What to do with old jerseys? The Golden State Warriors have an idea

FastCompany: The NBA is officially in its off-season, but the Golden State Warriors are making moves. For the past nine years, the Bay Area team has partnered with Japanese online retail marketplace Rakuten as its official badge partner. Now, that partnership is changing. Rakuten will no longer serve as the Warriors badge partner, leaving behind a stockpile of old jerseys. Their solution is to mix these old jerseys with premium materials like genuine leather to create upcycled pieces made available to their fans as part of a limited collection called Warriors Golden Legacy Collection.

The collection, accessible by fans who are Rakuten members from June 18 – June 25 via a sweepstakes, includes one leather jacket, two duffle bags, 10 denim jackets, 10 clear purses, and 35 bucket hats. [Photo: Sophie Kuller] “This has been a very long nine-year successful partnership and because there’s such rich history in the jersey, it made perfect sense to upcycle,” says Wendy Bergh, Rakuten’s chief marketing officer.

To design this collection, the Warriors and Rakuten tapped premium merchandise and experiential product studio theheymann , led by its creative product developer Gustavo Servin, a Mexican born designer who grew up in the Bay Area as a passionate Warriors fan. [Photo: Sophie Kuller] “Gustavo is an incredible human, and I think he has a real modern but timeless sense of style,” says Amanda Chin, the Warriors SVP of Marketing. “What’s so special about Gustavo and what he is able to bring to fans is this really custom feel to the product.

There’s a real uniqueness to how he crafts the pieces and is just very thoughtful about the details and storytelling.” Servin and his business partner’s storytelling involved giving a nod to the longstanding partnership between Rakuten and the Warriors. [Photo: Sophie Kuller] “ For us it was [about] how do we honor the legacy by making this really amazing product,” explains Servin. “But also how do we honor the legacy by staying true to ourselves in terms of the quality of the craftsmanship that we expect from ourselves.” Servin and his team came up with 15 products that they knew they could turn around within a couple of months.

“ We already knew that we wanted to incorporate leathers and a denim jacket,” says Servin. “The outer piece[s] [were] pretty simple [because] we knew where we wanted to go in terms of luxury. But, the inner components … took a little bit more time.” [Photo: Sophie Kuller] The process of incorporating four different versions of these outdated jerseys presented unique design challenges in creating the collection’s pieces. “ They were all kind of uniquely challenging because the materials were so strange to work with,” says Servin.

“Working with an already made jersey that had a bunch of logos printed, ribbing, and all of these things posed its own challenge to manipulate and work with it [for] brand new pieces.” For example, take the jacket linings. [Photo: Sophie Kuller] “ The lining in jackets is usually a textile,” says Servin. “So we cut up all these jerseys and reinforced them properly to create essentially a collage of jerseys that we could use in the lining.” In addition to understanding how to work with old jerseys, Servin and his team had to consider each item’s composition.

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The initiative by the Golden State Warriors represents a significant trend in sustainability within the sports industry, making it impactful and relevant, while the upcycling concept adds a level of novelty to traditional merchandise strategies.