales operations.
What were you doing before Herschel Supply? J: I worked out of Calgary, at a sales agency there. We worked with a sports distribution agency – it was primarily winter-based, and I did that for about 12 years. L: Before starting Hershel, I took care of Vans footwear for the Western portion of Canada.
How do you find people’s reactions to the brand being Canadian?
J: I think people don’t know where its from, and that brings about a sense of discovery. At most tradeshows people ask where we are from, even after we’ve told that story so many times.
L: We never set out to take a stance on a country or city of origin. We really set out to make a global offering for the specific products that we are bringing out. But do people react? There is a general consensus that Vancouver is a great city in the world, and we are certainly proud to be from Vancouver and from Canada, and we’re happy to have a Canadian brand the resonates globally.
What led you to the classic aspect of the brand?
J: More than just a [classic] product is the brand, and we’ve brought a brand out. In the very early days, I probably thought Lyndon was crazy because he said he wanted to make a lookbook, just so we know what we have and to give it a heartbeat and a sense and make it a brand. We have stuck by that, and we give a whole brand experience and tell stories.
L: We thought a brand just like ours was missing from the actual category. To be able to look back and have that nostalgic styling, but really take that styling and taking those influences and modernizing them. That is what we’ve been doing since day one, is looking back, and saying, “How do we move that forward?” Jamie and I have grown up together appreciating the classics. We’ve grown up loving fashion and streetwear and sportswear, but we also really love basics. We take those can take a basic piece and add the attention to detail.
What is the most appealing characteristic about Herschel Supply?
J: Our brand tells a story. We’re great at storytelling and we put a lifestyle behind our brand. Some other product-based companies don’t have that story to tell. More and more travelling and talking to people, they’re buying into a brand and not just a product. We get better and better at telling the story every season.
L: Whether it’s wallets or backpacks or duffle bags or computer cases, we want to have the widest range for a global offering. One thing that we concentrate on with the brand is ensuring that our collections can resonate in each country, whether it be a different currency size, or the fact that Americans don’t carry as much change as Canadians in their pockets, we really focus in on how to do it globally. That’s part of our brand message, we want to make sure we are having the right offering at the right time in the right place for everybody. I think that although our designs are ever in-your-face, we like to be a little more stand-offish and we want to have a fashion-infused product but with timeless styling. It’s something we do each and every day. We want the bag to be timeless. We’re interested in fashion, but we want those simple timeless characteristics.
Any upcoming projects you can hint at?
J: …We just launched a navy [Clarks] Desert Boot in Europe. In the middle of October, we’re going to launch a second color in North America – we’re going to launch the navy and another color. That’s the next good one coming up around October 15th. Lots of other footwear projects. Stuff like this allows you step out of where you’re allowed to be and where your brand is. Collaborations let you have more fun, and they take your head to a different spot, it lets everyone be more innovative.
L: There are a bunch of things coming up. We’re most likely working on a collection with Disney [and] we are working towards something with a very large classic watch brand. We are continuing to work with Stussy – we’ve done 12 collections for Stussy. Every single season, we do a new collection for them. We just launched our 3m wallets. We are continuing to work on projects with Beams and United Arrows in Japan, as well as Journal Standard. We’re also working on 2 collections for Liberty London right now, and in 2 weeks there is a new collection dropping for Barney’s New York. Some people say collaborations are getting stale, but great ones are fucking great. Just for me and not Jamie, all of a sudden I’m pretty stoked on collaborations right now, I think we can use collaborations to push a little bit more right now.
