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- REPRESENT: Garden Shed to $80M
REPRESENT: Garden Shed to $80M
Power of Personal Brand, the Scarcity Principle and Paid Search Strategy

REPRESENT Clothing is in my top five favourite brands of all time. From their brand identity, product and marketing, they’ve truly built something incredible across an extremely competitive industry. Specifically, luxury streetwear.
It always fascinates me when a ‘want’ based brand can weave some utility that entrenches people in the brand, and importantly, keeps bringing them back into their sales cycle. REPRESENT clothing does this very well.
This is what I’m covering in today’s edition:
How the founder built and leveraged his personal brand to drive growth
YouTube strategy that drives more traffic than other channels
Demand creation through the scarcity principle
Paid search & shopping insights
Customer acquisition using strong site engagement behaviours
FEATURE CASE STUDY
REPRESENT CLOTHING

Context: Launched in the UK by brothers George and Michael Heaton, Represent has become a global contemporary brand, selling graphic T-shirts, hoodies and trousers. As demand grew, they expanded their range to cater to everyone. Driven by their love for fashion, the brothers poured effort into each garment, ensuring top-notch quality. Soon enough, REPRESENT gained traction. In recent times, the product has been worn by celebrities like Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, and Dua Lipa. Now, with a new CEO and expansion on the cards, these guys aren’t messing around and are shooting for £250 million in revenue by 2025.
CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
Leveraging Personal Brand to Drive Growth

Source: YouTube & Vogue Business
Over the past five years, founder George Heaton has crafted a genuine personal brand, epitomizing the Represent lifestyle. He's deeply engaged in the design journey, embodying the brand's ethos, which strikes a chord with customers seeking authentic connections with brands.
This is his playbook for reaching new audiences, weaving connections, and ultimately channelling all that newfound buzz towards REPRESENT's products.
Visibility: George Heaton doesn't just sit on the sidelines of social media; he's all over Instagram and Twitter. From giving you a sneak peek into his personal life to sharing the nitty-gritty of Represent Clothing's design process and his training regiment — adding that personal touch and making people feel like they’re part of something special.
Collaboration: These partnerships aren't just about rubbing elbows; they're about shaking up the fashion scene. These collabs often result in co-designed collections or exclusive releases, generating buzz and driving sales for the brand. He has worked with streetwear brands like Kith and Off-White on limited-edition releases.
Leading the business of fashion conversion: Positioning himself as a thought leader in fashion, he shares industry expertise, insights, and creative vision through interviews, podcasts, and speaking engagements. Most recently, he was featured on the popular The Diary of CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett.
Getting engaged: He's hands-on with Represent’s community, interacting with customers, fans, and followers by replying to comments, joining discussions, and seeking feedback. This builds a strong bond and loyalty among customers, who feel connected to the brand's journey and future.
CONTENT MARKETING
YouTube Strategy Covers the Entire Funnel
YouTube is an effective tool for creating brand awareness. However, for REPRESENT, it is valuable for both creating awareness and promoting consideration in the sales funnel. Plus, it’s their top social channel for generating website traffic, with approximately 37% of their website visitors coming from their video content!
Types of content they post: They have a very diverse range of content but it generally covers most parts of the user journey. This is what they typically post:
Behind the scenes: "Represent - Behind The Scenes - FW21" provides a behind-the-scenes look at the brand's Fall/Winter 2021 collection, showcasing the brand's operations and events
New drops: Short, sharp, aesthetic hype videos that quickly capture and introduce the latest collection. Their 247 collection drop video is a good example of this style.
Vlog: Provides BTS a look at the brand’s operations, collaborations and events. They just opened up a store in LA and captured the entire thing in their series.
Behind the brand series: Video series that showcases trips to potential retailers and stores, store visits, sneaker runs, PR meetings, interviews, and other aspects of the brand's journey. The first season of "Behind The Brand" consists of 15 episodes, the second season has 17 episodes, and they have dropped a new season this year where they have already released 8 videos. It’s a great concept that helps them to build a strong relationship with existing customers and fast-track purchases from new customers. This is how it fits in the awareness and consideration stages of their funnel:
Awareness stage: The series introduces new viewers by showcasing its personality and inner workings. It attracts attention through captivating storytelling and visuals, sparking curiosity among potential customers.
Consideration stage: As viewers become more familiar, the series deepens their understanding of its values and unique selling points. It builds credibility by showcasing behind-the-scenes processes, collaborations, and events, positioning it as an authority.
DEMAND CREATION
Applying the Scarcity Principle
REPRESENT knows how to grab the attention of their audience with one of the most powerful marketing tactics - the scarcity principle.
The scarcity principle: Emphasises the value placed on items in short supply, making them more desirable to consumers. By creating exclusivity and limited availability, brands can increase perceived value and motivate individuals to make purchases quickly. Scarcity creates a frenzy, making people jump at the chance to snag something special before it's gone.
How they apply it: REPRESENT creates a feeling of exclusivity and urgency around their products by making them seem rare and desirable. They achieve this by releasing limited editions, showcasing remaining stock, and using tactics like flash sales and countdowns. This makes customers feel like they may miss out, driving demand, and encouraging quick purchasing decisions.
Example collection: In 2023, the "Patron of the Club" collection was released as a limited edition. With a limited number of pieces available, the brand created urgency, sparking FOMO and increasing consumer desire.
GOOGLE ADS
Active Campaigns Across Paid Search & Shopping

Top Performing Google Ads
With a monthly budget of approximately $230k, paid search brings in over 1 million visitors, surpassing organic search and paid social. Visitors explore an average of 6 pages, spending about 3 minutes per visit—a clear indicator of strong interest.
This is what their non-brand vs brand activity looks like:
Non-brand keywords: They are actively going after 876 paid keywords, some high-volume transactional keywords they are dominating are:
graphic tees
hoodie
mohair sweater
streetwear hoodie
varsity jacket
cargo pants
zip hoodie

Brand keywords: With a prominent brand presence, they have all their brand keywords covered as expected. They also spend heavily on getting customers through their popular Owners Club and 247 sub-brands, targeting a more general audience who are looking for workout gear and essentials.

DISPLAY ADVERTISING
Customer Acquisition Based On Site Behaviour
In a niche industry, new customer growth can be very limiting. All brands are fighting for the same audience across paid social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Display ads are a good option to break this glass ceiling but it typically comes with a lot of junk traffic and wasted ad spend. Represent was smart to partner with Criteo to narrow down on their target audience, only showing their ads to potential customers who have indicated a preference for high-end brands and showcase strong site engagement.
How? They used a tool like Criteo, which allows brands to personalise their prospecting and remarketing ads. REPRESENT tapped into Criteo’s AI capability to optimise their audience targeting in the three ways.
User-level bidding: This approach helps adjust their bids based on the value of each user, their likelihood to convert, and their past interactions. REPRESENT optimised their ad spend by focusing on users who are more likely to engage with the ad and take desired actions, ultimately improving the efficiency.
Creative decisioning: Since visuals are critical to helping sell the brand and its products, this tactic helped to determine the most effective messaging, visuals and ad formats to use to best tailor the creatives/messages to the right person. The more relevant, the higher the conversions.
Product recommendations: By using each shopper’s past interactions, popular products, and behaviors of similar shoppers to determine their intent, the product feed suggests only items that are likely to catch the shopper’s interest and encourage a purchase. This data is combined with shopper intent signals to deliver campaigns that feature items with the highest likelihood of driving a purchase.
WRAP UP
TL;DR
Customer Acquisition
Leverage personal brand: Build an authentic personal brand, and engage with customers on social media.
Strategic collaborations: Partner with influencers or complementary brands for exclusive releases.
Thought leadership: Position as an industry thought leader through content creation.
Community engagement: Interact with your community and seek feedback.
Content Marketing
Diverse content strategy: Post for different stages of the customer journey.
Behind-the-scenes content: Showcase brand personality and operations. Taking the end user on a journey that gets them emotionally invested in the brand using relatable videos i.e. Vlogs.
Consideration content: Provide in-depth insights into brand values and unique selling points.
Demand Creation
Create exclusivity: Release limited edition collections or products that are strategically inaccessible.
Urgency tactics: Use flash sales, countdowns, and showcase remaining stock.
Google Ads
Paid search optimization: Allocate budget effectively, and target high-intent keywords.
Keyword domination: Target non-brand and brand keywords to strengthen brand presence. Growth comes from non-brand, push to get sales from those keywords.
Ads: They need to have all the relevant pieces and be aligned to the keywords.
Display Advertising
Audience targeting: Personalize ads, and target engaged users likely to convert based on quality, historical first-party data.
User-level bidding: Deploy ad spend towards users with high engagement.
Product recommendations: Serve ads tailored to the customer’s interest and stage of the buyer journey.
NEWS
Meta Adds New Targeting Option to ASC+

Meta has added a new audience insight and targeting option within its Advantage+ Shopping Campaign, you to target people who have shown an interest in your products or services but have not yet made a purchase.
Amazon launched generative AI-powered features last year to help sellers quickly create listings by entering just a few words about the product. The company is now making it easier for sellers to create listings if an item is already listed on their website.
Shopify is releasing new features for its Winter Edition rollout, including an AI-powered media editor to enhance product images, improved semantic search and a better way for merchants to showcase different variants of a product.
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