LeSportsac and Rowing Blazers Announce New Strategic Partnership
LeSportsac and Rowing Blazers have joined forces to create a new paradigm in brand collaborations.
Arc En Ciel is a new collection designed by LeSportsac’s in-house team using specific references provided by Rowing Blazers’ chief executive officer and creative director Jack Carlson. He will help oversee creative of the long-term partnership, and has kicked things off with a collection inspired by vintage tennis bag shapes that launch today on LeSportsac’s website priced from $55 for a coin purse to $250 for a weekender.
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LeSportsac chief operating officer Thomas Becker, who started at the label in 2019, said he was eager to bring fresh spin to the LeSportsac name and felt inspired by the brand’s heyday era in the early Aughts when it collaborated with Gwen Stefani.
“We have been doing partnerships since the ’90s. We did a collaboration with Gwen Stefani and essentially launched the L.A.M.B. brand. LeSportsac has a long history of collaboration and what’s different about the nature of our work with Jack is that it’s a long-term relationship,” Becker said.
When Becker was the CEO at Thom Browne between 2007 and 2009, he helped negotiate the designer’s relationship with Moncler that resulted in the Gamme Bleu line. The executive said this experience was formative in his handling of partnerships for LeSportsac.
“I learned the nature of just collaboration versus a relationship and bringing another talent and team into the building. That’s something we are doing here with Jack and his team — it gives us more time and space to be creative. Because our brand has done so many traditional collaborations, it was time to be distinct and get a lot more vulnerable and creative with a longer horizon,” he added. New Arc En Ciel collections are meant to come out twice annually.
Carlson, who met Becker at a WWD-run summit, said he was “super excited when Tom reached out to us because Lesportsac is a brand I’ve always loved and been fascinated with. We are selective of who we work with and who we partner with and this is different from a normal collaboration — it’s a different type of opportunity. What I thought was exciting is that it’s a different kind of challenge to come up with the branding and creative direction for a whole new [product] line.”
The first collection, drawing from original LeSportsac styles, incorporates Carlson’s appreciation for nostalgia and color. Color-blocked in retro colorways or stripes and typeface, the collection plays to the designer’s aesthetic obsessions. “Being playful with color is one of the things I wanted to do. Rowing Blazers never shies away from color so we dug into some of the archival images and mood boards to come up with a palette that felt very unique,” he said.
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