In 1947, twin brothers and Italian immigrants, Arthur and Henry D’Angelo founded Twins Enterprises. The D’Angelos were entrepreneurial pioneers who were quick to see the future of sports licensing. Their company became ’47 brand, which this year dropped the “brand” in its name becoming simply ’47. As the decades have passed, ’47 has grown into a premium global sports lifestyle brand that is a licensed partner with the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, as well as over 900 colleges.
We caught up with ’47 during our recent visit to NYC to talk about the brand’s new products, recent collaborations, and where the brand is going next.
As the new generation of ’47 begins, what kind of new products can we expect to see from the brand?
Well one of the new projects we put out recently is a great example of the kind of new stuff we want to do – Our “Black Fives” collection. This is a collaborative effort between us and the Black Fives Foundation that celebrates Black Fives era teams. Before the NBA was integrated, there was the Black Fives League so we decided to pay homage to those teams with this collection. It was a way to stick to our historic roots and still create something new and fresh. So you’ll see more projects like that from us moving forward.
Street culture is always popping up with new trends. How do you guys plan to keep up?
Well we we’re paying a lot of attention to the pulse of the culture. So we’re going to make sure that when the trends hit, we’ve got a wide selection of products ready to cater to that younger demographic.
Some of those trends play into what you’ve already been doing anyway. Curved visor caps or “dad caps” are back in style and that’s one of your original products right?
Yes, definitely. That’s a big piece of our foundation so we’ll definitely try to do some story telling around that. We’ve got a wide range of that style of cap already and we’ll continue to build on that.
The Supreme collaboration was a benchmark moment where ’47 crossed over from just sporstwear to streetwear. How did that effect the brand?
After the Supreme collab, we’ve had an influx of brands that want to work with us. But there’s some things our team really sticks to when it comes to collaborations. One of them is, we should never do something if our brand or the other brand could do it on their own. We believe collaboration is when two brands have different foundations or capabilities come together to do something greater. It has to be unique, and it has to be grounded in sport.
A lot of brands will be attracted to working with you because of your massive amount of licenses with the sports leagues too.
Yeah, we have this massive amount of assets in the licensed product category so we have to be strategic about it. Especially with the Supreme x Yankees collab, after that we got all these brands like “We wanna do Dodgers, We wanna do this team, etc” So we really have to set up a filter to protect both our relationships with these brands and make sure our past collabs don’t become watered down by doing the same thing over.
You can follow ’47 on instagram or twitter and check out their products here.
Photos by Crispi | Video by Michael Nymania
Source: Gear Bottle
