San Francisco was a strange and different town by the time we left. The echoes of clattering skateboard wheels against the Embarcadero’s floors had long ceased. In their place, electric skateboards for commuting developers. I used to travel from L.A. to the Haight just to see what was on Red Five’s and True’s racks. I could no longer hear the commotion for Earthquake Dunks outside Huf on Sutter. Silicon Valley plated the city in an aluminum veneer of yuppie riches, apps, and Michelin-star restaurants. The Bay had upgraded—it was the Bay version 2.0. The bugs that made San Francisco slightly dysfunctional—the Tenderloin crackheads, the crust punks with sidewalk dogs, the fixie girls with dreads—had all been purged. Facebook, Apple, and Google covered the city’s tattoos with black turtlenecks and gray short-sleeve T-shirts. It’s not that there wasn’t any culture left; it just wasn’t our culture. Ten years was a solid and respectable run for any store. Our San Francisco flagship lasted longer than all of the brands in the space and certainly longer than any streetwear shop downtown.
With all the money we were now saving—and making—we channeled our efforts into e-commerce and digital strategy. The Hundreds, we reminded ourselves, was inherently an internet brand. We came from the blog and found our groove with an internet readership, so our online shopping experience had to come correct. For the first time in over a decade, we signed a contract with a new web design company and revamped the e-commerce interface. We optimized the online shop for mobile phones and got smarter about how our editorial content converted readers to customers. We hired staff for a new digital department, collected emails of loyal customers, and strategized how best to reach our following on social media through transparent communication. When we combined the lessons of new-school e-commerce with the relationships and street knowledge we’d accumulated over the years, our revenue multiplied.
In the online marketplace, there are deep-pocketed digital brands with even deeper email subscription lists that have mastered targeted ads and user acquisition. Then there are organic upstarts that are soulful and scrappy but ignorant to the business trappings of digital commerce. We’ve done our best to cultivate both sides for The Hundreds, and I think that’s a key to our success.
* * *
“IT’S TIME we tell the POST guys,” Ben said from across his desk in our L.A. warehouse. He was looking up flights to San Francisco. I nodded silently. We both knew how hard this was going to be. Most of our Bay Area crew had been running The Hundreds San Francisco for at least five years. Bryan, our manager, had held it down for nearly seven years and was about to celebrate his thirtieth birthday. We had watched these kids grow up, but it was time for everyone to commence the next chapter in their lives.
The following Wednesday afternoon, we flew into SFO and took Bryan to lunch at Shalimar, a well-known Pakistani mainstay in downtown San Francisco, just a five-minute walk from our store. Ben’s not the best at holding on to secrets, especially the painful ones.
“Bryan, we have to talk.”
“Oh no,” he said, removing his cap at the table. “Bad news?”
“Bad now. Good later.”
And he let The Hundreds San Francisco go.
“Our lease is up at the end of the year, and we’re not going to renew it.”
He let Bryan and the rest of the gang go.
“We can’t thank you enough for the hard work and dedication you’ve poured into the shop.”
And then he let San Francisco go.
“It’s time to close this chapter.”
* * *
BRYAN TOOK a deep breath. He’d watched over the store reports every night for nearly a decade. He had seen the writing on the wall. Bryan admitted that he was already thinking of a new job, maybe in app development, something Silicon Valley based because he was born and bred in the city. We offered him a job with us in L.A., but he couldn’t leave his girlfriend and family. The three of us walked back to the shop, gathered the rest of the POST crew, and this time it was even harder. Some guys stayed silent while others cracked jokes to cope with the unsettling news.
“I guess it’s time we all grew up!” Budge said.
“One day, you will thank us for this,” I said. “The truth is we should have closed this store three years ago, and if we had, you’d be three years into your next career by now.”
Ben added, “You guys know we’ve been trying to find a better neighborhood, gotten near a few leases, debated on whether to move to Oakland since the kids have left the city. The main reason why we hung on was because you guys hung on. But now we all gotta let go.”
The guys rolled one up and smoked outside the store. We reminisced about what once was in San Francisco streetwear. Benny Gold was still holding it down in the Mission, but Black Scale was long gone, as was Infinite. Huf got its start on Sutter but abandoned ship just a couple years into our move to S.F. The leader of the new school, John Elliott, moved to L.A. There were endless rumors of Supreme moving into San Francisco, but as the years sloughed off, that chatter diminished. My favorite sushi restaurant next door to our shop was now a hipster noodle house. A “For Lease” notice half covered the glowing pink sign over the seedy massage parlor on Taylor. If that didn’t say it all: the oldest brothel on the block was about to become a yoga studio.
At that moment, a Jeep wagon pulled up to the curb. An older Persian man got out, looked at our store, then into the window next door to The Hundreds, took a step back, and stared at our neighbor’s faded signage.
“Excuse me, where did the hookah café go?” he asked Ben.
“I’m sorry,” Ben replied, “but they closed. The owner died of cancer a couple years ago.”
“He died!” The man sat there with a curious look. He searched Ben’s face for answers and found none. “He was my friend. He had a wife and a child. He owned this lounge.”
“I know who you’re talking about. I’m really sorry, but he died.”
“Hmph!” The man absorbed the news, walked back to his car, and got in. He sat there for a moment staring through the windshield as the rain gathered on his hood. Then he turned his head to the side and merged back into the flow of traffic.
“Well, if that wasn’t a sign.”
* * *
KEEPING WITH POST crew tradition, we took the guys to dinner that night at the Greek restaurant Kokkari in the business district, a pillar of San Francisco dining. Most patrons wear suits and jackets, coming in from a long day in skyscraper offices, but we always show up in camo T-shirts and beanies. I think the staff kinda likes it: these stoned brown kids sweep through the menu, order tall drinks, and dust off a hefty bill.
While we were all mourning the death of The Hundreds San Francisco, we also wanted to make it a positive night to remember what we had contributed to the Bay.
“We can worry about the future tomorrow. Tonight, we eat and drink,” I cheered in my merriest, medieval accent, right in time for the garlic shrimp and lamb. We updated each other on former employees and debated our favorite Bay Area–themed collaborations (The Hundreds has worked on projects with E-40, Grateful Dead, Mac Dre, and Too Short).
Speaking of which, unbeknownst to the guys, Ben and I were also celebrating another milestone. We were hours from releasing The Hundreds’ long-awaited collaboration with the Warner Bros. cartoon Animaniacs in our online shop. This was a project that was near to our hearts, having first been broached early in our brand’s history. We didn’t have the wherewithal to pull it off as a smaller company, but now we were getting to realize another dream thanks to our growing legacy. The social media anticipation around this project had been building for weeks. Through his Shopify app, Ben could see that there were already hundreds of customers “lined up” on the website, refreshing the browser for the product to pop up.
After dinner, Ben and I retreated back to the Clift Hotel, our familiar haunt. We scurried to the bar, ordered up some smoky Scotch with fat ice cubes, and waited until the midnight drop. So much had changed since we first stayed there when The
Hundreds San Francisco opened. We would party alongside early tech founders like Facebook’s Sean Parker. Now there were just tired call girls fishing for olives in their martinis. As the clock struck twelve, our online shop got rebooted with the entire Animaniacs collection. Two hundred customers jumped to four hundred, seven hundred. Ceilidh, our digital director, called us from L.A.
“We’re making $1,000 a minute!” It was hard to hear her above the noise.
“Holy … What?”
“We haven’t even posted that the product is available yet on our social. I’m just about to send out the newsletter, and we’re getting this many sales!”
Ben and I took big gulps of our drinks and hunkered over our phones.
Three thousand dollars.
Refresh.
Fifty-five hundred dollars.
Certain styles were already selling out of popular sizes and colors. The complaints started foaming up on our social media feeds.
“This is bullshit! How are you guys already sold out of the green jacket?! You just put this collab up for sale!”
Thousands of customers from around the country drilled into our website, and it was the middle of the night. East Coast kids were setting their alarms for 3:00 a.m., waking up, only to find scraps left.
Seventy-eight hundred dollars.
Refresh.
We couldn’t believe it. Ben and I knew our brand was enjoying a serious upswing in 2017, but the year was culminating in fireworks. Sales slackened into the after hours, so we hurried ourselves off to our rooms to steal a few hours of sleep. At 7:00 a.m., we were at $25,000. By noon, we had passed $100,000 in sales and had sold out of all our product.
The numbers didn’t lie. Earnings-wise, this was our biggest collaboration of the year and maybe our fastest-selling project ever. What was meant to be one of the most difficult days in our brand’s history was cushioned by this unanticipated achievement.
Ben and I met downstairs for breakfast. “I don’t know how we pulled it off, but I’m proud of us, Bob. We did it.” We high-fived over sausage links and orange juice in the hotel lobby.
Ben wasn’t just talking about the success of the Animaniacs collaboration. Nor was he simply congratulating us for having operated the San Francisco store for ten years. Ben was referring to our perseverance over the years of drought. The breakthrough. And the sweet taste of scrambled eggs and victory.
“Not many people can go through what we just did. We made it out alive.”
* * *
THE RETAIL roller coaster that was The Hundreds stores wasn’t over just yet. As the dust settled on San Francisco, Ben and I had one last trick up our sleeve.
Back when we moved into L.A.’s Fairfax District in 2005, we were twenty-five-year-old kids with a few T-shirts and lots of big dreams. One of them was to someday open a store for our brand. We could keep the office where it was on the side street, but the emerald castle was the corner spot on Fairfax and Rosewood. Pro skater Sal Barbier took the space first. When he was ready to move out, we begged him for the lease. He gave it instead to Orange County label RVCA, which held on to the prime real estate for the next several years.
It was hard to drive through that intersection every day and admit that the space wasn’t ours. Like watching your soul mate marry someone else.
And then one day, she calls and says, “I’m available.”
Before we could make the big move to the corner, we first had to button up our original store. It saddened us to close The Hundreds L.A. at 7909 Rosewood Avenue, but we were also overdue in sealing that chapter. That store was a four-hundred-square-foot black box theater where we groomed our brand in the shadows. We’d played the underground club for so long; we were now prepared for the main stage: 501 North Fairfax Avenue.
After our first day in the new space, the daily reports were off the charts. We chalked it up to grand-opening vibes, but then the numbers held steady and continued to escalate. Literally overnight, we were tripling sales out of The Hundreds Los Angeles. It showed us that we should have made that leap to the big top long ago.
The design concept for this new store was a concluding discussion of time and space. Elements of all four prior store designs were incorporated into the build, surrounding a mastodon skeleton emerging from a tar pit (inspired by the La Brea tar pits down Fairfax). The sculpture was a literal address to the elephant in the room: The Hundreds had thus far lived fifteen years, which was like fifteen million years in streetwear.
In the tar pit underneath the mastodon, you’ll find fossils burbling up, like my installation outside our first store down Rosewood Avenue. This time, however, the artifacts aren’t keepsakes of California, the 1980s, or any adopted culture as they were in past stores. After a decade and a half, we have built our own culture with The Hundreds—one that reflects us as well as those who support us. There’s the $3 million Ben Baller chain from our April Fools’ prank one year, our collaboration Garfield toy, and an RSWD cap buried in the black pool, among an assemblage of other familiar objects from our timeline. There’s even an Adam Bomb in there.
32. THE REAR VIEW
IN A WAY, I never stopped driving after Ben and I had that blowout about selling The Hundreds to the malls. I kept on, past our shop on Rosewood. I left the noise and lines of Fairfax’s busy streetwear neighborhood. I drove outside the big city, past New York, Tokyo, London, and Paris. I went higher, beyond the blogs and comment threads, far past the mainstream magazines and elite opinions. I reached the tallest vantage point, a bird’s-eye view from the top of the highest mountain peak. There, I saw how big the world was and how much potential The Hundreds community held, and I had a change of heart.
It’s been almost a decade since we turned that knob on expansion, and I can replay the sequence of events with clear eyes. I don’t have regrets, but I have review. If we didn’t expand in the bigger chains, would The Hundreds be further ahead today? Perhaps we’d have preserved a particular image with a specific clientele, but could we have survived without the new fan base and revenue the exposure brought? With time, many of our peer brands that refrained from wider distribution eventually lost their edge. I’m sure some have maintained their cool somewhere and somehow, but the market and media spotlight moved on. Either those brands depleted their resources, or their following aged out and there was no one next in line to fill their seats.
The media loves direct-to-consumer brands like Glossier and Casper, because they cut out the retail middleman. Even in streetwear, young brands opt to sell directly to their kids through their online stores. They fail to appreciate, though, how a store’s stocking of your brand acts as a cosign of your product to out-of-reach locales. The mom and pops, international distribution, and especially the chain stores gave us play in towns and neighborhoods we’d never see in our lifetime. They shared The Hundreds’ gospel with legions of young kids who couldn’t access street culture off-line. And on a practical front, selling to these stores injected us with consistent and hearty capital around which we were able to build a functioning business. This was the critical ingredient, without which we wouldn’t be here today. Unlike most of our competitors, we’ve never had financial backers or partners in The Hundreds, so we siphoned cash from wholesale accounts to grow, create, and sustain. So, did the malls help or hurt? I really don’t know and never will, but maybe that’s not the right question to ask.
In building a brand, as in life, it rarely comes down to binary, right or wrong decisions. When I was younger and ignorant, the world was split into Pleasantville-like black-and-white. I was convinced, for example, that skateboarding shouldn’t hold contests, be co-opted by celebrities, or be affiliated with corporate footwear companies. This was “selling out,” the worst thing that could happen to a subculture. With more experience and knowledge, however, I walked around the problem and saw it from an elevated vantage point. The X Games, Pharrell, and Nike opened skateboarding up to an entire generation of young people, gave people jobs, and changed live
s for the better.
When I was younger, I wanted The Hundreds to remain my private little secret forever. The closer I held the brand to my heart, the longer it would remain cool and limited by virtue of being unknown. Premium street brands have historically stayed relevant through this notion of finite inventory. They used to accomplish this by narrowing distribution—for example, by only selling direct through hard-to-find shops or by capping supply. The more physical hoops we put between the customer and our product, the higher the value. I traveled to London for maharishi, New York City for J. Money. The cost of the airline ticket was worked into the retail sticker, but that made the T-shirt extra-special. Streetwear, in the early 2000s, was like a scavenger hunt. In our foundational years, we stuck to this philosophy as well, situating our store on a side street in a quiet neighborhood.
But the internet changed that; now every “exclusive” brand sells globally through their online shop. Even if we didn’t, there are gray marketers, auction sites, and reseller apps to be the messengers for us. This muddies the conversation about malls as “mainstream” distribution. Nothing is more ubiquitous than e-commerce. It’s easier for your grandma to click on a luxe designer’s dot-com from her sofa than shop the Urban Outfitters sale rack in a neighboring town.
Because e-commerce has razed geographical hurdles, the modern means of keeping your brand out of reach from “uncool” customers is by pricing them out. This explains why streetwear’s high fashion crossover has gotten so appealing. Four-hundred-dollar T-shirts. Three-thousand-dollar jeans. It’s no longer about how hard you searched for something, how well you researched the culture’s history, or how deep you dug into your networks for that hookup. It’s now about class difference: whether you can afford to buy into streetwear. Do you want it for its exceptional design or because of how much it costs?
A couple years ago, there was this viral video series called How Much Is Your Outfit? that came out of Copenhagen. In one episode, the shot opens on a blond teenager wearing a satin zip-up jacket with a palm tree sunset design.
This Is Not a T-Shirt Page 22
