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Brother Jesse Talks ‘Shaun White For Target’

There are two brothers White. Shaun is a professional skateboarder/snowboarder, and Jesse is the designer behind Burton’s impressive White Collection. Success begets success, and on July 27th, the two are dropping Shaun White for Target, a continuation of the series that the Target superbrand has been creating in conjunction with designers in the know.

Maybe you heard of Rogan for Target? Maybe you were paying attention to your girl when she was yakking up Zac Posen working for the Bullseye? No? Well, no worries. Shaun White for Target is a collection of access point skate clothes ($10-30) you can actually buy in this post-America, “Why can’t you pay me in Euros?” economic setting. Read on for an interview with the man behind the collection, Jesse White, and to peep the collection.

Interview by Bradley Carbone

Click thumbnails for full-size images.

Complex: So, Shaun White for Target. It’s coming out in a week or so, but it’s been relatively quiet on the hype-circuit, from a “buzz” perspective what do you think the difference is between this line, and past collections?

Jesse White: [Laughs] I know. It’s right around the corner. The consumer for this stuff is a little different for this type of product though. When we do the snowboard line, people see it way out and we get them excited about it, but for something like this, we’re going to do a tight internet and TV play and drive people directly to it. It’s skate clothes, but in the end we had to remember the range of people going to stores to buy this stuff.

Complex: Did you work directly with Target on promoting the line post-design?

Jesse White: Working with Target was actually really cool. Instead of Target giving us the corporate marketing handbook, they sat with us. They’ve been really open, because the people [at Target] know skate culture is finicky, and they know we know it better than they do. I mean, these guys do all kinds of sick design, but it is a big company and skateboarding is full of skeptics.

Complex: Burton, who you’ve worked with in the past, is corporate, but Target is big business. How was that trying to design for a non-skate or snow brand?

Jesse White: This is the first project that we’ve tackled like this. Shaun and I are really involved in our endemic culture, and our biggest fear [in] branching out to Target was whether they were going to accurately portray the image that we wanted. This collection shows a good middle ground between the core and the lifestyle.

Complex: Shaun has a lot of corporate brands stickered onto his boards and helmets. Do you guys get a lot of push back on that type of stuff?

Jesse White: We do work with a lot of corporate brands, but even though these are big companies, we still try to make sure we’re working with companies who can best and most smoothly relate to the skate and snow cultures.

Complex: What was the design process behind this collection?

Jesse White: For a project like this, you create a larger collection and then cut it down. With Target, we told them straight up which items had to be in the line. There are certain skate basics that we needed to give identity to the line. You know like the denim, or certain graphic Ts. Without that, you can lose the focus of the line. Some products are flexible, but some of these are musts. Then we went back and forth about certain graphics and other pieces that would either help or hurt the line. I mean there was some stuff that just wasn’t going to make the cut, you know, certain graphics and whatnot. [Laughs]

Complex: In a short sentence, what is Shaun White for Target?

Jesse White: We wanted to design clothes that our friends would wear.

Complex: How does working with Target differ from Burton?

Jesse White: The biggest difference is comfort level. Target appeals to so many people that we had to design to a broader audience. I mean, it’s huge. When we set off to design this stuff, the biggest challenge was “who are we working with?” We went to Target HQ, sat down in a big boardroom, but at the end of the day there was just a tight crew working on the collection. They were really open to discussions, and the strictest guidelines were just working with the deadlines.