Represent Names Priya De Souza as Chief Marketing Officer

The Manchester-founded fashion and sportswear label Represent has named Priya De Souza as its chief marketing officer, a role she takes up with immediate effect.

De Souza will answer directly to chief executive Paul Spencer and will take charge of marketing, communications and brand strategy across the main Represent line and its performance arm, 247 by Represent. The company confirmed the appointment in a statement announcing the leadership change.

A career built where fashion meets culture

The appointment brings a marketing leader with a background spanning youth media, sportswear and luxury collaborations. De Souza joins Represent from Casablanca, the Paris-based label, where she served as chief marketing officer. There she assembled the marketing team from the ground up and directed the brand’s communications and marketing strategy.

Before Casablanca, she spent several years at Adidas Originals leading global marketing communications. In that post she oversaw end-to-end campaigns for high-profile collaborations with Gucci, Balenciaga and Wales Bonner, and was responsible for global social media and public relations.

Her earlier career was rooted in youth culture publishing. For almost a decade she worked at Dazed Media, heading up the partnerships division of the publisher, which positions itself at the intersection of fashion, music and contemporary culture.

That combination — culture-led media, sports performance and luxury fashion — maps closely onto Represent’s own positioning as an independent label that moves between streetwear, athletics and premium product.

Leadership welcomes a “rare” senior hire

Spencer framed the appointment around both professional depth and cultural fit. He said De Souza brings an extraordinary breadth of global brand experience across culture, sport and luxury, and added that the team had been won over by her personality from the very first meeting.

Co-founder George Heaton struck a similar note, pointing to a career spent exactly where fashion and culture converge and to a portfolio of brands the company holds in high regard. He described her as central to how Represent will tell its story as it continues to grow.

De Souza, for her part, said Represent has achieved something unusual for an independent label: a devoted following and genuine standing within fashion. She said she is looking forward to working closely with George, Spencer and the wider team on what she called the next chapter.

The hire places a dedicated brand strategist at the heart of a company that has so far built its reputation largely through word of mouth, limited drops and community-driven momentum.

A brand in the middle of a global push

The marketing leadership change lands at a busy moment. Since 2024, Represent has opened its first physical stores, beginning with Los Angeles before adding a site in its home city of Manchester, followed by London and, most recently, Cape Town. Each opening has extended the label’s reach beyond online retail and wholesale into direct, street-level retail in key international markets.

That kind of expansion demands consistent brand messaging across very different territories, which is likely to be a central part of De Souza’s brief. Coordinating communications across two product lines — the main fashion label and the performance-focused 247 — adds another layer to the role.

Represent was founded in 2011 by brothers George and Mike Heaton. The company launched 247 by Represent in 2020, positioning it as a performance line that covers running, hybrid training and fashion-led sportswear rather than purely technical kit.

What the appointment signals

• Brand over product alone: Bringing in a chief marketing officer with a luxury and culture background suggests the label wants to sharpen how it presents itself, not just what it sells.
• Two lines, one voice: De Souza will need to keep the main Represent collection and the 247 performance range coherent while giving each its own identity.
• Retail maturity: With stores now open in Los Angeles, Manchester, London and Cape Town, the company is moving from a purely digital and wholesale model towards a more visible international presence.
• Leadership structure: Reporting directly to the CEO, the new chief marketing officer sits at the top table rather than within a departmental silo.

The person behind the title

De Souza’s CV reads as a sequence of roles at the meeting point of sport, music and fashion. Her time at Dazed Media gave her grounding in youth-led publishing and brand partnerships; her years at Adidas Originals exposed her to the machinery of global campaigns and large-scale collaborations; and her tenure at Casablanca added experience of building a marketing function inside a fast-rising fashion house.

For an independent British label still writing its growth story, that mix of scrappy cultural instinct and large-organisation discipline is clearly the appeal. Whether the appointment accelerates Represent’s international ambitions will become clearer as the next wave of campaigns and store openings takes shape.