Or, they refuted it. The Roc-A-Fella camp requested the shirt, but Dame Dash supposedly hated it. Meanwhile, Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys wore the tee on a publicity tour, our first celebrity placement. There were countless knockoffs and bootlegs that followed, and a lot of people made money off the controversial sentiment. Even Nas adopted “Hip-Hop Is Dead” as an album title years down the road. We had a winner and stores wanted it. Now we had a centerpiece to build a collection around. As our retail doors grew, so did our line. Within a couple seasons, our footprint doubled.
Every three months, we unloaded another ten T-shirts into the pipeline. “Honkys” (the Cleveland Indians’ mascot turned into a redneck), “Cans” (Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans appropriated into spray cans and paint buckets), and a collaboration with the Japanese artist Usugrow performed well for us, but after a couple years of printing the best graphic tees, I wanted our name to stand on its own as a brand. At this point, we were only as good as our last clever T-shirt, which was both unsustainable and exhausting. I had created hundreds of original designs, and T-shirts that simply read “The Hundreds” were our worst sellers. We were nothing more than a novelty T-shirt company, an edgier version of what you’d pick up as a stocking stuffer in an airport souvenir store.
I knew, however, that the value in our clothes wasn’t the kooky parody or nervy design. It was the attitude and status that hummed in the background of our product. If you looked at the art that came forth from The Hundreds, there was a singular vision and tone that was uniquely ours, and people wanted more of it. We just had to package it against an insignia or mark that our following could cop as an identity. It was time to institute a logo for the brand.
The problem was that designing a logo was far from a priority for me. This was an era where fat DC lockups, Sean John emblems, and Juicy Couture ass slaps dominated the fashion landscape. I was tired of big, heavy logos overwhelming the clothes. Even the Polo horse mushroomed in size. Clothing was diminished to a billboard. It’s a shame how much of men’s streetwear sales aren’t motivated by design and quality. (Then again, male shoppers are motivated by brand names. Fashion, for a lot of guys, boils down to status, belonging, and tribalism.)
I wasn’t formally trained and I lacked experience, but I had my own rules when it came to constructing logos. An impactful icon—a graphic representation of the brand—should be able to be drawn by a kindergartner in a few steps. Like the McDonald’s M or the Playboy bunny. I wanted a logo so succinct, so potent, that you could trace the outline without lifting the pen. After all, it’s been said that “brevity is the soul of wit.” I also believe that the less alphabet letters are incorporated into the icon, the more conspicuous it can be. I hate when brands use an initial or the entire word(s) in their logo. It’s a cheat, the easy way out. Plus, a brand might be confused for another sharing the same letters. What about an image that’s one of a kind? Whittle the shapes down to such a simple and uncomplicated vision that a few intersecting lines can capture the universe of a brand. For example, Target. Apple. It’s easier said than done.
There needed to be a reason for the icon, a story. It couldn’t be arbitrary. It had to embody our philosophy. I listened for the brand’s heartbeat. The 1980s stepped forward, and animation. Hanna-Barbera, Disney, Looney Tunes. Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner with anvils and portable black holes. But there was one weapon that symbolized an entire chapter of cartoon history: the bomb. A black steel sphere, the size and shape of a small bowling ball, tethered to a long, sizzling wick. Upon detonation, it explodes into a jagged shape.
I drew a detailed bomb at first, then started editing. I reminded myself that not only should a kid be able to draw this in seconds but also people have got to be able to tell what it is from a distance. I kept the circle intact. Anyone can draw a circle; that’s easy. Then I worked on the flare in the shape of a seven-pointed star. We were left with the silhouette of a cartoon bomb that unmistakably represented The Hundreds and all its inspirations. We debuted the “Solid Bomb” logo as our first icon, slapping the decals on street signs and—to this day—stamping it on the back collar of our T-shirts.
* * *
“YOU KNOW, for being such a cartoon guy, how come you’ve never drawn a cartoon version of our bomb?”
It was late into the morning, and we were working out of my studio apartment on Venice Boulevard. Ben took a break from hounding shops for past-due payments. We liked to get paid up front, but for the exclusive image doors we allowed “terms.” Net thirty, at the most net sixty. This meant the owners had thirty or sixty days after delivery of our product to pay us. It was a good look to be in these more prestigious boutiques, so most brands swallowed the agreement. Of course, we also rarely got paid on time—if ever. We’d chalk up the loss to marketing expenses. It was a tiring and frustrating game, but we all played it.
“What do you mean a cartoon bomb? That’s what Solid Bomb is,” I said in my defense.
Ben hovered over my desk, watching me illustrate a new T-shirt graphic: a set of three skulls with candles melting on top of them. The drawing was a commentary on how we were working ourselves to death: “burning the candle at both ends.” I put down my markers.
“No. I’m saying a cartoon bomb with a cartoon face. Like one of your characters.” He pointed to the loose scraps of computer paper strewn around my bedroom. I had sketches of pigs in cop uniforms, dead cats with their eyes crossed out (I’m a dog person),1 and three monkeys in the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil poses (subtext: industry hate). I liked drawing caricatures of people most of all, their faces taking on my own features in exaggerated form. Big, sad eyes, drooping under the weight of heavy lids. Full mouths, rails of teeth, long grotesque limbs.
A cartoon bomb character. Ben was hitting outside the box. I didn’t think it served us to have a cartoony logo—we’d be limiting ourselves to a younger audience—but The Hundreds could use a fun mascot. Michelin has the Michelin Man and Geico has the gecko, while both corporations retain their classic logos. The Phillies have a timeless P on their caps, but the colorful Phanatic revs the crowd. Post-Y2K, corporations eased off mascots in favor of sleeker branding, but I dug the wistful nostalgia around them. I always had a thing for Americana advertising characters.
Later that night, long after Ben left his desk and I’d reached the bottom of a syrupy Merlot, I cracked open my bedroom window and let the crickets’ chirps filter in. Under a fluorescent desk light, I gathered my yellow pencils and sketchbook. Page after page, I drew disembodied facial expressions. Wide, toothy grins. Leery eyes and pursed lips. None of them seemed to apply. If our bomb were to have a personality, he wouldn’t be smug or aggressive. How would he react to the dwindling spark above him, the imminent boom? He wouldn’t want it at all, I decided, and drew his face in a state of shock.
I liked the idea that this moment was frozen in time. The bomb was just about to explode, but the blast would never be realized. It was a frank metaphor for our brand strategy. We wanted to stay underground for as long as possible, serving our loyal niche audience. The Hundreds would hover right under the surface of the mainstream but never give itself over completely. The character represented the discipline required in keeping our brand from blowing up.
Overstated, anxious eyes. A mouth held agape. Tilted forward and flinching at what’s to come. I scanned the final rendering into my Dell laptop and vectorized the cartoon in Adobe Illustrator. The loose, wiggly pencil lines stood straight and bold now. He needed a name, but it was nearing 4:00 a.m. and I had class in five hours. I was eager to share our mascot with the world, so I uploaded him to my blog and asked our readers to come up with something. I guess this was our first contest. “NAME OUR MASCOT!” the flyer read. Ben and I would choose the winner in the next twenty-four hours. The winner would get a free T-shirt.
I woke up to over two hundred emails in my in-box. There were a few “Bo(m)bby Hundreds” votes in the pile and a “Kablooey Louie.” And two separate fa
ns submitted “Adam Bomb.” It stuck. There was something funny about giving a catastrophic explosive a banal human name (like Brian, the dog on Family Guy). We called him Adam for short and treated him like a real person.2 I built a Myspace page for Adam Bomb and listed in his bio “black,” “round,” and “has a short fuse.”
The first time he appeared on clothing was the back of a Freshjive collaboration. He went unnoticed. The following season, our holiday collection of 2006, he got his own sweatshirt. Adam nestled between a lowercase t and h in block letters, but the product didn’t sell. Our average customer was confused by the character. They expected social commentary, nostalgic references, or provocative designs from The Hundreds. Adam Bomb hadn’t set in deep enough to prove himself. Plus, no one knew we were committing to Adam Bomb as our official mascot.
We tried a couple more times throughout the next year and struck out. But in November 2007, we converted Adam Bomb into an orange basketball,3 and that fateful twist of the knob changed people’s minds. The shirt, titled “Bridgeburners,” was part of a sports parody collection with team names that complemented our MO like “Firestarters” and “Noisemakers.” The “Bridgeburners” tee merged a basketball into Adam and not only blew the other designs out of the water but was the highest-selling piece of the season. We knew most purchasers were only buying “Bridgeburners” because it was the first The Hundreds shirt with a basketball on it (I could’ve drawn a basketball in crayon with my left hand, and it would’ve sold as much), but we rode the momentum anyway.
We went harder. Branding is about making your customers comfortable, secure with buying your product. It’s about letting them know that you aren’t going anywhere. That they are buying something stable and unfading. They don’t want to take a risk. Everyone wants to be unique, but no one wants to be the only one asking themselves, “Will I get teased for wearing this?” or “Will anyone know what this is?”
The only way to get your audience on board with your logo is by showing them how serious you are about it. Commitment! That means posting it and pasting it, expending the sweat to publicize it, and yes, investing dollars into it. Adam Bomb was featured everywhere—from T-shirts to backpacks, key chains to wheatpaste posters. He graced the backs of celebrities like The Game, Olivia Munn, Jaden Smith, and Wiz Khalifa. He dominated billboard campaigns in Los Angeles and San Francisco, without a mention of The Hundreds name. Just giant black walls with a forty-foot Adam Bomb painted on them. In 2012, Adam Bomb flashed on the highest marquee in Times Square, the advertising mecca. These are the lengths we went to to make our customers feel safe wearing that big, round bomb on their backs.
Adam Bomb—like Supreme’s box logo or Bape’s ape head—stands as one of the most recognizable icons in streetwear history, epitomizing the early-2000s chapter of naive and elemental brand establishment. The sneaker designer Jon Buscemi once commended us on it, saying, “You made your own Nike swoosh.” We couldn’t disagree. Adam Bomb was an unexpected power-up, like a Super Mario boost. We weren’t invincible, but we had a clear advantage. While most of our competitors bounced between isolated designs, Adam Bomb was a panacea that compensated for weaker pieces and carried us over slower collections. Other brands—well, every brand—hunt for a bestselling logo like this, their golden ticket. Most fall short.
I knew so much of it was dumb luck. Adam Bomb was striking a nerve with the customer and the culture. At first, this was a rewarding and encouraging stroke of good fortune. Adam Bomb’s animated nature lined up with the youthful emotion of street culture in the late 2000s. Kanye West had yet to turn irritable street goth, still bright-eyed and dazzling behind shutter shades and a College Dropout bear letterman jacket. Takashi Murakami was achieving peak gallery status with his Louis Vuitton flower prints and cheeky Dobby character. Pharrell’s Stan Smith–inspired Ice Cream sneakers were draped in contrasting pastel prints of cartoon pagers and diamonds.
However, strokes of luck are often accompanied by unexpected consequences. Over the next five years, in spite of Adam Bomb’s blessings, I slid from love to apathy to disgust with our character. I didn’t anticipate how viscerally I’d turn against my own monster, but I started to curse my creation. As if Dr. Frankenstein were a T-shirt designer.
For starters, Adam Bomb—the silly, bug-eyed cartoon bomb—was supposed to be our mascot, not our logo. Remember, the Phillies embroidered their script P—not the Phanatic’s furry face—on their official uniforms. Yet here was Adam, taking off in the marketplace by assuming our brand’s total identity. Within two years, Adam Bomb eclipsed everything else we had accomplished in strategically building this brand: the apparel design, the exclusive interviews with iconic figures on our website, the marketing campaigns built around painstaking collaborations, and the experiences we infused into our stores. Initially confused by the mascot’s takeover, our core customer stuck with us, supportive of our main endeavors. Then a new generation of fans glommed on to The Hundreds brand solely because of the bomb, wearing it head to toe like a uniform, ignorant to our surrounding brand narrative. A fan set up a “FuckYeahTheHundreds” Tumblr that was an infinite stream of teenagers distorted in fish-eye selfies, proudly flashing their Adam Bomb stamps. Tattoo photos flooded our in-boxes—Adam Bombs permanently inked on arms and necks. I didn’t have the heart to tell the victims when the icon was inked inverted or backward.
Adam Bomb was a runaway train. Stores went from wondering, “What’s with this bomb stuff?” to asking, “The Hundreds? You guys do Adam Bomb, right?” No matter how much we sweat over our cut-and-sew apparel, regardless of the thoughtfulness and consideration imbued in the T-shirts, the majority of customers were only scanning The Hundreds for that black, red, and yellow insignia. It got to the point where shops wouldn’t buy pieces from us unless they had Adam Bomb on there somewhere. We were forced to stitch him onto cardigan sweaters and chino pants (garments on which Adam Bomb had no business finding residence) just to meet our production minimums and so the collection could see the light of day. The irony was that our design eye was getting more sophisticated and our taste levels more refined, and as our technique flourished, so did our design choices. Yet Adam Bomb contradicted this progression. No matter how smart our clothing was getting, that small patch on the crest or direct embroidery on the back compromised the piece’s maturity.
I started to hate Adam Bomb. I hated the way people confused the metaphor. I hated how we’d score a sought-after collaboration with a cool brand, getting pumped on the innovative art both parties might produce together, only to have the other side submit their reworking of Adam Bomb as the proposal. I hated how Adam Bomb’s aesthetic failed to jibe with our punk rock, black-and-white photocopied designs and traditional men’s clothing. I hated the inevitability that no matter what I did with my career, I’d be remembered as “the bomb guy. He drew bombs. One of the best to ever do it, really.”
23. BOOM
What could a businessman ever want more
Than to have us sucking in his store
—Fugazi, “Merchandise”
“BOBBY! CAN WE get a photo?”
This happens sometimes. No, I’m not a celebrity (contrary to what my mom might tell you), but like YouTube stars or social media personalities, I’ve got a niche fan base. They’re the only ones who can decipher the difference between my face and the actor John Cho’s. I’m recognized by fourteen-year-old Echo Park skate rats; or Filipino sneakerheads; or surly dudes hanging with other surly dudes, collared with neck tattoos, neglecting bored girlfriends. The way these guys do a double take when they catch me out of the corner of their eye, pause a beat, and inch the awkward approach flags (a) an oncoming sucker punch or (b) a selfie. Either way, I always brace myself.
“Hey, man! Love what you’ve done for the culture! Are you hiring?”
“My friends and I have a brand too. Can you take a half hour to look through my photos and tell me what you think?”
“I used to wear your shit all the time in hig
h school. Then I grew up, wrapped it up in a garbage bag, and lit it on fire. Do you guys make neckties? Can I get one for free?”
But tonight, it’s not some gold-grilled fuccboi inquiring about the next collab. It’s my friends and family asking for pictures together. These are people I’ve known my entire life smiling at me, proud of me, as if I were a hero. Weird. Ben looks at me and grins. Together, we’re standing in the courtyard at Disneyland, encircled by loved ones and loyalists who are snapping phone pics and posing with us as if we were Mickey and Minnie. It’s 2013 and our company turns ten this year. To celebrate the anniversary, we wanted to go big. We’d thrown block parties and Gucci Mane concerts before—parties so big and memorable that riot police showed up—but our tenth birthday had to be exceptional.
“What about shutting down Disneyland for a night? Just for our community?” I wondered out loud.
It was the most outrageous, over-the-top party I could think of, outside flying everyone to Ibiza on private jets. Rap show? Art exhibition? Been there, done those. Stereotypical streetwear events bump for the night, then disappear deep down in the Instagram feed. But everyone remembers Disneyland: where Inside Out–style “core memories” are made. Only question was, could it be done?
“It’s America,” Ben said. “Money talks. Everything has a price.”
This Is Not a T-Shirt Page 16
