Heritage brand vs brand with heritage

A heritage brand sells its past: the founding date, the original factory, the way things used to be made. A brand with heritage uses that past as raw material for what's next. The product often barely changes. Its meaning does, and culture is what changes it. Usually the people who change it are outside the brand, and today a lot of them are creators.

New Balance's CMO, Chris Davis, says it isn't a heritage brand but a brand with heritage. That line caught my attention, because the pattern behind it keeps repeating in fashion:

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  Carhartt made workwear for labourers. It became a uniform for 90s hip hop and skateboarding.
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  Clarks made the Wallabee. Jamaica's dancehall scene took it over.
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  Stone Island made jackets from fabric inspired by military truck tarpaulins. They became streetwear's most recognisable badge.

None of these brands redesigned the product to win a new audience. The product gave culture something to hold on to, and the right people carried it from there.

New Balance famously embraced being the dad shoe. Now it leads in both performance and lifestyle, because it hands its product to people who tell stories with it: Bukayo Saka in the Furon v8 boot, Aimé Leon Dore pulling the 1000 out of the archive. It's on course for a record $10bn in revenue this year, growing faster than Nike.

Davis put the approach in one line to Forbes: "As we get bigger, we have to continue to think smaller." You can see it in how New Balance picks partners. Considered collaborations over mass campaigns. A short list of ambassadors (Shohei Ohtani, Coco Gauff, Saka, Jack Harlow) rather than a long one.

Stewart Rawle, Kyra's Chief Commercial Officer, wanted to know if "thinking smaller" applied to its creator marketing too. We looked at 12 months of paid creator posts on TikTok and Instagram. It does, quite literally. Compared with Nike, Adidas and Puma, New Balance uses fewer famous faces and more smaller creators with highly engaged communities.

Pentland Brands runs a similar play. It spent the last few years reminding everyone that Berghaus belongs to rave and terrace culture as much as to hill walking. Now Kickers is getting the same treatment, because the Kick Hi has been living a double life for decades:

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  Late 80s acid house: the shoe you danced in until 6am.
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  Madchester and Britpop: the Happy Mondays, baggy jeans, the red and green tags.
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  90s playgrounds: the shoe your mum bought that somehow made you cool.

Pentland's playbook seems to be: don't invent a story, go and collect the one that's already written. Then hand the product to the people writing the next chapter. For Berghaus that was Liam Gallagher. For Kickers it's Eliza Rose. And it's running the same play with Ellesse, built on its 1959 origin story.

Miu Miu does a version of this from the other direction. It takes athletic heritage and passes it through its own lens: the ballerina-cut New Balance, upcycled vintage Wrangler denim. Its retail sales fell for the first time in four years, but over the 90 days to late October, creator posts on TikTok and Instagram mentioning Miu Miu pulled 2.7 times the views of posts mentioning Prada. Cultural heat and revenue don't always move together. The creator layer is often where the heat shows first.

The flip side is what happens when a brand stops handing its product to culture. Golf is a good example. Two years ago Nike had 37% of the golf conversation on TikTok. Today it has 16%. Malbon Golf, a creator-led brand built on culture first, overtook it this spring.

That gap is why On is heading into golf apparel by early 2027, even though its share of the golf conversation today is zero. Its playbook is the one that took it from a Swiss running startup to a company targeting $7bn in sales: partner with elite athletes, build the product around them and borrow their cultural credibility.

Nike seems to know it. Its recent moves read like a legacy giant thinking like a challenger again: Jordan Brand returning to a scarcity model with fewer retro releases, a 5,000-woman night run at London City Airport with PinkPantheress, and handing the Shox R419 campaign to Corteiz. The hard part is joining those communities without looking like you're borrowing their cool.

Three things come up again and again:

1. They find the story culture already wrote. The Kick Hi didn't need a new backstory. It needed someone to remember the old one.
2. They hand the product to a few people with real communities. A short list of ambassadors and smaller creators, chosen for who's watching, not follower count.
3. They watch their share of the conversation as well as sales. It can move long before revenue does, as Miu Miu's numbers show in the other direction.

A great product gives culture something to hold on to. The right people carry it from there.