The brothers from Bolton who've made £120m dressing pop stars

Times

2 days ago

I know I have arrived at the right industrial estate near Bolton when I clock the cars. They are parked next to each other, a humdinger of a Roller and an even larger Bentley, with matching his 'n' his personalised number plates.
The letters on those plates make it clear that the cars belong to the Heaton brothers, Mike and George, who founded their clothing brand Represent 14 years ago in their parents' old garden shed a few minutes up the road. The shed (and house) where it all began is now owned by a 'massive Represent fan', George says. 'I think he hopes that if his sons work in that shed they will have the same luck we did.'
Mike is now 34, George is now 32 and Represent is now a phenomenon. You may not have heard of it but every teenage and twentysomething male I have spoken to has. In May the pair appeared at No 31 in The Sunday Times's 40 Under 40 Rich List with a combined fortune of £122 million.
Celebrity fans include Justin Bieber, Dua Lipa and Kim Kardashian, plus a gentleman who goes by the name of Bad Bunny. The brand only just missed its stated ambition of a £100 million turnover in the last financial year by a squeak. They are fine with that, they claim. 'It was a very lofty ambition,' George says. 'We pushed and we pushed. Our aim now is to get to £250 million in the next three to five years.' Mike nods. 'If we can crack America the market's seven times the size of the UK.'
Represent opened boutiques in Los Angeles and Manchester (in that order) last year, and will open in London on July 12. A sweatshirt starts at £130, though the more expensive items — many of which feature the kind of line drawings Mike was doing while studying graphic design at the University of Salford when the pair decided to launch their own brand — can be more pricey. Still, theirs is, George insists, 'An attainable price point. Not cheap, but not too expensive for the everyday lad.' Or indeed lass. They branched out into womenswear in February.
As you can probably tell, George is the Heaton who has more to say for himself. Yet even he — for someone whose look-at-me Los Angeles house and car collection, plus even more look-at-me musculature, is all over Instagram — is surprisingly softly spoken. Neither of them come across as a C-suite cliché.
'That's not for us,' George says. 'We have always been like this. I think it would be exhausting to try to be any other way.' Mike — who seems verging on shy — tells me he doesn't use his upstairs office much 'as I don't like to have to make people come up here'. Theirs is an unusual combination of something that is akin to reticence with so much inner fire you can almost smell it. They both use the word 'grafting' several times during our conversation.
The Heatons may be the second-most famous brothers to have come out of Greater Manchester but they couldn't be more different from the first, those ever-sparring Gallaghers. With whom, as it so happens, Represent is collaborating, producing merchandise for this summer's Oasis reunion. But I still have to ask: who is Noel and who is Liam in their relationship? Their answer says it all.
Mike: 'Ha! That's a good question.'
George: 'Even though Liam was the frontman, I think Noel was more of the …'
Mike: '… He was the brains, weren't he?'
George: 'Yeah, yeah.'
Mike: 'Maybe I am Noel and you are Liam!'
George: 'I'll have either!'
They both chortle. There's clearly no power struggle here.
Represent sells a slightly Californian take on streetwear that was first inspired by the Heatons' teenage love of skateboarding and vintage band T-shirts. Growing up in the Noughties, they were anomalies in their area with their long hair, baggy jeans and the wooden skate ramp their dad — who ran a business converting minibuses for disabled users and also chauffeured vintage Rolls-Royces at weddings — built for them in the back garden.
'We always looked to the States,' Mike says.
'We just didn't fit in around here,' George says. 'We started out simply creating clothes that we wanted to wear.'
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'You were either a mosher or a chav,' Mike says. A mosher? 'You had long hair and skated, and were maybe a bit greasy and a bit of a weirdo.'
Their brand's broad appeal today tracks a wider shift: the transformation of skateboarding — and the sartorial bagginess, not to mention grunginess, that went with it — from mosher to mainstream, from counterculture to what dads do with their daughters at the weekend.
Just one of the things Represent does well is create faux vintage gear that somehow looks just the right amount of knackered and also as if it smells of fabric softener. Today both brothers are sporting faded black sweatshirts that are — if you are the sort of person who is into faded black sweatshirts, and lots of people are — nothing less than perfect. In this their success tracks a second cultural shift. Not only has mere 'second-hand' become 'vintage', but 'vintage' — the right sort of vintage — is now such a status symbol as to be faked.
Mike tells me they think nothing of spending $2,000 on an original tee from one of Los Angeles' bouji vintage stores to use as inspiration. What on earth makes a second-hand T-shirt worth that much money? 'The way it's been worn, the distressing,' he says.
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'We're the best in the world at creating new versions of vintage products,' George says. 'I've never come across another brand that's been able to replicate a vintage tee like we do.'
Business really started to fly when the brothers started sharing their lives on social media. 'It took us three years to put one YouTube video out,' George says with a laugh. 'Just because, like, filming yourself, you think, 'What will other other people perceive me as? Am I cool enough to match how cool the brand is?' But people just started loving it and it became a thing and, yeah, we like to do it.'
What's become important to them, George continues, is 'that we kind of position ourselves as motivational rather than just, you know, like a rapper would. They just show off everything they do and buy. Whereas our position is, we get up, we train, we work, we sleep.'
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Not that they are, as discussed, entirely without the rapper accoutrements. They are both wearing a gold and diamond Rolex the size of a sundial today, for example, though they tell me they were inherited from their father and grandfather respectively. (There's clearly more money in minibuses than one might think.)
They also concede, laughing, that the further back one delves into their social media, the more rapper it gets — the more 'chunky chains' there are, for example. 'Mike was wearing a chain once and went into the sun and then the pattern was burnt into his neck,' George says. 'Yeah,' Mike says with a chuckle, delighted. 'Yeah.'
Given how relentlessly on-brand their social media profiles are, what do they have in their lives that isn't? 'I always wanted an English bull terrier,' George says, 'and we've always used them in shoots. I always had this vision of driving around LA in a vintage Rolls with the top down and an English bull terrier hanging out. Instead I ended up with a goldendoodle.' He does, needless to say, have the vintage Rolls over in LA, where he now lives for much of the year, as well as the new one in the car park outside. There is also a Range Rover in California 'for everyday'.
Aside from the clothes themselves, it's the Heatons' take on 21st bro-dom that is a big part of their appeal. What goes down in the weights room seems to have become more important than what goes down at the skate park in the world of Represent, which now includes a fitness-focused line called 247.
At their HQ the gym takes up almost as much space as the office. When I visit mid-afternoon there are just a couple of people in there — one of them Mike's girlfriend — pumping impressive amounts of iron. They run classes every morning, the women's at 6am, the men's at 7am, as well as at lunchtime. It seems a bit unfair that the women have to get up earlier if they want to do the morning class, I say. 'It was the result of a vote,' George says. 'The women wanted more time to get ready after.'
George is the most impressive in the gym, volunteers the ever-generous Mike. 'He has got the best bench press in the office.' Mike's forte is apparently 'the GHD'. The GHD? 'The glutes and hamstring developer. Though I did manage to get myself a hernia off it.' So more of a glutes and hernia developer, then? They guffaw.
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George moved to Los Angeles just before they opened their store there, the better to, as he puts it, 'bring people on the journey with us, the Brit in LA'. This has become an established path among youth-targeting British brands. Conna Walker of the bodycon-fuelled House of CB is another thirtysomething founder who spends part of her year there and makes sure to post regularly to tell us about it.
It seems remarkable that Represent, a business that had its foundations in selling a particular take on the American dream — a grungy, long-haired take — to the British, should now be selling it back to America. Forget coals to Newcastle, think hoodies to West Hollywood.
But what's even more remarkable is that two brothers with no backers and no connections have gained such ground in an arena that should theoretically be locked down by the vast marketing spends and real estate — whether concrete or digital — of established brands such as Nike and Adidas.
Not that Represent is entirely anomalous. Castore, founded by two more brothers, Tom and Phil Beahon, aged 35 and 32 respectively, from just down the road in Liverpool, are at No 14 on the 40 Under 40 rich list, with a combined fortune of £350 million.
Social media has been one enabler but so too has the fact that Represent — and the two men behind it — seems real, authentic and at times downright quirky, what with those tattoo-adjacent graphics of Mike's, plus that love they inherited from their father of all things Rolls.
This manifests not only in George's car collection (not to mention, he tells me, in his tattoo collection) but also in one of their most popular logos. 'It's called Represent Owners' Club,' Mike says, 'and it was inspired by the Rolls-Royce owners' club. Our dad would get the magazine when we were growing up. It made you feel a part of something.'
'We have used a lot of what Rolls does as inspiration,' George says. 'The way they built that brand, we're obsessed. How they talk about the cars is how we talk about the clothes.'
Next stop £250 million. I'd put money on it.