29. DEAR MOM
WHEN I WAS ten, we moved to a larger house in the Canyon Crest neighborhood of Riverside. I had a new room all to myself, fresh Garfield bedsheets, and a big desk to draw and make art on. My brothers’ bedrooms were stock and straightforward, but my mom wallpapered my room in a pattern of pastel pink and blue zigzag stripes. The repeating design was dizzying at first, but over time it jibed with the bustling noise in my head. I had trouble sleeping the first night, tossing and turning and calling for her to stay with me. She could tell I was nervous about the new house and room, so she sat on the corner of my bed and asked me to interpret the shapes on the walls. What did I see?
“They look like the letter M over and over again,” I told her. “Um, are they lightning bolts?” I guessed. It was a fair crack, but she was unmoved by my response. Too on the nose.
The next night, she tucked me in and asked again, “What do you see?”
“Lightning bolts,” I repeated.
“No, you can’t use the same answer twice. Do you see anything else?”
I studied the sharp points and unpredictable lines colliding against each other on the paper. Like looking at a Magic Eye poster, my eyes soft-focused as the walls pinched and recast around us. Now I pulled seismograph sequences out of the pattern.
“Earthquake charts?”
She shrugged and said, “Okay. That’s not bad.”
The following night, I identified cascading waterfalls rolling over each other endlessly. The paper appeared to slide off the walls. I could almost hear the deafening roar of water barreling through the gully.
“Better.”
Or were they the shoulders of towering mountain peaks, as if I were flying a helicopter into a snowy range?
“Teeth! No, fangs!” Gnashing simultaneously, a formation of wolves.
“Rocket ships, all launching at once.”
OG fans of The Hundreds might have figured out by now that this wallpaper is where our signature JAGS pattern derived from. It’s our trademark print, like a Louis Vuitton monogram or a Burberry plaid. I didn’t even realize it until years after I’d created it. At the start of The Hundreds, I’d drawn up JAGS on Photoshop accidentally as I fiddled with the program for the first time. Ben didn’t love it; he thought it looked messy. But JAGS resonated with me for some reason. It felt punk and disruptive. It wasn’t until I was visiting my parents years later that my wife walked into my childhood bedroom and asked, “Is this where you got JAGS?” Throughout our history, we wrapped JAGS print around our shopping bags, jackets, hats, and BMX bikes. It had been a decade since I’d slept in that room, yet I was still writing my own narrative into those erratic lines.
My mom’s wallpaper game became one of my favorite exercises. There are a million solutions for every problem; it just depends on how you look at it. So much of life, I learned, was about perspective—the way you frame and reframe a question to fit your answer.
The JAGS pattern is a reminder that I hold the pen and it’s up to me to tell the story.
PART FOUR
30. BLOW OUT
SOMETIMES I TAKE in the work of esteemed artists like Shepard Fairey and Banksy and wonder if they ever get tired of stencils and painting political art (after all, this is what their admirers long for, to reclaim that mysterious first kiss, that initial high). The same way I imagine Radiohead hates playing “Creep” live or Cardi B has to pretend it’s the first time she’s performed “Bodak Yellow” at every concert. This is what the world wants of you. That’s the double-edged sword of producing a hit. It makes your career but can break your creative spirit. It can imprison you in a parade of pandering to your audience. But what’s most important—making them happy or making yourself happy? There’s a fine line between a well-made home and a comfortable prison.
John Mayer once said to me, “You think I like playing ‘Your Body Is a Wonderland’ at every show? You think it doesn’t scare me that maybe my best work is behind me?” As I grow older, inching closer to obscurity, and further removed from a “30 Under 30” list, it scares me too.
Is this it?
These are the things they neglect to mention: the dark underpinnings of success. As an entrepreneur or creator, you know the road is going to be rocky. You know hard work reaps rewards. But did you ever think you’d prefer to stay in that cool, secret unknown? What about being trapped by your own legacy? Painting yourself into a corner by virtue of your own achievements? Take consistent and powerful brands like Apple and Supreme. They’ve managed to remind their customer time and again of who they are, but has that allowed them room for change and evolution? Branding sells, but it can also suffocate artistry.
When it comes down to it, branding is much like human behavior. We have limited brain space to value the entirety of the world and its ingredients. This is part of why we stereotype people after all—selfishness and convenience. The same goes for companies: it’s practical and economical to distill a brand into a single product. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say “McDonald’s”? Hamburgers. Red and yellow. Diabetes, perhaps. McDonald’s is a $100 billion multinational quick-service food corporation with 130 menu items across seventy-eight countries, but all you can think of is a creepy clown in striped socks or sad burgers in yellow paper.
As for the brands of people, we regularly allow one trait or memory to define the whole of a person. Oprah is sage, while Trump is an utter moron. Brand perception may change, but we tend to collectively grant celebrities one defining characteristic at a time. Cosby is funny. Cosby is rapey.
No matter how complicated and sophisticated you believe your brand to be, you must accept the fact that (1) most of the world will never see your brand and (2) the majority of those who do glance at it will take away one microscopic detail that will color their impression of your brand forever.
I know this is a hard pill to swallow for a generation whose solar system spins around their multitude of accomplishments, but you really only have one shot to leave your mark on the timeline. This is why recording artists are defined by singles. Why the Verizon guy will always be known as the Verizon guy even when he’s the Sprint guy. And as ingenious as Steve Jobs’s varied contributions might have been, the iPhone will be canonized as his definitive blip on the radar—a device that experts agree will be obsolete in ten years.
* * *
I HAVE this recurring nightmare. In this dream, I’m Indiana Jones, deep in a dark cavern. I run as fast as I can in the blackness, my legs tangled in the ravines, my feet slow and sticky in the mud. A thundering noise rains down from above, and then a giant rolling ball descends on me. Except when I look over my shoulder, it isn’t a boulder. It’s Adam Bomb.
Our popular mascot turned logo, Adam Bomb, was a force of nature, unstoppable and ubiquitous. From Valencia to San Diego, you could play a road trip game of spotting Adam Bomb stickers on the freeway and wind up with an arm full of bruises. In the early 2010s, he covered the earth, from London to Tokyo to São Paulo. There he was on Lil Wayne’s hat in Drake’s “Motto” video or on the Warped Tour’s main stage with A Day to Remember. He took up prime real estate in premier boutiques and chain stores alike, the central display of window dressings.
We knew, however, that we were running out of runway and that if we didn’t curtail Adam soon, that bomb would blow up in our face. Fashion tires easily of such obvious trends. The more omnipresent Adam Bomb became, the more we fertilized our own backlash—not just from our core customer, but from the resistant shopper. Our mascot was so recognizable and obnoxiously out there that he polarized audiences like a pop star. Once a craze—whether it be Justin Bieber or tribal tattoos or the athleisure trend—dominates the market, resentment begins to simmer and eventually overflows.
We saw it, but we also felt it. I was long uninterested in, and fatigued by, Adam Bomb’s overbearing presence. I was unable to reconcile his image with the updated, cleaner The Hundreds that our team was so diligently putting together
. Our designers and salesmen were over it too. There are only so many ways to tweak and parody Adam Bomb into T-shirt graphics, only so many stores to which we might sell the same icon. For our customers, buying collections of Adam Bomb designs was like buying albums where every song sounds the same.
Behind the scenes, Adam’s impression was so overwhelming and loaded that he locked us out of cool opportunities. Potential collaborators, store buyers, and industry peers couldn’t see what else was behind the bomb, so they assumed that’s all there was. The immediate money was nice. We were making bank; it was almost too easy. But it came at a cost to our brand cachet. Adam would have worked ideally for a short-lived hiccup of a brand. But Ben and I never wanted that. We wanted The Hundreds to be a time-tested company and had to start acting like it with time-tested designs.
The choice was clear. We had to revert Adam back to being our mascot. His demotion would open up the opportunity for a new stable logo, one that encompassed our true brand story. The only way out of The Hundreds’ misperception, I figured, was brand renovation.
* * *
BACK WHEN we first sat down with our intellectual property lawyer about registering “The Hundreds” as an official trademark, he implored us to stick to one logo.
“I know how you artists get. As soon as you push one design out there, you’re sick of it, and move on.1 But you can’t do that with your registered trademarks. Intellectual property is only as strong as how long you stick with it.”
Every three to four years, I’ve willfully defied his orders by injecting another keystone logo into our brand communication. “Solid Bomb” turned into “Bar Logo,” our name spelled out in the Raiders’ font (Futura Bold). Then came “Adam Bomb,” the next iteration of “Solid Bomb.” By the early 2010s, menswear cleaned up and went bespoke and tailored. The Hundreds needed a logo that channeled this buttoned-up aesthetic. The “Slant” logo was informed by the Dodgers’ (another L.A. hometown team) lettering. Having gone against my own unwritten law by relying on the “The Hundreds” name in our logo, I then conceptualized our flag, the “Wildfire.” This latest logo, featuring our JAGS pattern, is a takedown of the Los Angeles flag and offers an analogy for a torn box.
Each logo or icon has taken about a year to gain traction, two to become a favorite, depending on how extremely we pledge our allegiance to the design. Our “Slant” logo, for example, started to gain in the marketplace soon after we made a fifteen-foot, CNC-milled, light-up sign featuring the design for our Santa Monica store. The installation was such an audacious statement that our followers immediately trusted the cursive logo. To introduce “Wildfire,” I wrote and directed a short film on our lifestyle, analogizing our community to an inferno, and concluded the movie with our red, black, and yellow2 flag flying high.
The Hundreds’ youngest fans were confused, as were our peers. To them, Adam Bomb symbolized the brand and was single-handedly driving the majority of our sales. Most competitors were desperate to match our success with their own icons and imitative mascots. Why would we scale back on Adam and forfeit our biggest advantage? Don’t we adhere to the adage “The customer is always right”?
No. We do not. I know this goes against everything you might have learned on the internet, but the customer is not always right. Just as the child doesn’t teach the parent and the dog doesn’t walk the owner. I believe the customer wants the business to know its own identity, purpose, and direction. The relationship between brand and customer flourishes when the customer feels secure that the business is secure.
This is the problem with crowdsourcing validation: you give over control and ownership of your brand to the consumer. The entrepreneur’s responsibility is believing you could do it better, smarter, and faster than whatever’s already out there. The world just hasn’t discovered you yet. You’ve worked your ass off to be heard; the onlookers are pulled toward your passion. The customers hand you their hard-earned cash because they believe in your vision and product. Now that you have their attention and devotion, why would you surrender the reins to them? How does this help them? How does it help you?
In 2010, Gap debuted a new logo to refresh its ailing brand (just as The Hundreds did with “Slant” and “Wildfire”). Where once stood an emblematic navy box with a timeless serif font, there was now a Helvetica “Gap” anchoring a floating gradient blue square asterisk. On first glance, the heritage clothing company appeared to have repackaged as a sleek tech start-up. The redesign was more Microsoft than Ralph Lauren, and the most vocal Gap customers (or at least the ones most active on social media) weren’t having it. The backlash was immediate and merciless.
“This is the worst idea Gap has ever had. I will be sad to see this change take place,” a customer wrote on Gap’s page. “If this logo is brought into the clothing [store] I will no long[er] be shopping with the Gap. Really a bummer because 90% of my clothing has been purchased there in the last 15+ years.”
Two thousand comments flooded Gap’s Facebook. A Twitter profile to protest the new logo collected five thousand followers. Fourteen thousand parody logos were designed. The media also went to town. Ad Age wrote a piece titled “What the Gap Did Wrong,” listing all the critical design errors apparent in the new logo. The BBC said the clothing company should have prepped the customers better, perhaps by improving the product first. This was the overarching commentary—that Gap didn’t heed the customer. To put it bluntly, Gap didn’t consider people’s feelings.
Gap responded to the outcry right away.
We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.
Cringe.
I remember watching “Gapgate” unfold. It bummed me out. Gap shouldn’t have ceded to vocal Facebook groups. It should have remained in control of its brand, even if it had to fake it. Gap should have dictated what Gap was, even if that meant being defined by amateur design. I understand that companies on Gap’s level are beholden to shareholders and boards who only care about the bottom line, but we also look to the brands to know what’s best for … the brand.
Of course the customer will be turned off by unilateral corporate decisions. But those disagreements are what make the relationship truthful. Would you rather have a friend who, by staying true to her convictions, manages to disappoint you from time to time? Or would you rather have a friend who lacks a sharp identity and molds her worldview around yours, echoing your likes and dislikes? The latter sounds most convenient, but in the long run what makes for a more trustworthy partner?
Slowly but surely, we held Adam Bomb back from our line. Our T-shirts went from twenty-eight Adam Bomb–inspired graphics to fourteen, then four. The changes ranged from nominal (swapping out the watermark on YouTube videos from Adam to Wildfire) to large scale (taking down our Adam Bomb billboard in New York’s Times Square). When collaborators would request to work on Adam Bomb, we’d give them another logo set instead. When customers only filled up their shopping carts halfway because we had edited down the Adam Bomb goods, we swallowed the loss and crossed our fingers that they’d return down the road for the alternatives. Ben and I believed in our community. Even if they didn’t grasp our Adam Bomb minimizing strategy, we were confident that they trusted us to set the long-term goals for the betterment of the brand.
From every vantage point, it looked like a dumb business move to curb our bestseller. But in clamping down on our greatest hit, we were able to showcase our broader range of work and diversify The Hundreds’ successes. All our eggs weren’t in Adam’s basket anymore. Slant logo started outselling Adam Bomb. The kids outgrew the family-friendly cartoon and demanded something more mature and practical in a brand ID. Our pricier cut-and-sew apparel surpassed logo T-shirts.
Adam Bomb hasn’t gone missing. Today, we still capitalize on our friendly mascot when the
occasion calls for it. Instead of whoring him out, we design special collections where Adam Bomb is contained. The sales team restricts his pieces to specific accounts. We are now in control of Adam and can turn him off and on when we need him. He still makes us money, but by the time he started his descent on the trend boards, we positioned other points of the business to fill in the holes. I guess we diversified our assets after all.
It’s so incredibly important to get out in front of your strengths and to govern how, when, and where to use them. I also realize that this is the theme of the X-Men series. You can be Cyclops with the visor, which allows you to harness your powers, or you can be Cyclops without the visor and have a laser cannon for a face and have nobody invite you to their staring contest.
31. END OF DAZE
IN THE CRISP and early days of 2018, we drew the curtains on my favorite of all four of our flagships, The Hundreds San Francisco, colloquially referred to as POST (because of its address on the corner of Post and Taylor). The register closed out its final sale on the store’s ten-year anniversary. The night before, we celebrated deep into a damp San Francisco night. Our entire staff drove up from Los Angeles in a party bus to say goodbye in The Hundreds style: with hard drinks in red cups spilling onto wet floors, against loud Bay Area music. We weren’t just bidding farewell to 585 Post Street; we were also signing off from the city.
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