Because of my ethnicity, my age, and my countercultural interests, people have assumed things about me throughout my life, instead of allowing me to tell them what I’m really about. It’s frustrating to be misunderstood like this, and I’ve forged so much of my identity around proving them wrong. Like tackling Raymond. But it doesn’t just start and end with surface stereotypes. I’ve also fought to be understood on deeper personal levels, especially when it comes to my creative endeavors like design and writing. The Hundreds was born of this desire to be acknowledged. I believe this was a universal struggle for all creators. We have a specific way of expressing ourselves and won’t be at peace until the world gets it.1
When the money guys dismissed us because of a column of lousy numbers, I felt unheard. And when the haters wrote us off as irrelevant and the critics declared The Hundreds a nonissue in new streetwear, I was bothered. Not because I was afraid that I was uncool or ashamed that my business was failing. I cared little about those things. But it irritated me because they were so myopic. By overemphasizing the numbers, they underestimated me and Ben and our community. Like Raymond, they stereotyped us and failed to appreciate the whole 145 pounds that was about to blindside them and take their heads off.
27. POINT PROVEN
THE BEST AND worst thing about entrepreneurship is that there are no rules. There’s a history behind you to acknowledge, learn from, and build off, but you also don’t want to follow the blueprint too closely; the past is in the past. Every generation progresses by questioning tradition, reinterpreting established practice, and adding its voice and style. It takes balls to forge new territory. It takes guts to say no to best practices. Whenever up-and-coming entrepreneurs ask me what it takes to gain the industry’s recognition, I say, “You shouldn’t care about earning their respect. You should be doing everything in your power to piss them off.”
I also like to say, “If you play by their rules, they’ll never let you win.”
And trust me, the OGs and predecessors don’t want to see you prevail. Your very presence eats up space, dollars, and spotlight, and no matter the size of the industry it’s too small to accommodate anyone new.
In 2003, a few months into having established The Hundreds, we attended one of the first Agenda shows downtown, as guests. We didn’t even have a business or product, let alone a viable concept or ideas. To get a feel for the clothing landscape and to soak up some knowledge, we visited Ben’s childhood friend Richard, who was selling his brand (for the purposes of my story, let’s call it Adjective Animal) at the trade show. Adjective Animal was on its way to becoming an established hip-hop-minded label with colorful graffiti-lettered T-shirt graphics and baggy cut-and-sew. As a punk kid, I was never into the rootsy hip-hop brands of the time, but I do remember admiring the full collection of apparel that Richard was exhibiting. We hadn’t even printed a single T-shirt, yet this guy was somehow manufacturing pants and headwear. Making actual clothes in China and India just seemed so abstract and far off to me and Ben. We were still squeezing paint onto AAA T-shirts in Van Nuys.
“What are you guys doing here?” Richard marveled from behind his booth. Richard was tall and beaky and aloof. I never felt comfortable with this guy. He was dry on the tone and snarky on the delivery. He didn’t even bother to get out of his chair. Instead, he interlocked his fingers behind his head, propped his feet up on the table, and said, “Aren’t you guys lawyers or something?”
“What’s up, Richard?” Ben asked, without addressing the jab. “We’re thinking of starting up a T-shirt company. Wondering if you could tell us some things. You know, break off some advice.” Between Ben, Mak, and myself, the only people we knew in the fashion business were this asshole and my girlfriend’s second cousin out in New York who designed wedding dresses. Without YouTube tutorials to refer to or DMs with our favorite designers to fish for advice from, our only hope was Richard.
“Yeah,” he snorted. “Don’t do it!”
Here we go.
“You guys are law students,” he said, laying into us again. “Finish school, get your six-figure job, and be happy with that. People like us don’t have any other option.” He motioned around the room to the other starry-eyed dreamers, the designers and founders nervously toiling behind cluttered racks and folding tables. “Do you see how many new T-shirt companies start up every day? It’s more than ever. Thousands! Yeah, go be lawyers.”
Damn. The air was sucked out of the room. The background noise grew muffled, and all I could hear was my heart beating through my ears. What was I smoking, thinking I could make a living selling T-shirts? Richard was right. What made my designs any different from all these other artists and designers? They already had more experience, and some were clearly more talented and had better resources. Did I think I could just waltz into the marketplace and have strangers trip over themselves to buy my clothes? At no point did I stop to think about the alternative. Yet here was Richard painting me a picture: Of course you want to start a T-shirt company. Everybody wants to start a T-shirt company, moron. But it’s challenging. It’s emotionally taxing. It’s financially draining. And nothing is guaranteed. Meanwhile, if I got through law school, there’d be a surefire pot of gold surrounded by girls in shimmery bikinis awaiting me, just as Abe promised. More money than any of these designers drawing pictures onto sweatshirts would see in a lifetime.
No. I shook it off. Richard was wrong. As we walked up and down the halls, passing tables piled high with cheap stickers and pins, flipped through racks of splatter-paint T-shirts, and talked to designers about their concepts, I sensed a glaring absence on the floor: me. I didn’t find my voice represented anywhere. My interests, my art, my style. Everyone was using this new buttery American Apparel T-shirt as their base, but I grew up on the rough and starchy AAA swap meet tees. There had to be other people like me who preferred a durable boxy shirt over a baby-soft fitted tee that hugged your pecs. There had to be an audience out there that preferred colorful, bold, parody T-shirt art over the digital graffiti aesthetic that was so popular in the early 2000s. What was everyone’s obsession with embroidered crosses and pocket designs about, anyway? What happened to clean, forthright workwear?
We stood in silence as the elevator doors closed, our tails tucked between our legs. I don’t know what Ben and Mak were thinking, but I was shell-shocked. With each descending floor, I thawed, the blood coursing through my veins, my head ringing like a Warner Bros. cartoon.
“Fuck him,” I muttered to myself, but just loud enough for Ben and Mak to hear; they turned their heads toward me. I looked straight ahead. “We’re gonna prove him wrong. We belong here. We don’t have another option either.”
By the time we got to the bottom floor, I was reinvigorated. Richard didn’t know the future. Nobody did. That meant that we had just as much of a shot as any of these other hundreds of millions of T-shirt brands. And our greatest strength? Our perspective.
It’s probably worth stating that Adjective Animal eventually blew up and soon after that blew out, and that The Hundreds eventually surpassed the brand. Ben and I ran into Richard at a local lunch spot not long ago, and he pulled us aside to apologize. “You were right all along,” he confessed. But we weren’t. To his credit, I didn’t know the future either. Richard had based his judgment on what he’d learned of a dog-eat-dog industry. Odds were that The Hundreds would have crashed and burned out of the gate. It took a fair bit of luck to make it out alive. But we weren’t just a clothing company like many of the upstarts at Agenda. We were assembling a community, and these types of fellowships are near impossible to break.1
The other thing we got right was to not let Richard’s hot take sear into our heads. I’ve come across this time and again in this vitriolic, bitter, and hateful scene. Everyone has an opinion, whether it’s supported by data or jealousy, but nobody knows what happens next. It’s beyond our control. There are so many factors and outside influences that contribute to a brand’s success or failure. The
political climate, a new Facebook algorithm, technological shifts—they all play into fashion trends and market movements. These outsized factors always trickle down to even the smallest of labels, no matter how much they think is in their dominion. Everything exists within an ecosystem. Something that happened years ago, thousands of miles away, can affect a customer’s decision to press “Purchase” today.
Ten years later, as our sales unexpectedly stalled, the bloodthirsty investors abruptly stopped knocking at the door and took their money elsewhere. They’d coldly abandoned us. To them, it was a simple equation. Statistically, declining brands—like ours at the time—are risky bets. They assumed they could predict the future of our business with Excel sheets. What they failed to quantify was our heart and avarice and how underdogs favor harsh climates. The basis of their evaluation was rooted in the past, but there has never been a brand like ours, with people like us, in a time like now.
You see it in the political climate. Strategists and forecasters are consistently proven wrong. I never thought I’d see the day when America elected a black president—not just once, but twice. Then, confounding every major poll and expert opinion, we elected a reality TV star. The Parkland survivors—a band of Florida teenagers—turned the nationwide sentiment on gun control, something lawmakers and other adults have historically failed to accomplish. Our naysayers completely missed the potency and combativeness of a core community. There is no exact science for this data; no one can measure the fight in an individual or the loyalty fomented by collectives. Just as no one could have predicted The Hundreds’ success from our first garbage T-shirts.
My parents didn’t get it. Nor did my law school professors. The print shop guys couldn’t see it. The buyer at Fred Segal wasn’t a believer. Accounts told us, “We’ve never heard of you guys; you’ll never make it.” Richard laughed us off. Tommy’s people said no. And the streetwear market slowly turned its back on us. But they all just gave us a reason to carry on. Every morning, when I’d hop on social media and converse with our fans, I was reminded that my community understood me. The critics, the bloggers, and the buyers pitched their stereotypes and assumptions right down the middle, and I stepped forward to take a hurricane of a swing.
28. SOMETIMES IT TAKES SOME TIME
I know someday I’ll get through to you
Until then I’ll just keep screaming
—Uniform Choice, “In Time”
ON THE HEELS of the abbreviated Tommy negotiation, we were courted by Seth Gerszberg of Ecko, an urban label with a rhinoceros logo that was wildly successful when I was in college. By 2009, Ecko had achieved a $1.5 billion valuation, predating Supreme’s record-breaking success by a decade. Seth is a bit of a rhino himself, stock and block, a mad scientist trapped in a football player’s body. I loved my talks with Seth, and if he had pitched us the price that we were dreaming of, we could have taken over the world.
He and his designer/partner Marc Ecko initiated the conversation by gifting us with a Swarovski crystal hourglass. Seth was a big collector of timepieces—time was central in his life—and along with this $30,000 article came a congratulatory letter on all our success, noting The Hundreds as the most promising brand in our category. This was flattering and we were admirers of Ecko’s work, so we replied with urgency. Ben and I flew out to New York to visit them in their offices.
Seth wanted to reimagine streetwear’s mainstream strategy by curating a collective of auspicious players (there were only a few of us left by that time) and attacking the market with a united front. For four hours, we sat in Seth’s office as he broke down the ebbs and flows of streetwear trends. He showed us charts of an apparel brand’s growth and tenure and how that’s accelerated over the generations. Labels used to climb for ten years and profit hundreds of millions of dollars at their peak. Today, they have a year or two to make their mark, for a fraction of the yield.
He broke the ice by recounting his outside opinion of The Hundreds when we first came on the scene in 2003. In the early 2000s, Ecko had been developing the perfect T-shirt, integrating the finest ring-spun cotton with a velvety hand-feel. Its pattern makers refined the T-shirt’s cut to fit all the right corners on all the different bodies. The shrinkage was precise; the cost was manageable. But by the time Seth, Marc, and their company had gone out to introduce this innovation, all these novice T-shirt makers (like us) had appeared, running loose in the marketplace. Even though Ecko was sitting on the Tesla of T-shirts, the kids wanted the Ford Fiesta: rough, open-ended blank T-shirts made in Mexico. These shirts were cheap, matched the sneakerhead style, and the hot, young brands were reverting to this vintage look.1
The moral of Seth’s story was that no matter what we do to stay relevant, when the campsite picks up and moves, you’ll wake up outside the tent. In fashion, especially, it’s unavoidable. In 2013, we were doing everything we could to connect with our customers. We opened flagship stores, released high-profile collaborations, and developed our own eyewear and footwear programs, but our fan base was slipping through our fingers. We couldn’t do much but stand back and let them go.2 Our sales lost footing, then plunged.
Like the “This is fine” meme of the cartoon dog sipping coffee in a burning house, for the next few years we struggled to maintain.3 Men’s fashion chose one of three doors, none of which welcomed The Hundreds: Americana or “trad,” street goth, and core skateboarding. Our aesthetic landed in the center of the Venn diagram, but we weren’t leading any one category. As the U.S. economy repaired itself, we upped our orders with overseas accounts. We swung wide into the media space, investing in video content and editorial. And here we were, resting in a new ninety-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Vernon, right outside downtown Los Angeles, having leased five times the space we needed at the time because our plan was to grow five times in size over the next five years.
* * *
IF I had to blame one thing, it’s that we had developed too fast. In The Hundreds’ formative years, the hype was so swift and blinding that we didn’t have time to lay the right foundation for our brand. Ben and I never even had a business plan. We were signing Disney licensing contracts before we had a mission statement (I have yet to write one for The Hundreds). The blogs and media descended on us like locusts. Our entrepreneurial story was sensational and fun, and “I can’t believe the margins these kids are making off T-shirts!” My blog was in widespread circulation in the design and business space, and our staff exploded. We couldn’t even enjoy the ride; we just had to hold on.
Until that point, our business was a Winchester House of improvisations and wild guesses. No matter how we built it, they kept coming. The train sped up, more coal in the fire. Designs went from thoughtful to throwaway, without a difference in sales. Each exorbitant expenditure—like taking over Disneyland for a party—was classified as a “marketing” expense. We let the fires lead the way. So when the switch flipped and the train came to a screeching halt, we finally took a breather to assess the breakdowns.
In hindsight, our tumble was unavoidable. By the mid-2010s, many of us in the streetwear space were running into the same roadblocks: poor infrastructure prevented us from bridging the transition from garage brand to profitable business. We found ourselves facing production difficulties and straight-up fatigue. Nearly every brand in our category perished.
Most damning, however, was that we were losing relevancy. The kids who grew up with our generation’s street brands aged out, and their little brothers were hungry for something fresh and different. A new breed of designers like PYREX, Black Scale, Hood By Air, and STAMPD deflated the whimsy of streetwear and painted street fashion in opaque black tones, incorporating sports jerseys and gothic art into a look that was popularized by A$AP Rocky, Rick Owens, and a crop of newly minted street corner fashionistas. Suddenly our denomination of streetwear (New Era fitteds, allover-print hoodies, and oversized graphic T-shirts) seemed obsolete.
High fashion capitalized on the look and moved in. Over th
e years, the term “streetwear” itself would be adopted, co-opted, and distorted by elite designers at Fashion Week and in the pages of Vogue. Streetwear and sneakers broke aboveground, and the sky was the limit. Fashion used to be partitioned between the Paris runway, the department stores, and the swap meet. Now the internet was stirring it all together with brands like Off-White, Alyx, Fear of God, A-COLD-WALL, and AMIRI taking center stage. Rappers turned designers sat front row. Nike and adidas battled it out like Godzilla and King Kong, devastating the street marketplace around them in the process. And outside, breaking down the walls, the direct-to-consumer upstarts challenged all the traditional rules. Babylon, Joefreshgoods, Chinatown Market, Carrots, and FTP capitalized on their zealous bases, drawing people to line up down the block and widening the generation gap.
With our genre of streetwear migrating to extravagant haute couture, The Hundreds was suddenly missing the mark. Internally, nothing had reprogrammed as far as culture and design process. I was still drawing inspiration from the same well, but we were a couple years into selling to the mall stores at this point. Although we had started slow with Zumiez and PacSun, neighboring indie accounts on Main Street complained and used this excuse of unfair competition as a crutch to taper off their buys. There was no distinction in the online chatter. For better or worse, The Hundreds had changed. There were more kids wearing our clothes now. And in the eyes of the “right kids,” these were the “wrong kids”—the ones who weren’t versed in the culture. The Hundreds had betrayed its community by attaining mass appeal, they cried. “The Hundreds sold out.”
* * *
WE WEREN’T the new kids anymore with the next big thing. We were the awkward teenager now, trying to make sense of his bones, yet to grow into his body. It was time to act our age and nurture a healthy business. Ten years in, as the brand’s energy decelerated in the news cycles, Ben said, “We have to look at this like we’re starting over.” And we did, but this time we did it the right way: our way.
This Is Not a T-Shirt Page 19
