True Religion

As Head of Creative at True Religion, I led a repositioning and top to bottom restage of the brand. I tapped into the brand DNA, emphasizing its roots as a rugged, authentic California brand, leveraging American counterculture as an expression of rebellion and freedom. I worked across all customer touchpoints to modernize the brand look and feel with a more cinematic, evocative look rich with story. The rebrand included a refreshed POV on brand imaging, an overhaul of brand identity and design, a digital redesign, and an overhaul of store design and visual merchandising.

Ultilizing the nascent social media space, I conceived of an episodic series of narrative films evoking classic western road films and channeling the spirit of the West. This premiered on truereligion.com, in-store, and across all social platforms across owned channels and paid media.

Directors: Alex Freund & Joshua Steen

Brand Identity

Leveraging the brand’s legacy iconography and equity, I modernized the iconic horseshoe logomark with a more rugged, distressed look, and revived the then-retired script wordmark, to give the brand a fresh new feel. I defined a typography system which combined a utilitarian sensibility with clear legibility and drew upon references of a modernized American west. This was scaled across all touchpoints from on-product packaging, to collateral, to digital channels.

Collaborations

The brand had lost relevancy with its core customer and was failing to attract new, younger, style-conscious customers - we partnered with mega-athlete Russel Westbrook and supermodel Joan Smalls to create respective mens and women’s capsule collections to tap into their star power and access new customers relevant to our design target.

TR x Westbrook

Photographer/Director: Alex Freund

TR x Joan Smalls

Photographer/Director: Steven Klein

Retail Design

With an aging fleet of stores and a dated aesthetic, the brick-and-mortar retail needed a refresh.
I collaborated with an external partner to rethink the design and bring a more authentic and rugged feel to the environment, focussing on 3 materials - rough hewn wood, polished concrete, and hot mild steel. In our SoHo NYC store, I brought the brand’s iconic super-T stitch to life through a giant thread wall with the brand’s iconic horseshoe logo and tapped into the community, hiring local artists to create murals in store. When the brand needed a bespoke design for our flagship in NYC’s Oculus, I developed an innovative concept store with floor to ceiling shelving, a concealed on-floor storage solution, and an optimized product presentation for a design worthy of its location and pragmatic for a minimal footprint.