The NBA is officially in its off-season, but the Golden State Warriors are making moves. For the past nine years, the Bay Area team has partnered with Japanese online retail marketplace Rakuten as its official badge partner. Now, that partnership is changing.
Rakuten will no longer serve as the Warriors badge partner, leaving behind a stockpile of old jerseys. Their solution is to mix these old jerseys with premium materials like genuine leather to create upcycled pieces made available to their fans as part of a limited collection called Warriors Golden Legacy Collection. The collection, accessible by fans who are Rakuten members from June 18 – June 25 via a sweepstakes, includes one leather jacket, two duffle bags, 10 denim jackets, 10 clear purses, and 35 bucket hats.
“This has been a very long nine-year successful partnership and because there’s such rich history in the jersey, it made perfect sense to upcycle,” says Wendy Bergh, Rakuten’s chief marketing officer.
To design this collection, the Warriors and Rakuten tapped premium merchandise and experiential product studio theheymann, led by its creative product developer Gustavo Servin, a Mexican born designer who grew up in the Bay Area as a passionate Warriors fan.
“Gustavo is an incredible human, and I think he has a real modern but timeless sense of style,” says Amanda Chin, the Warriors SVP of Marketing. “What’s so special about Gustavo and what he is able to bring to fans is this really custom feel to the product. There’s a real uniqueness to how he crafts the pieces and is just very thoughtful about the details and storytelling.”
Servin and his business partner’s storytelling involved giving a nod to the longstanding partnership between Rakuten and the Warriors.
“ For us it was [about] how do we honor the legacy by making this really amazing product,” explains Servin. “But also how do we honor the legacy by staying true to ourselves in terms of the quality of the craftsmanship that we expect from ourselves.”
Servin and his team came up with 15 products that they knew they could turn around within a couple of months. “ We already knew that we wanted to incorporate leathers and a denim jacket,” says Servin. “The outer piece[s] [were] pretty simple [because] we knew where we wanted to go in terms of luxury. But, the inner components … took a little bit more time.”
The process of incorporating four different versions of these outdated jerseys presented unique design challenges in creating the collection’s pieces.
“ They were all kind of uniquely challenging because the materials were so strange to work with,” says Servin. “Working with an already made jersey that had a bunch of logos printed, ribbing, and all of these things posed its own challenge to manipulate and work with it [for] brand new pieces.” For example, take the jacket linings.
“ The lining in jackets is usually a textile,” says Servin. “So we cut up all these jerseys and reinforced them properly to create essentially a collage of jerseys that we could use in the lining.”
In addition to understanding how to work with old jerseys, Servin and his team had to consider each item’s composition.
“ The structure that a duffel bag requires is not the structure that a lining of a jacket requires,” says Servin. “ So all of those were individual processes of testing different materials and testing how we approach the cutting of the jersey, where we cut the jersey, and what seams can be on top of each other.”
Moving forward, both the Warriors and Rakuten plan to expand their work with local artists to design more widely available merchandise for the Warriors’ fan base.
“ We know our fans are interested in having access to the fashion and feeling connected to the lifestyle [and] culture that the players are embodying,” says Chin.
In addition to specialty merchandise, the Warriors and Rakuten remain committed to creating more enriching fan experiences.
“ As our world evolves with AI and automation, live events are going to become more important than ever because that is where community and connection happens,” says Bergh. “It’s a big part of why we are passionate about this evolution of this partnership, the legacy that we are building on, and the importance of continuing to show up for fans in those live moments where there is connection, there’s emotion, and ultimately a desire to feel part of the community at a larger scale.”