In hard times, I like to call on my old friend Jim Thiebaud. Jim was a big skateboarder in the 1980s, but in my opinion his true success and impact came later as cofounder of Real Skateboards and vice president of Deluxe Distribution. If any industry has weathered the violent ups and downs of youth culture, it’s skateboarding. There’s this great line in the documentary The Man Who Souled the World where Steve Rocco, founder of World Industries, says, “Here’s the thing about skaters, it’s pretty simple. You set ’em loose. They do whatever they want. They will destroy everything around. And you can sit there and laugh at it, but the problem is, once they’ve done destroying everything, then they go for you. There’s nothing left for ’em!” Skateboarders, more than anyone, are familiar with building your idols and breaking them down.
Jim has survived so many peaks and valleys that he’s eerily Zen in the rainy days. Although streetwear has only surmounted a couple of these rotations, skateboarding off roads through a terrain of rise and demise in trends every several years. And every time Jim and Deluxe pull through to the other side, they’re a little bit stronger, and wiser, and more prepared for the next round of challenges.
While everyone in our streetwear sector was scrambling, Jim gave us perspective. When the tides turn, the first order of business is to conserve as much fuel as possible. “Cut fast and cut deep” was one of Jim’s first pieces of advice, in reference to any extraneous overhead that might be weighing us down. Whether that meant chopping staff or production or business-class flights, we ran toward all luxuries with a scythe. It was painful and embarrassing to edit our team down, but Ben and I forced ourselves to consider the greater good. Sacrifice one to save many, sure … but really it was sacrifice many to save ourselves. If we kept dicking around, the entire company could topple. We had to act fast.
As online sales escalated for The Hundreds (and global retail in general), we were forced to take a hard look at our own brick-and-mortar stores. What was their central purpose—was it sales or marketing? While we calculated, Ben put an immediate hold on any new The Hundreds storefronts. Although we were in the green in our L.A., San Francisco, and New York stores, and they were providing a sanctuary for our kids, they were also sapping us of overhead dollars: rising rent in gentrifying neighborhoods, staffing and maintenance, store-exclusive product, events, and so on. More critically, our stores drained us of emotional energy. A couple of the stores were plagued with personnel issues like employee theft (although we were angry about the money, the heartaches from disloyalty were an exhausting distraction from daily business). Then there were complications outside our control, like agitated neighbors (“Turn down the music!”) and inclement weather (polar vortex problems).
Restaurants and nightclubs grow on the strength of their newness. After a couple years, the novelty wears off, and they become a business like any other—relying on marketing and reinvention. We were spread so thin between all our endeavors (a quarterly print magazine, YouTube series, and international distribution) that we strained to circle back to our shops. Eventually, the retail energy subsided.
Ben also surmised that because he had locked in a once-in-a-lifetime lease on our SoHo location during the recession, we could make more money by just handing over the keys to a new tenant as rents doubled, then tripled in our district. I hated this solution at first, because our New York store granted us priceless exposure in the international shopping mecca. The banner of that store sailed over a historic neighborhood and was itself worth the marketing expense. But now was not the time to be stressing over brand awareness. When the shit hits the fan, advertising is the first thing to go. We had to salvage the business before we could afford to spread the good news with retail stores again. Ironically, we passed the store on to a new “high-end streetwear” brand that capitalized on all the trends that missed us: jogger pants, fashion fuccbois, and celebrity endorsements.4
After New York, Ben took the same course of action with The Hundreds Santa Monica. When we moved in, outside of tourism Santa Monica wasn’t exactly a hotbed of commerce. By the mid-2010s, however, climate change had wrapped summer’s warmth around Los Angeles for eight months of the year. The city cut the ribbon on a Metrolink train stop on our building’s doorstep. The neighborhood was gentrifying around the rise of Silicon Beach, America’s best new restaurants opened along Abbot Kinney Boulevard, and property values in the area were exploding. In 2015, after half a decade in Santa Monica, Ben realized we could cut down on overhead while simultaneously making a fat profit from subletting the building, and we bade goodbye to our Broadway location. We happily subleased our space to a small-time women’s clothing boutique with its own bright-eyed California dreams.
We continued to tinker and toy with the internal business, scraping up loose change from our seat cushions. Ben and our vice president, Joey Gonzalez, made more strategic buys, meaning they were making better-educated guesses as to which pieces to produce. My early design process, which I’d developed in Hong Kong, consisted in my producing whatever I wanted and Ben going out and selling it: reflective corduroy pants, gingham cargo shorts? Ben would sell it.
This system is effective for an avant-garde, boutique brand on a small-time scale, but for a larger brand selling to a wider audience, most customers can’t swallow a turquoise T-shirt printed all over with cherries. Our designers still conceptualize garments that are art and passion led, but now we’re realistic about their range with the consumer. Think of the flamboyant ensembles on the runway. Typical shoppers can’t wear these items in their everyday lives, but they look to these examples—these opinions—to set the designer’s tone and the brand’s attitude. So, we produced the off-the-wall apparel in more sensible quantities, accentuating them as seasonal statements for editorial shoots and advertising. Conversely, we found a sweet spot with “dad” caps, color-blocked knits, and anorak jackets, so we included them as a baseline throughout regular deliveries. As a result, our brand was less schizophrenic in design offerings and felt tighter as a unified presentation. Smarter business doesn’t always mean stronger branding, but in this case sales consideration refined our look and voice. Plus, our product sold through faster in our stores, leaving us with less fat stocked up in the warehouse.5
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STREETWEAR IS special for a number of reasons, including its limited-edition distribution and hype economy, but its most distinguishing mark is collaborations. Of course, the idea of a co-brand or an artist project is nothing new. Brands have long cross-pollinated across disparate markets. Collaborations have worked for everyone from the Allied forces in World War II to Madonna and Britney Spears, with their MTV-broadcast kiss, and Doritos with their Tapatío-flavored chips. Streetwear, however, mastered the art of the collaboration by distilling it into noisy and punchy hits, like capturing lightning in a bottle and selling it in editions of one hundred. In recent years, this consistent pattern of collaborations has resulted in the “drop” calendar. Where fashion historically worked on a seasonal delivery schedule, the releases are now continuous and arbitrary. At The Hundreds, we now do a drop a week, with collaborations and special projects interrupting your Instagram feed twice a month.
Due to the frequency and success of collaborations, it’s often the go-to conversation topic with our friends and fans. “What’s your next collab?” and “How do collaborations work?” The latter is a question by which I’m often stumped. I don’t know—how do you make new friends? You just do it. Yet I know what the kids are asking: “How do you negotiate the terms of a collaboration with a partner?” In that regard, the answer is quite simple: different partnerships require different agreements. Licensing projects with movie studios takes lawyers and contracts. Meanwhile, if you work with your friends’ T-shirt label, you can divvy everything up over handshakes and beers.
But how, and why, do collaborations work so well in streetwear? That goes back to our foundation as arbiters of culture. Collaborations make sense because they require different minds to come togethe
r and create something original. It’s not just about Virgil Abloh and a Nike Air Presto. The shoe is an embodiment of progression, a new idea that didn’t exist before. Collaborations literally make something out of nothing. The friendship between me and Ben was a collaboration that yielded The Hundreds. Our community itself is also a collaboration of people and stories. Accordingly, collaborations also speak to our championing of diversity by mixing independent groups and creating unexpected bonds.
When sales were slumping, we pared down our weaknesses and pinpointed our strengths. Collaborations are in our brand DNA and can be found in The Hundreds’ first collection in fall 2003. Since then, we’ve offered our customers a series of collabs with artists, musicians, other labels, and entertainment properties. Some of our biggest projects have included adidas sneakers, Casio G-Shock watches, Kenny Scharf jackets, Lil B T-shirts, and Death Row Records hoodies. We’ve designed Eames chairs with Modernica and gloves with Mechanix. We’ve collaborated on snowboards, aprons, hot sauce, and a DeLorean. Some of my personal favorites include an apparel collection with the estate of Jackson Pollock, Stanley Kubrick, a Nerf Turbo football, music projects with Revelation and Epitaph Records, and a Roger Rabbit line with Disney that took over eleven years of negotiations.
We were offering collaborations like these a few times a year, but it wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy an attention-deficit-disorder-addled marketplace. So, we focused our efforts on scouting and locking in collaborations scheduled to drop every other week. And it hasn’t been easy for our team to ramp up the release calendar. First, we have to find partners that make sense for us to collaborate with, the ones that contribute to our character just as much as to the bottom line. Collaborations are like hooking up. A little of them ends up in you, and vice versa. There’s also shared reputations to consider. So it’s important to aim high while staying true to your brand.
While other brands may shoot for the easy and obvious, we try to pursue the narratives that align with our interests, even if they aren’t attached to recognizable properties. Everything we do begins with a story. So, when Disney offered for us to interpret Mickey Mouse, we asked for the slightly more obscure Peter Pan’s Lost Boys instead, because the Lost Boys offered a better analogue for us as a crew.
There were more hardships. Negotiations around collaborations can be backbreaking. Sometimes, we would go back and forth with a partner for years before the rug would be pulled out from under the project—failure to agree on a contract’s terms, interference from a rival brand, or just plain cold feet. For every The Hundreds collaboration you see, there are another nine that never saw the light of day.6 Any proper business would laugh at this return on investment. We knew, however, that the labor and emotion invested into all ten potential collaborations made the one success story worthwhile.
With so many drops, of course there was the fear of diminishing returns. Could an onslaught of releases exhaust our customers? In practice, the more special projects we offered, the more invested our audience became in our storytelling. Collaborations with outside partners weren’t opportunistic money grabs—they provided us with the space to reveal other facets of our character. The Hundreds became nuanced and complex instead of a one-dimensional clothing company.
Our fans not only kept coming back, but they multiplied. As we spoke to different subcultures, we attracted the curiosity of new communities. For Elvira fans, our Halloween collaboration with the cult horror personality was their first introduction to our brand. The next week, much of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s niche theater fan base discovered The Hundreds for the first time through a co-branded project. More drops and releases also meant we were in the news more. We held the world’s attention, and The Hundreds ingrained trust in our audience. Every week, they could anticipate something new and meaningful from us as people and as storytellers. If they wanted to keep listening, I wanted to keep talking.
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ON THE personal front, my wife and I suffered through a scary season when our doctor suspected she was sick. She’s fine and healthy now. But in those weeks, I spent a lot of time reflecting on mortality and purpose. I had been busily pruning and modifying the company and consumer-facing brand, but what of personal fulfillment?
“What makes me happiest?”
I wasn’t motivated by money or respect. I was driven by the work itself, the process. That was the fun part. I also loved meeting new people and investing in existing relationships. My reward was the connection I was making with our fans and the connections our fans were making with each other.
Beyond work, it was surfing or reading that put the biggest smile on my face. These were simple and relatively free pastimes. It’d hit me as I sat in the ocean: Anything beyond this was ancillary, superfluous, another distraction, something new to stress about. Life and work are hard enough as it is, why clutter my vision with things I don’t need? I sold my DeLorean. I dumped my sneaker collection. I freed myself from this fictional idea of worldly success.
I concluded that above all, what matters most is the opinion of my family—my wife and children. As long as they’re stoked on me, everyone else can screw themselves. They aren’t proudest of me when I lock in an epic collaboration, or meet a celebrity, or score big sales with a new product. They want me to be happy with my work. To bring that joy home is priceless and honorable. And nothing makes me love The Hundreds more than the fact that it allows me to do work of which I am proud.
I imported that philosophy to the office.
“From now on,” I told my staff on my first day back, “let’s try to work on projects that we will gladly boast about.”
We knew what it felt like to do the right thing in the market’s eyes and feel soulless. No amount of sales could fill that emptiness, but even worse our customers were so attuned to our heartbeat that they could sense if we were being off-brand. Product sell-through would suffer regardless.
“And sometimes we’re gonna have to make things we aren’t head over heels about, but let’s infuse our flavor into it and make it ours. I want you to own your work here, be proud of what you do, and hold your head up high when you see your product out on the streets.”
Our wholesale accounts begged us to make jogger pants and to revive Adam Bomb, surefire bets in a volatile marketplace. We declined, frustrating them. We doubled down on our core themes of baggy chinos and L.A.-styled workwear, although all indicators pointed to East Coast nineties sportswear and luxe fashion. Stores dropped us, fuccbois dissed us, but we were curating our audience. Slowly but surely, we again carved out a niche for ourselves. The Hundreds wasn’t the most hyped streetwear brand during these years, but we were uniquely us, and our pride radiated through our results. Our community held fast to us, as they would to an oak tree in a cyclone. And once the storm passed, our brand and its constituents were some of the last ones standing.
After four or five years of darkness, we were finally starting to see some light. The year-to-year reports were making an about-face. Not only had sales stopped diving, but in some categories we were doing the best we’d ever done. There wasn’t one fix that explained this. What we were experiencing was the sum of all those tiny tweaks we’d diligently implemented over the years (tweaks we’d made without any guarantee of results).
“Maybe we should reuse glass cups, instead of buying five hundred red plastic Costco cups every week.”
“Do we really need a full-time person just to cut party flyers? Can we find an intern for that?”
“Okay, fine, I won’t fly first-class on Singapore Airlines … for now…”
Our staff had been broken down and rebuilt into a dream team that reflected and reciprocated our personal values: no more know-it-alls, arrogant assholes, and freeloaders. The designs were cohesive and consistently represented us. We’d cultivated a signature style, something that most designers never develop. We weren’t in as many stockists as before, but we were in the right ones, stores that suited us and appreciated our brand, stores like P’s &
Q’s in Philadelphia, Compound Gallery in Portland, and Wish in Atlanta. Our orders went as deep as our relationships with these accounts. Meanwhile, we quietly bowed out of our bigger stores like PacSun. There was no love lost. The truth was that we never performed that strongly in the malls. Our core customer refused to follow us there; meanwhile, our brand was too niche for the general mall shopper.
We were reminded that in our hearts we are a community-based brand. Maybe the Blog 2.0 with our army of freelance writers had put too much distance between me and our customer. But as soon as my voice came back into our social content and design narrative, the numbers spiked. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, my opinions were finally striking a nerve with The Hundreds’ fans. Our company’s foundation was cemented in political discourse, social justice, and speaking out, but it often went ignored. In the Obama years, I’d blog about immigration reform rallies held in protest of the president’s policies. But readers were more excited about streetwear gossip. The youth were unbothered during Barack’s reign. But as Trump’s regime began to threaten many of those values The Hundreds’ customer holds dear—namely, diversity and equality—our designs and actions resonated with new noise.
In 2017, I took to my Instagram and challenged the purpose of ComplexCon, a popular expo for the street fashion community. The show sold out that year, earning tens of millions of dollars. But the daylong lineups, which sometimes erupted in physical violence, highlighted the disparity between commerce and culture. A couple months later, we provided an alternative experience for the kids by coproducing Into Action, a free, social-justice-themed art show and festival in downtown Los Angeles. Over nine days, we welcomed tens of thousands of visitors to absorb over 250 works of original art speaking to various causes. We didn’t make the millions that Nike and adidas raked in at ComplexCon; in fact, I think we might have lost money, all things considered. But we had an impact on people’s minds and hearts. The Hundreds brought people together for a positive cause, and they would never forget it. I would pay out of pocket to do that all over again.
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