Fashion designer Dao-yi Chow has had a long career, both with his own brand Public School, founded with Maxwell Osborne in 2008, and with stints at other brands like Tom Brady’s performance apparel-focused brand Brady.
His newest role is vp and creative director of brand at the 140-year-old hat company New Era, known for its ubiquitous baseball caps. While New Era sells hundreds of licensed products — an abundance of team, logo and brand names can be found on New Era hats — Chow’s job is to help establish and drive the brand side of the business without the crutch of a licensed logo.
“New Era has a huge and successful licensed business,” Chow said. “So our job is to figure out how to establish this brand without having the luxury of the Yankees logo. You put a Yankees logo on anything and it will sell. We know we can do licensing really well, but now we have to build up the brand side.”
Chow’s first collection for New Era, released on Tuesday, draws inspiration from New York City in the mid-‘90s, the time and place where Chow grew up, and includes over 50 pieces in headwear and apparel. The accompanying campaign, called Brand New Era, features youthful influencers and models like skateboarder Carlisle Aikens and rugby player Jonah Lowe, photographed by Andy Warhol protege Ari Marcopoulos. The campaign is running across New Era’s multiple Instagram accounts, which collectively have over 2 million followers.
Chow said he approached his task of establishing the brand side of the business with reverence for New Era’s long history, spinning pieces from its archive into new forms. For example, he took the wool material used in classic versions of New Era’s famous 59Fifty hat and reformulated it to make a shirt.
“It’s not my personality to come in and try to blow things up,” Chow said. “I don’t think that’s the right way to approach working with a 100-plus-year-old brand. There are only a handful of companies with a truly iconic product. So I approached [the collection] with a lot of reverence and just tried to take what makes the brand great and recontextualize it.”
New Era does over a billion dollars in annual revenue and has exclusive contracts with major sports leagues like Major League Baseball and the National Football League. James Grundtisch, president of global brand at New Era, said the Chow-led campaign is the company’s first big effort to establish a brand outside of its licensing deals.
“While New Era has been a part of people’s lives in many different ways for over a century, now is the time for us to truly express our brand’s unique identity,” Grundtisch said.
While New Era is a privately held company, a $600 million loan it took out last year led to speculation that an IPO could be in the future. Earlier this summer, it purchased the sports merchandise company ‘47 in a deal that New Era hopes will bring in $2 billion annually.
