You don't, for the most part. Every brand revival was predicated on the history of their last incarnation, and you either try to live off that legacy (Plan B) or you disappoint everyone (Axion). Why do you think Gonz never brought some cool shit like 60/40 or Kool back?
Plan B didn't have the "best" team in the world that second go around. They had cherry picked guys who were better off/ fit better on their previous board brands (aside from Sheckler and maybe PJ), and were banking super hard off of the legacy Questionable and Virtual Reality established. That team was such a legendary myth in the early 2000's to people who weren't skating in its heyday with all the mentions from all the newest up and comers like Pj and Gallant praising it in their interviews around 2001-2002 that there was a direct correlation between those mentions and the drastic increase in people downloading the old videos off of p2p at the time. They were able to ride that wave and had the right people in place to make the correlation strong to beef up the hype of the brands reopening, and it worked. It worked because Danny Way & Colin McKay were behind it, and it made sense at the time even though it was more fabricated than the original.
Now look at the second shot at something like Blueprint or City Stars, that shit fucking tanked. You think getting Mike York and some fake ass looking Tosh Townend looking kid for that Blueprint revival did them any good? City Stars didn't have Kareem pushing the brand as hard as Danny and Colin pushed Plan B 2.0, and no one gave a shit about some random nice kid suburban black skateboarders skating metal skate plaza ledges, we wanted some gritty shit going on. Even Kyle Nicholson and Mike Maldonado couldn't bring Axion back, because it had zero ties to its legacy.
The bottom line is that when things are over, they should stay in the past because they'll never recapture what made the initial offering hot. You have to have a following outside of skateboarding like what Supreme has to weather a storm like that; if it weren't for hypebeast culture who didn't even give a fuck about skateboarding infusing them with more cash than the skateboard market could provide, it would have died in the early 2000's no problem. And as much as they work to legitimize themselves with Fat Bill filming the FA kids (read: not giving shine to Antonio or SP bc their sponsors aren't financially propped up by Supreme), skateboarding doesn't care about them.
It's always better to do something new than it is to beat a dead horse. The best you can hope for if you bring a brand back out is to exist enough to make bank, and eventually let people down when it's apparent this second go isn't as authentic as the last (read: Plan B, True). But most likely, you're gonna end up like World Industries (who's actually trying to make boards again and put them into "legit" skate shops as we speak)
Topic: How would you make a lame brand cool again? (Read 14070 times)