Judge Dredd opens a Palace store

Palace, the London skate brand, releases its winter collection on Friday, 2 October, at 11am UK time in Europe, the UK and the US, and a day later in Japan, China, Korea and Australia. A lot of it is serious outerwear: a B-15 flight jacket with shearling, down jackets, windproof Gore-Tex parkas, trousers in Realtree, the camouflage pattern hunters wear. Somewhere in the middle is a run of pieces with Judge Dredd on them: a mesh jersey with flames, a hoodie with his badge on the back, long-sleeve tops, a T-shirt, a cap and a beanie.

Judge Dredd comes from 2000 AD, a British weekly comic that started in 1977. He’s a police officer in a violent future city called Mega-City One, and he’s allowed to arrest, judge and sentence people on the spot.

To launch the pieces, Palace and 2000 AD made a short digital comic. Jake Lynch drew it, Liam Johnson wrote it, and in the story Dredd opens a Palace store in Mega-City One. It runs on Palace’s Instagram.

Photo: Dominic Marley, courtesy of Palace Skateboards

I first read about it in a licensing press release. Rebellion, the Oxford company that has owned 2000 AD since 2000, announced Palace on 29 September as one of several new partners for its comics. The same list has Logitech G, the gaming accessories brand, the US toy company Nacelle, and Medicom Toy from Japan. Rebellion will present all of them at Brand Licensing Europe, a trade fair where companies rent out the rights to their characters, at ExCeL in London from 6 to 8 October.

On 6 March 2008 I stood in the line outside Supreme on Fairfax in Los Angeles. Everyone was waiting for Kermit the Frog in a small white box logo tee, and I didn’t understand what I was looking at. A skate brand from New York and a puppet from children’s television looked like a strange pair to me. I wrote about that day here.

Medicom Toy made the small Kermit figure for that Supreme release. Now it sits in the same partner list as Palace, both of them licensees of the same comic. A skate brand putting a children’s TV character or a comic cop on a shirt used to be a surprise. For a rights holder like Rebellion it’s now a category, sold next to headsets and figures, with its own fair.

Palace still decides how the character shows up. In the comic, Dredd opens a store in his own city, so the campaign and the brand’s world become one story. Supreme did something close to this with Kermit: the photo on the posters was the photo on the shirts.

Palace was founded in London in 2009. Product photos courtesy of Palace Skateboards

I think the choice of character tells you less about a brand than it did in 2008, because the rights holders now offer them openly. The staging is probably where the difference shows. It’s a small collection inside a big winter release, and I don’t know yet how it will sell.

Also on my radar

• Shopify now lets AI assistants that run in the browser complete a checkout. On 28 September it extended its support for WebMCP, a standard that lets these assistants work directly with a website, from search and cart to payment, and the order only goes through after the buyer confirms. Amazon and adidas block such agents. For a lot of smaller brands on Shopify, some of the shoppers at checkout will probably be software acting for a person.
• Duer, the Vancouver denim brand, is starting a free print magazine called Interval. It comes out four times a year from October, 5,000 copies, handed out in its stores, mailed to loyalty members and given to some retailers. The first issue shows no prices. CEO Gary Lenett says the company is on track for about $100 million in revenue within 18 months and asks how a brand gets across “that it’s actually authentic.” For him, the answer is print.
• The Italian design duo Formafantasma are the new creative directors of Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, the Florence pharmacy and perfume house that Dominican friars started in 1221. Their stated plan is to build from what the house already has instead of giving it a new image. I like that brief.
• Formula E, the electric car racing series, signed a long-term partnership with Heron Preston, who’ll make merchandise and performance wear from recycled cotton spun out of factory scraps and designed the paint and graphics for its new GEN4 car. Three days later it showed a new visual identity by Mox, built on a 30 degree forward tilt. A racing series is trying to look like a fashion and design brand before the new season starts.
• Nike split its marathon shoes into three. Apex is the new top racer for elite runners, coming in January 2027, the Alphafly 4 sits below it from October, and Swooshfly is a cheaper race shoe for everyday runners from early 2027. It looks a bit like a car range now, one model for each kind of runner.

Courtesy of Nike

That’s it for today.