“Oh hey, guys,” he stammered. Alan seemed distracted and not quite as warm and interested as he was before. “Look, I got caught up with some work stuff. I’m gonna need another week, if that’s cool.”
Another week! We didn’t know much about screen printing, but we did know that he wasn’t running an actual print shop with other orders in the way. Plus, we only had a hundred shirts. “Any way we can get them sooner than that?”
“No, I’m sorry. I haven’t had a chance to start. Just gimme one more week and I got you guys.”
Over the years, I’ve mastered the art of spotting red flags. In this business, the flags fly high with underqualified job interviewees, flaky vendors, and opportunists who mean well but tend to royally screw things up by watching out for themselves more than the people around them. But Alan was a friend of Jon’s, and no one had anything bad to say about him. Maybe he was just having a hard month. We could also use that extra week to get our ducks in a row with accounts.
“All right.” I capitulated.
The next week, Alan wouldn’t pick up his phone. Ben left a polite but stern voice mail noting that our shirts were past due and that a third of the summer had already escaped us. This project was supposed to be churning money by now, yet we were visiting stores without samples or inventory to show for ourselves. Alan didn’t call back that day or the next. On the third day, he finally replied that there was an emergency and he had to leave town. He had worked through half of the shirts and would return that weekend to finish them up. Then he asked if we could stop by on Monday.
Sunday night, Alan emailed asking if we could give him until Wednesday.
A month and a half later, our phone calls and voice mails were getting heated. Alan appealed to us asking for patience: “Good work takes time!” Ben and Mak were infuriated, realizing we’d made a costly mistake by going with an amateur. We finally pulled the trigger. “We’re coming up there tomorrow. You better have our shirts done, or we’re taking all our blanks back.”
Alan lived deep in the Valley with his mother in a modest house behind a chain-link fence with an overgrown lawn. On a broiling hundred-degree July afternoon, we pulled up out front and made the anxious walk to his front door.
“What’s up, guys?” There was no welcome in Alan’s greeting. No handshakes or hugs. “Come on in.”
I was happy to get out of the heat. He invited us into the living room and told us he’d be back with the finished shirts. We were surprised to hear that, but his confidence gave us relief. We all loosened up, Alan offered us something to drink, and then he and his friend walked out back.
Five minutes later, Alan was standing in front of us with a big black garbage bag. He turned it upside down and poured out the contents. T-shirts dumped onto the carpet in one wrinkled heap. Where was the box? Why weren’t these neatly folded? Before we could get to those questions, Mak reached for the top shirt and examined the print.
“This is off-center,” Mak noted. The T-shirt was called “Mic” and featured the silhouette of Slick Rick, traced from a live photo I’d shot of his Boombazzi San Diego concert. “He’s supposed to be flush against this edge, but he’s crooked.”
Alan made a face. “Looks pretty centered to me. You have to leave room for allowance,” he said defensively. He picked up the next shirt and said, “See? This one is fine.”
That one was not fine. That one was printed on the wrong-colored shirt.
This time, Ben picked out a shirt. “Dude, the front and back graphics are swapped.” The T-shirt was literally backward.
“All right, so there’s one fuckup. I’ll take that back.” He threw that shirt over his shoulder and frowned.
“What about this?” I asked. The T-shirt in my hands had the graphic printed on the inside of the shirt. I don’t even know how that’s possible, unless Alan had turned the shirt inside out, printed it, and then flipped it back to normal. Was he trying to screw us? I couldn’t tell.
“What the fuck!” Ben cried. He was holding two T-shirts in the air. No print at all. We found ten more like that.
Alan had gone from being on the defense to taking a knee. “All right,” he admitted. “What do you wanna do?”
We needed a moment to think. “Give us a minute,” Mak said. And we marched back out into the hot Valley air. We retreated to Ben’s car and kicked the doors open. For the first five minutes after we climbed in, we didn’t say a thing. We were all searching for solutions in our head, like rats in a maze.
I cracked. “What’re we gonna do with all those dishrags? We can’t sell them. And we already burned through all our money buying those blanks, so it’s not like we can replace ’em.”
Mak said what everyone was thinking: “We’re out of business before we began!” Alan had ruined our goods, sending us into a tailspin. But even worse—he had wasted our time. It had been almost two months since we’d started this company, and we still didn’t have a T-shirt to show for ourselves. Even by 2003 standards, that was ridiculous. Three capable, intelligent guys and we couldn’t get a single T-shirt printed to order in eight weeks.
There’ve been plenty of crises like this over the years. As The Hundreds grew, the storms became costlier and more devastating, affecting not just the people at the top but the livelihood of everyone on board. There have been errors that cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. Something as minuscule as a misplaced zero on an Excel sheet would pass undetected by three levels of management, leading to a surplus of a thousand hoodies for which we didn’t have a home.
When you find yourself in the midst of such a disastrous miscalculation, it’s like having your computer freeze before you’ve backed up your work. All you can do is take a deep breath, gather your wits, and improvise from what’s left. Even if that means starting over. The Japanese have a beautiful saying for this—a maxim that has survived through atomic bombs, economic collapse, and countless tsunamis: Shikata ga nai. “There’s nothing to be done, so move on.” Move forward. It takes a bit of self-deception to mind-wipe the regret and a truckload of moxie to push through the work of regaining control. But sometimes it’s necessary.
Fifteen minutes later, we were back in Alan’s house, sorting through the casualties. The figures were hard to stomach. Each base shirt represented $5 down the drain. Ten bucks, fifteen, one hundred—there goes rent! By the end, we’d salvaged maybe twenty T-shirts that were decent enough to be worn without being a bad look for the wearer or The Hundreds. We didn’t pay Alan a dime—not that we had any money to give.
We flipped those twenty T-shirts to charitable friends and family out of the back of our trunk. We sold them at $20 a pop—or whatever folks were willing to bless us with for what would amount to a new gym tee. Many of those friends have held on to those first-edition The Hundreds shirts. It shocks me when I see how bad the art was. Even if Alan had printed them right, those shirts sucked. He was probably doing us a favor by getting unorthodox with the print placements; at least they looked provocative.
15. UPSET THE SETUP
WE’D MADE ABOUT $400 back from the debacle with Alan, enough to buy another batch of blanks downtown and get some printing done. Not as much volume as before, but enough to get us back on our feet. We asked around to see if anyone knew of a decent screen-printing shop, one that didn’t print designs upside down and on the insides of shirts. Mak’s cousin Goli had used a facility in Van Nuys called STIX for a school project, and she passed on its info.
“They’re cool guys,” she said. “Easy to work with. They’ll get the job done.”
I still remember walking into STIX’s front office for the first time. At first, we thought we were in the wrong place. It looked as if we had stumbled into a trucker’s man cave, buried under fifteen years of cigarette soot, take-out lunch menus, and Perfect 10 magazines. The den was carpeted, matted down, and gnarled after years of abuse. There was a pool table in the center of the room that doubled as a spare flat surface on which to lay out print samples, Pant
one books, and fabric scraps. Instead of a front desk, there was an L-shaped bar, and instead of a bartender there was Kenny. The guys who ran STIX—Kenny, Rick, and Jason—were blue-collar types who chain-smoked indoors, kept the Angels game on in the background, and screen printed for biker gangs. Kenny was the sales guy, fast and wily—always wiping that bulbous nose of his while shaking you down with a pitch.
“What’s up, fellas? What can I do you for?” he said. Kenny was that dude.
We were in too deep. Like, literally, too far into the room to back out. So, Mak kicked things off. “We need to get some T-shirts printed. We’re starting a clothing company and…”
Kenny rolled his eyes harder than a Kit-Cat Klock. “Let me guess. This is your first time printing tees. How about this—how many do you wanna make?”
“Oh, well…” Mak looked at us and we all shrugged at each other. After what Alan had put us through, we hadn’t discussed numbers yet. We just wanted to see how far we could get. “I dunno, maybe twenty?”
“Twenty? Twenty pallets? Twenty dozen? What do you mean twenty?”
“Like, twenty.” Mak filled in the gaps. “Twenty total shirts,” he clarified without flinching. Just so you know, print shops can’t just spit out a custom T-shirt, or twenty for that matter. The art gets digitized, then printed onto a film that is chemically burned into a silk screen (which is, by the way, not made with silk anymore, but nylon). Multiple colors in the art mean multiple screens, attached to a rotating press. Ink colors get mixed according to the art’s Pantones and squeezed into the porous shapes of the screens. The print gets baked into the shirt in the dryer and the shirt is then tagged, bagged, and packaged for delivery. It’s a labor-intensive process, which means screen-printing shops require minimums. That is, if you’re going to print one T-shirt, you might as well print two hundred, because it takes the same amount of labor and will be charged at the same rate.
And that’s why Kenny was so turned off by the idea of printing just twenty T-shirts. “Do you guys know what we do here?” he asked rhetorically. “We make all the shirts for the Lakers. You know when you go to a Staples Center game and they’re launching shirts out of a cannon to those thousands of drunk motherfuckers on the Kiss Cam? We print those. We do million-T-shirt orders for the State of California. When you’re driving up the 5 and see all those migrant workers hunched over strawberries in the fields, those are our shirts on their backs. So you’re asking me to stop everything we’re doing, shut down the machines, so that you can make twenty tees for your ‘clothing company’?”
Kenny started laughing. He called in Rick, the art guy, to look over my primitive designs. “What’d you draw this in?” Rick wondered aloud, and not in a good way. “Do you know how to use Adobe Illustrator?” I shook my head sheepishly. I was literally tracing my drawings at a super-high resolution on Photoshop. He advised, “Learn the programs. I can do the rest for you—this time—but I’m not always gonna be able to work with this.”
“I like you guys,” Kenny’s partner Jason growled. He looked like a broader, burlier Eddie Munster with a handlebar mustache and two barbell earrings. “I believe in you. We’ll give you a shot.” And just like that, STIX green-lighted The Hundreds’ twenty-T-shirt order. It was charity—performed out of the kindness buried deep in the charcoal of their blackened lungs. But we wouldn’t be here today without Jason, Kenny, and Rick. And their print shop wouldn’t be here today without us. I’m sure we would have found another shop, eventually. But in hindsight, it seems as if it almost had to work this way. And once we hit that green light, we floored it.
* * *
OUR FIRST stop was Fred Segal in Santa Monica, a mainstay of Los Angeles boutique shopping that delved into all points of progressive fashion—from jewelry to maharishi dragon pants to Creative Recreation footwear. It was also one of the first stores stateside to invite men’s streetwear into its shop. We had nothing to lose, so we aimed high. In those days, Fred Segal was one of the most reputable clothing retailers in the city, and we knew that if we could slide The Hundreds in there, we could sell anywhere.
Ben, Mak, and I were oblivious to the selling process, so we took a deep breath and marched straight up to the counter of the “Street” department.
“Hi, can we speak with the manager?”
“’Bout what?”
Tony, the buyer, was a husky black dude with cornrows and a heavy handshake. He didn’t really seem interested in what we had to say, but it was a slow afternoon, so he humored us.
“We’re from The Hundreds,” Ben said. “We want to see about getting our T-shirts into Fred Segal.”
“First of all, you’re looking for the buyer. That’s me.”
I could feel my ears burning hot but kept my gaze steady.
“Second, The Hundreds? I’ve never heard of it, guys. Sorry.”
“Never heard of it?” I replied. “I thought this was the coolest shop in the city. Don’t you always know what’s up?”
“Well. Yeah…” Tony faltered. “Wait. Who else do you guys sell to?” He was looking for some kind of cosign or credibility.
Ben answered, “We’re only looking overseas at this point, but thought that Fred Segal would be a good place to start our domestic business.” Before Tony had a moment to mull that over, Ben said, “Here, why don’t you take a look at some of our designs.”
I placed a wrinkled line sheet on the glass. I’d chopped together a catalog of our first T-shirts in black-and-white, but the JPEGs were pixelated and muddy. It was almost impossible to tell what was going on with each shirt, so we talked louder as Tony’s face twisted in confusion.
“What makes you guys different from every other shirt company that comes in here? Do you know how many new brands I see every day?”
“It’s not really about the T-shirts as much as it is about our website.” I yanked the sheet out from Tony’s hands.
“Okay, explain.”
“The Hundreds is about the culture and community more than the clothing. Everything we make has a story tied to people. So, if somebody buys a T-shirt, they won’t get the full picture until they go to thehundreds.com and read about the story behind the shirt and the person who designed it. The website brings people together. It’s like our little club.”
Tony stared at me in silence.
“I’ll take twelve shirts, but only on consignment. What sizes do you make?”
“We have medium, large, and extra-large. Are you sure you don’t want more? You’re gonna sell out of them,” Mak cautioned.
Tony gave him a look and ignored him. “Four-four-four. Drop them off here by next Thursday.”
* * *
TWELVE SHIRTS! There was no time to celebrate. While we waited on STIX to screen print our first order of T-shirts, we drove across town to Hollywood and pulled up to Brooklyn Projects on Melrose, L.A.’s skate/street pillar. The founders and co-owners Dominick “Brooklyn Dom” DeLuca and “OG Merf” Osborne (RIP) stocked skate supplies and held a coveted Nike SB account, but their shop was also recognized for supporting smaller, unknown T-shirt labels.
“Can we speak to the … buyer?” This time, Mak got it right.
“Yo. You’re lookin’ at him.” The domineering former MTV Headbangers Ball VJ stepped up. Everything about Dom is big: big voice, big eyes, big hair, big personality.
“Um, hi. This is Bobby and Ben. I’m Mak. We’re from The Hundreds. Have you heard of us?”
“No.”
“Well, you should have.”
I gave him the spiel about my blog, The Hundreds’ lifestyle, and why he should be grateful to sell our shirts.
Dom was hooked, but not wholly on board.
“Who else carries you?”
“Fred Segal,” Ben said coolly.
“Tony?”
We nodded our heads slowly.
“That’s my boy. Okay, I’ll take a few tees. Net thirty, though.”
The Hundreds was now officially stocked in two of L.A.’s prime acc
ounts.
* * *
THE MORNING we delivered Tony his shirts, we went to breakfast at Swingers down the street. Then we circled the block and returned right back to the corner of the Fred Segal parking lot. We reclined our seats, stalled for an hour, then called the shop.
“Yeah, hi, is this Fred Segal Street? I’m looking for a company called The Hundreds. Do you carry it?”
One of the clerks answered enthusiastically, “Yes! We just got in a shipment today, actually. You might want to head down here; it’s not gonna last.”
“Be right there.”
Ben called up Jon and then I called my girlfriend to come down to the store. We handed them cash to walk in, buy a The Hundreds shirt, and throw it right back into the bin in our trunk. Then we called more friends and family who would stop by on their way to the beach. A week later, we casually strolled in to Fred Segal on a warm Sunday afternoon and bumped into Tony on his way out.
“Hey! Hundreds guys!” His face lit up. “You were right. Your shirts blew out. Had no idea, man. I need more. What do you got?”
* * *
NOT MORE than a week after we’d picked up our first order from our screen printers, STIX, we were back for more.
“We need to make more shirts,” Mak told Kenny.
“No way. Look, you guys are cool, but we don’t have the time for this.”
“We’ll take a hundred.”
Kenny cocked his head. We were getting closer to the minimum. “Okay, but nothing too complicated.”
Deal. I didn’t know how to design sophisticated graphics yet anyway.
Days later, Ben’s Ford Explorer backed into STIX’s loading dock, packed door to trunk with boxes of blank shirts.
Jason came out from the back. “Hey! Hey! What’s going on here, guys?”
“Shit’s moving!” he called out to Jason. “It’s working!”
That afternoon, Jason sat us down and took a serious look at our program. He and Kenny broke down the costs of printing, the scheduling, and all the common mistakes garage T-shirt brands make. I have to really hand it to those guys: I think they saw something in us that resonated differently from all these other kids with start-up labels. I’m not sure what it was, but I know we had heart, we loved T-shirts, and we cared about the science of screen printing—an art in itself. Over the months and years, Rick took me through the artwork setup and preparation: color separations, halftones, spot colors, and the painstaking process of photo prints. Eventually, we’d take up part-time residence in that warehouse. The Valley summers were slow and scalding, but it allowed us to stay on top of the machines, approve strike offs, and ensure our orders were done on time.
This Is Not a T-Shirt Page 10
