How Can Indigenous Designers Get the Most Out of Brand Collaborations? – Latest Fashion Trends & Style Tips June 13, 2025 at 05:30PM
📰 How Can Indigenous Designers Get the Most Out of Brand Collaborations?
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Bethany Yellowtail, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and descendant of the Crow Tribe, began her fashion career in Los Angeles working in production for large fashion labels — an experience that ultimately inspired her to launch her own brand, B. Yellowtail, in 2014.
"In those brands I worked for, I was a part of collections that were quote-unquote 'Native-' or 'Navajo-' or 'Aztec-inspired,' and it was a really bizarre experience," she reflects. "I grew up my whole life around our people and our culture. And then to be plopped into a world where we don't exist was really bizarre. I was just like, this doesn't represent me. This doesn't represent the people I love or come from. It actually has nothing to do with us, but we're being 'honored' or 'celebrated.' It was super strange. So I wanted to create a brand that I saw myself in."
It's a common theme among today's Native designers, this desire to produce their own goods, infused with their own perspectives and cultural experiences, in response to the appropriative stunts of mainstream labels. For Indigenous people, cultural appropriation is deeply personal.
Related: What Indigenous Designers Want (and Need) Out of Fashion Collaborations: A Guide for Brands
"We see our designs get knocked off or taken, and then our people live below the poverty line. That's not acceptable to me," says Yellowtail.
Take today's Western trend in fashion — an aesthetic we tend to attribute to (white) cowboys despite its Native American roots. "If you're not attuned to Native communities, you don't even know a Native person, you're not even going to make that connection and you're going to buy Western product that is absolutely influenced by Native culture," notes Yellowtail, whose own family runs a ranch. "The turquoise and 'Navajo' jewelry is so big in Western culture, but it gets ripped off for cheap so easily."
It's primarily non-Native, white-owned brands that are capitalizing on the Western phenomenon, which should also be an opportunity for Indigenous designers and artists. Per Yellowtail, "Shifting people's purchasing habits to investing in where it originally comes from... that's definitely a long battle and it's going to take someone or a brand with massive cultural influence to help change that."
One step toward that shift is collaborations between non-Native brands and Native designers. But ensuring that these partnerships are decolonized and mutually beneficial (i.e. not exploitative) can be tricky. As we covered in this guide for how brands should engage in such initiatives, the brand Faherty's ongoing Native Partnerships Program — created in 2017 as a way to course-correct after coming to terms with its own appropriative behavior — has emerged as a type of blueprint. Yellowtail is one of its long-term partners, working with the brand to provide prints and designs on an ongoing basis.
Photo: Courtesy of Faherty
It works in large part because the initiative was guided by Native people from the beginning; beyond launching collaborative collections, Faherty provides royalties, inventory sharing, business support and donations to Native-run nonprofits. Internally, it's also prioritized hiring Native people, appointing them to their board and educating all employees around Indigenous issues and culture.
"I know a shift is coming, and for me, Faherty has set the bar," says Yellowtail. For her, the relationship began with honest conversations with Faherty's Co-founder and Chief Impact Officer Kerry Docherty.
"We really had to make adjustments as we went along the way. I remember a conversation with Kerry [asking] 'Is this helping you enough? How about we change our royalty structure to this?' And it just changed the game for me," Yellowtail recalls. "The times when sales are really low and business might not be doing so well [for my own brand], those Faherty checks come in clutch every time."
It's been a major boon Yellowtail's own business. "I have a really, really exciting mega big collaboration coming this fall," she teases. "And a lot of their research behind deciding to work with me was because of the work I've done with Faherty."
Of course, not all designers have Yellowtail's industry experience and know-how, and most companies are not like Faherty. Part of the work of ensuring a mutually beneficial partnership will fall on the designers, and there can be a learning curve when it comes to negotiating. Below, find some tips and insights from Yellowtail and others on how Indigenous creatives can ensure collaborations are mutually beneficial, and eventually scale their own businesses.
Moving past fear and skepticism
History has way more examples of Native people being exploited by non-Native institutions than not; any skepticism or hesitation around entering into such relationships is fair and probably warranted, but with the right arrangement, the benefits can hopefully outweigh the drawbacks, even when there might be compromises or different outlooks.
"Collaborating with different institutions is incredibly frustrating, but if we are given a platform to promote people, we are going to take it," says Korina Emmerich, who's of Puyallup heritage and founded the brand Emme Studio as well as Relative Arts NYC, a multi-brand boutique selling Indigenous designs that has collaborated with the MoMA and Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Working in collaboration with different institutions doesn't mean that we have the same missions, but we really appreciate taking the opportunity."
Get your work in front of new customers
Among the top benefits of collaboration between small, independent creatives and larger brands are the opportunities to, one, take advantage of the latter's more developed production capabilities and, relatedly, get more of their work in front of a greater number of potential new customers.
"To be able to create such high-quality products with high-quality fabrics with our own designs, that's a dream alone," notes Yellowtail. "But also [Faherty's] larger investment is in us as brands and businesses.'"
Photo: Tiara Howard/Courtesy of Native Fashion Week Santa Fe
"[Native design] should be rooted in culture, rooted in identity, but I still want to be able to sell my products and my designs to non-Native folks," explains Ocean Cherneski, a Nishinaabe designer and artist from the Pic River First Nation community who founded her brand Ocean Kiana in 2020. (She has a collaboration in the works with Manitobah Mukluks.) "If I'm collaborating with non-Native brands, we're able to build that bridge for non-Natives to feel comfortable, because sometimes they think, because they're not Native, they can't buy from us, which, it's completely the opposite."
In a sort of domino effect, these collaborations can become a form of education for consumers, as well as the brands and retailers involved. "Our customers are now educating other brands," Faherty's Docherty recently discovered. "When they're in a store and they love something and it looks Native-inspired, they say, 'Hey, is this actually Native-designed? Because they have learned the difference between appropriation and not. And I think that's honestly how the collective conscious shifts."
It's also rubbed off on Nordstrom, one of Faherty's retail partners. "They're now more educated and intentional about even ensuring they don't have appropriated prints, that their buyers aren't buying from brands that are doing it."
Come to the negotiating table prepared, and stay vocal
"In a lot of cases, there's extraction from culturally significant designs. We've seen that as a community again and again. And so I think that these are the types of things we can implement on our own," Michelle Brown, the Diné creative director of Eighth Generation (a Seattle-based lifestyle brand that partners with Native artists across the country) explained during a panel discussion at Native Fashion Week Santa Fe (NFWSF) in May 2025. "If you own a small Indigenous business, have a plan, have your own model of how you want to be worked with, how you want to be compensated, so that you can present that when you arrive at the table for negotiation. I think that's so important to protect oneself in that way."
Think about the type of relationship and terms you want and deserve, and be vocal. "We've been approached by other brands who are like, 'Can we license your artwork?'" says Yellowtail." And it's like, no, that's actually not how it works. It's not just artwork for sale." On a basic level, Indigenous artists should retain ownership of their artwork and have a say in how it's used.
"Part of that is on our end," Yellowtail adds. "Knowing that we can push for a better collaboration, whether it be royalties or a community impact initiative, because a lot of these companies, it's never been done before. So there's also this education part that we have to, as designers or brand representatives, be able to articulate the bigger picture. "
And that Native-led involvement and education ideally shouldn't end once the contracts are signed. At Faherty, for instance, it's ongoing and extends throughout the company.
"There are so many different parts of the business that touch different parts of a partnership," Docherty explains. "When we're writing text around it, have we run that text by the partners? Are we putting words into their mouths that shouldn't be put? Are artists naming the product themselves as they should? Are they naming the color in which we're the color reference? Are we making sure they have an option to buy the clothes themselves so that they can put it on their platform?"
Talk to mentors, other members of the Indigenous design community
If you're new to business development or navigating the fashion industry, talk to people with experience, like Yellowtail. "What I fear is emerging artists or just cultural artists in general, not having the language or the fashion know-how to advocate for themselves," she says. "Faherty has really given me a great opportunity to create this blueprint of how to support designers."
"Some of the younger people that I mentor, I'm always reminding them... that you have to make money somehow," Jeremy Arvisi (of mixed Diné, Hopi, Akimel O'odham, and Tohono O'odham heritage), founder of Original Landlords, shared during NFWSF. "It's all fun to just do this because you love it, but at some point you have to make sure you are getting paid for this, or else else it's a hobby. It's not going to be a career."
And there's more to learn than just business advice. Arvisi added, "Being in the Native fashion industry has educated me in so many different aspects — including of how and what not to appropriate [from other tribes in the community]. Pan-Native American people are really like, 'Hey, you're Cheyenne. Why are you using Lakota designs?'"
Yellowtail is eager to share what she's learned to "help equip other Native artists and people who are looking to collaborate with big brands and give them a better blueprint instead of being taken advantage of."
Photo: David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Eco-Age
Set yourself up for growth
Ultimately, the goal is for Native creatives to leverage these collaborations to propel their own businesses and careers, but there are still issues that brand partnerships alone can't solve. "Where I come from, we're so rich in culture, but also, we're so tucked away from resources," says Yellowtail. She points out the inherent challenges around beadwork and other skills and techniques many Native designers use, which are often passed down through generations.
"It's hard to produce at a larger scale for anybody, but for Native artists who are from tribal communities, the access to capital and how do you actually grow as a business — those are all challenges we all have," she explains. "And my experience is unique because I worked in the industry and I kind of figured out how to do that with clothing."
So, she is working on creating a training program for Indigenous designers to help them grow. (Interested designers can enter now to win a mentorship session with her.) "I really started looking at, for example, the 15% Pledge with Aurora James and how they're advocating for Black brands to be in large stores... But we actually have such a large gap to fill first in helping people scale, and scale at a way that can be store-ready," she explains. The good thing, she says, is the demand is there — she's seen it.
"There's so much creativity in our communities...it's always been part of who we are as people," she says. "Now we're seeing how it could really be careers and be people's family livelihood, because people want it."
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