From start-up to £100m: how Represent prepares for peak sales perfection

Represent summer 2025

Harnessing the power of peaks has been one of the secrets of British streetwear brand Represent’s successful business strategy.

From screen printing small runs of T-shirts in their parents’ garden shed in Horwich, Greater Manchester, in 2011, to generating revenue of close to £100m in 2024, brothers (and Drapers 30 Under 30 alumni) George and Michael Heaton have mastered the art of the hyped online product drop.

In the run-up to a launch, they build interest from their loyal community of global consumers – they have close to 1 million followers on Instagram – which prompts surges in online traffic to their website and, ultimately, drives conver­sions. In tandem, the business has built the optimal digital foundations to allow it to reap the rewards of the website traffic spikes and peak periods.

Nearly 15 years since the brand launched, this strategy continues to work. Represent was named the UK’s 68th fastest-growing private company by The Sunday Times last year with a compound annual growth rate of 64% since 2020. Preliminary results for the 12 months to 31 December 2024 show a 16% year-on-year rise in revenue to £93.4m, and EBITDA up 3% to £15m.

In 2024 alone, the brand released product drops in col­laboration with American rock band Metallica, footwear brand Duke & Dexter, heritage label Belstaff, sportswear giant Puma and British retailer End. So far in 2025 there have been products launched in collaboration with bands Oasis, Guns N’ Roses and Iron Maiden, US hat specialist ‘47, as well as its regular seasonal collections, all sold via an omnichannel strategy that includes its website, a selection of global wholesale stockists, and its three bricks-and-mortar stores: London (opened July 2025), Manchester (October 2024) and West Hollywood, Los Angeles (March 2024).

“A product launch, for us, we would deem as a consumer touchpoint,” explains Stefan Lewis, Represent’s chief digital officer, of the strategy. “So, we try to keep a high cadence [of product launches] so that Represent and our products stay at the forefront of the consumer’s mind. That also gives us the ability to spike site traffic every single week.”

Stefan Lewis, Represent’s chief digital officer, speaking at Drapers Inner Circle Summit 2025

Represent came of age during the rise of retail’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday craze – the pre-Christmas Sales event that drives traffic and sales via discounts, and remains an impor­tant and successful part of the retail calendar for many brands. In 2024, businesses that sell via the Shopify platform hit a record $11.5bn (£8.6bn) in sales over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, up 24% from the year before.

Not only does Represent partake in the annual discounting period, offering deals across some of its most popular prod­ucts, it also capitalises on the increased interest from online customers with specially designed Black Friday ranges to coincide with the long weekend of shopping.

“Black Friday has always been part of our DNA – it’s a big part of the overall strategy,” says Lewis. “It’s a really power­ful moment for the brand.”

However, building hype around interesting new product drops and peak discount periods is only part of the strategy. To really capitalise on the benefits of that hard work, Represent needed to ensure its digital capabilities could keep up, particularly as it grew as a business.

And, with Google’s Mobile Site Speed Playbook reporting that a one-second website speed improvement can increase conversions for mobile users by up to 27%, fast site speed and smooth performance are essential, particularly during peaks.

“As much as Represent has been about our brand, from an ecommerce point of view, we’ve also always had a keen focus on core web vitals,” agrees Lewis. Google’s core web vitals assess the quality of a user’s experience on a webpage across elements including loading performance, interactiv­ity and visual stability. These are particularly important when Represent reports site traffic increasing 30% for regular prod­uct drops, and skyrocketing by 25 times with an eightfold increase in conversions during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday period. Being able to deliver a fast and seamless experience during these peaks is critical.

“Our previous platform took too much time and manual work to update,” says Lewis. “When you’re a start-up and you’re trying to do a multitude of different things, ease of access is a superpower. We needed a solution that was simple to use and ready to scale.”

Represent’s London store

Represent selected Shopify and has been working with the platform since 2013. Its current set-up includes four localised websites and four localised apps (for the UK, Europe, the US and Germany). Using Shopify Markets, the business has supercharged its international expansion by localising languages on its website, offering payments in a range of local cur­rencies and integrating with local shipping systems – factors that are proven to boost sales in international markets.

Represent has also used Shopify to help power a unified commerce strategy – bringing data and insights from across the business into one place, which has helped build a smooth operation internally and a frictionless experience for customers.

For instance, using Shopify POS soft­ware and hardware, it can unite data from stores, pop-ups and digital sales around the world with shipping points and ware­houses (it currently runs three distribution centres in Leicestershire in England, Ant­werp in Belgium and New Jersey in the US). This creates a single view of its stock, and a single source of truth across multiple locations and channels, optimising sales. Part of being prepared for peaks is also learning from the past spikes. Here, data is also key, and Shopify’s insights and analytics functions have helped the brand to make better, data-driven decisions.

Represent’s collaboration with US hat specialist ‘47

“We’ve always been able to proactively forecast and work with Shopify ahead of new launches,” Lewis says. “Shopify has always helped us in terms of increasing bandwidth and we’ve never run into any issues in a peak season around site speed [or] checkout issues.”

With Shopify, Represent has been able to scale its digital business, convert international customers and improve the shopping experience for its loyal community across channels that, when combined, means it is prepared for every product drop and peak period – Black Friday and beyond.

“I think one of the beautiful things about working with Shopify since 2013 is that we as a business have not sat still,” concludes Lewis. “And equally, Shopify has the same mantra.”