This Is Not a T-Shirt Read online

  Ben and I hit it off, in what transpired as a friendly rivalry over retro sneakers. I’d wear maple Dunk Highs on a Tuesday, and Ben would show up in black and blue BWs on a Wednesday. He always had the stronger Air Max game, while I’d win with trainers—the Mitas, the Viotechs, the Bo Jacksons. Outside NikeTalk, the collectors’ message board, there was no online platform that spoke to the sneakerhead. No TV shows, no apps, no official events. About the only thing tying us sneaker enthusiasts together was that unspoken nod over vintage Nikes.

  I had my group of friends and Ben had his. Late nights in the library, our circles would meet in the middle, like a Venn diagram. While studying for our first-year final exams, Ben, his best friend, Mak, my homie Drew, and I would take breaks between the bookshelves to dream about the infinite possibilities our futures held. Ben and Mak were always on the money. With summer approaching, they were scheming up ways to make some extra cash. Drew was leaving for Tokyo in a week for a legal internship, and considering the Japanese influence on the sneaker resale market, he suggested sourcing the inventory for us to build a stateside distribution operation. The rare, retro sneaker market was still laying its roots in the United States, so avid American collectors were champing at the bit for the rare Nikes and adidas that Japanese sellers and collectors had been hoarding for a decade. In those days, shoe brands also issued special editions intended for sale strictly in Asian territories, so there was a demand for those too. eBay was a collector’s best bet to buy the 3M/snakeskin Air Force 1s or Stüssy Blazers. Or, you could try your luck at back-door sneaker boutiques like Sportie LA on Melrose or Chinaman’s in downtown San Diego.2 We could charge a premium for importing these treasures, do something we loved and genuinely cared about, and, for a season, forget that we were lawyers.

  The morning after final exams, we held our first meeting at Ben and Mak’s Mid-City apartment to discuss our looming business empire. The guys lived in squalor like typical postcollege bachelors: dishes piled high in the kitchen, Scarface poster in the bedroom, moldy shower curtain in the bathroom. Regardless of the time of day, it always smelled as if someone had just woken up. We sat around the living room coffee table, set aside the Playboys, and even removed the bong. This was serious business.

  Drew, our “Japanese distributor,” cleared his throat and spoke first.

  “I’m out, guys. I’m sorry. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I really won’t have the time between school and travels to work on this thing. I still think it’s a good idea, and maybe I can find someone while I’m there to connect you with, but…”

  Ben, Mak, and I broke down and laughed. Our pipe dream had already burst not two minutes into our first business meeting. Drew cut the silence by wishing us all a fruitful summer and making a graceful exit into the balmy June sun and a promising legal career.3

  “So, what now?” Mak asked.

  Ben started reaching for his bong.

  I took a deep breath. “There’s this thing I’m trying to do, actually.” I explained the Bobby Kim Project. “I want to funnel my art, photography, design, and writing into one outlet. Imagine a company that’s half T-shirt brand, half online magazine. The T-shirt graphics all have a substantive story to them, which I’ll write about on my blog. That way, you’re not just buying a logo or a Che Guevara stencil without knowing the meaning behind it. As far as the magazine, everybody’s focused on New York and Japan right now, but we have talented friends here in L.A. who are getting clipped from the conversation. Los Angeles is getting a bad rap with the reality shows, Paris Hilton hijinks, and Von Dutch trucker caps. But I’m a writer; we can flip this. I’ll interview graffiti artists, musicians, and designers who are putting our city on the map. I’ll use aliases to make it look as if we have an editorial staff. These articles will help build the brand’s lifestyle. That’s our marketing. It all works together; the T-shirts and the magazine inform each other. The best part about it is the internet is free and it’s wide open for the taking. Nobody’s doing anything like this. This isn’t just a clothing company or an online magazine; it’s more than that. It’s a ‘lifestyle project.’”

  Ben and Mak lit up (both figuratively and literally) and latched on immediately. Mak was a slick hustler, a born salesman. Ben had experience peddling garments—cheap downtown neckties out of swap meet booths in high school and Nordstrom suits in college. But above all, the three of us were big sneakerheads and fans of the artist-led T-shirt brands coming out of New York and Tokyo. Why couldn’t we play too? We didn’t have much money, but with the internet who cared? For brand awareness, we’d spread the word through message boards that catered to the community like Superfuture and NikeTalk. I would design T-shirts in the spirit of the brands we wore in the nineties like X-Large and Freshjive. And our secret weapon, even if we didn’t totally appreciate it then, would be my blog. I had a voice and I knew how to use it to connect people. I could mobilize a movement around a brand.

  I was just happy that I’d be able to draw, take photos, design, and tell stories. I hadn’t even contemplated squeezing a profit out of this thing. For me, designing and storytelling were born of necessity. I needed the creative outlet to stay sane after a year of analyzing contracts, dressing like a nimrod, and wrapping my head around the rule against perpetuities. I figured the cost of screen printing T-shirts was a fair trade offering, if nothing else, the freedom to create. I hardly noticed the two Persians in the room salivating with dollar signs for eyes.

  “I know how to make money doing this,” Ben said. “Easy.”

  12.   FANNING THE FLAMES OF CONTENT

  WE LIKE TO say “Since 1980” because that is the year in which Ben and I were both born and the brand is a reflection of our lives. But The Hundreds as a business entity officially launched on July 27, 2003. That was the day the website went live. Later that week, once our T-shirts hit Fred Segal in Santa Monica, we’d start directing traffic there. We’d packaged each T-shirt in a clear vinyl bag the way Bape did. I always loved that part of the customer experience, as if each piece held artistic value and needed protection from the elements. On the front, we’d screen printed our web address, thehundreds.com. I wanted the customers to understand that they weren’t just buying a T-shirt. Like in a scavenger hunt, the shirt was a clue to a greater treasure buried in the internet. The clothes unlocked a story. There was an entire universe attached to each T-shirt that I was blogging about on the site.

  People always ask, what came first, the clothes or the blog? But from its inception, thehundreds.com was bifurcated between “Collection” and the current blog’s predecessor, “Chronicles.” Under the Collection tab were our latest offerings of graphic T-shirts. Each tee was buttressed with a story behind its graphic, often political in nature or a commentary on society and culture. The Chronicles illustrated the lifestyle around our brand. The section was dedicated to magazine-style profiles on personalities within our community. With the streetwear scene so preoccupied with Japanese and New York designers, we felt like Los Angeles was getting the shaft. L.A. had a burgeoning street culture that was being ignored. The cool crowd in this period of L.A. life congregated around nightlife spots like Nacional or Cinespace, as captured in the Cobrasnake’s Polaroids. But we witnessed artistic innovation emanating from local brands like Undefeated and Grn Apple Tree, painters like Craola and Buff Monster, and underground hip-hop artists like pre-Fergie Black Eyed Peas and L.A. Symphony. We also knew that streetwear had started in our backyard and was still thriving in the underground. All we had to do was cut through the reality shows and Christian Audigier’s bedazzled noise to excavate it.

  The Chronicles section was popular, but heavy and laborious to put together. Between interviewing, transcribing, and editing, I found that each article would eat up a week’s time. But there were so many things happening every day that I eventually just started populating the news feed with unedited updates as they rolled in. Eventually, the main page started getting all the attention. Readers came for the news
feed and stayed for the Chronicles. Short-form, long-form—thehundreds.com was your one-stop shop for quality street-culture editorial.

  At the time, the only people producing content online were larger media outlets and high-profile bloggers like Perez Hilton. Before social media, average people didn’t spend their days digging for stories to tell. They weren’t interested in starring in their own reality show or sharing their opinions with an audience of strangers. In fact, in the early days of social media, sites like Friendster invited your friends to say something about you instead of granting you the space to talk about yourself. There was a degree of privacy then that would be worth one’s weight in gold today. And the few of us who did choose to share our stories did so discriminatingly. As a journalist, I didn’t consider thehundreds.com a means to highlight my life as much as a platform on which I might highlight the stories of others. After years of following my blog, my readers learned a whole lot about the culture without finding much of anything about me. Today, social media is all about designing a compelling self-portrait, but back then my writing derived from a belief that real artists make the world look better, not themselves. The more I bigged up my crew, the stronger L.A. came to be, the better for all parties involved. A rising tide lifts all boats.

  I interviewed Angeleno designers, artists, and musicians who were putting our neighborhood on the map. To inflate our credibility, I’d assign pen names to different articles. But it was all me behind the screen, writing every line and designing every T-shirt. Ben, meanwhile, was on the operations end, dialing numbers and making sales.

  There are a few reasons why the blog worked. For one, it lent transparency to our brand, while our competitors sealed the doors shut. There weren’t any other blogs that itemized the steps of making a streetwear line for the thousands of other dreamers out there brainstorming ideas for the next big brand.1 Day in and day out, I shared our lessons with our readership. We celebrated the highs with the customers and wallowed in the lows together as well. There’s no school for this, but my blog was the closest to it. A generation later, all those kids who were raised on my blog would install the next rung on the streetwear ladder. It’s not the most shrewd business strategy—cultivating our own competitors—but it’s how we ensure that the culture continues. The purpose of every generation—in streetwear and in life—is to make things better and easier for the next generation. The OGs planted the seeds and tended the soil, and my class watered the sapling, so that the kids today could lounge under the tree’s shade and pick the fruits.

  The blog unmasked the industry we were diving into. I was simultaneously entrepreneur and investigative journalist, educating readers on starting a clothing company and introducing them to the godfathers and backstage players. Streetwear was a clandestine boys’ club, off the grid, hidden from Main Street. Even if you knew this universe existed, it wasn’t exactly easy to learn its nuances, its politics, and its unspoken rules. You could knock on the door of Alife Rivington Club all you wanted, but they wouldn’t let you in if they didn’t like what they saw on their security camera. Even if you made it to the cash wrap, there was no guarantee they’d sell you a sweatshirt. Streetwear’s cobweb of coolness was impervious, but on thehundreds.com I’d walk you right up to the window.

  The blog offered a fresh stream of compelling content. Years before Twitter and Instagram surfaced, those in the know filled their free time with the long-format eye candy of blogs. While most bloggers updated two or three times a week, I was broadcasting multiple times a day. No matter where I landed in the world, I was ferreting out the Ethernet cords so I could plug back into WordPress and speak to my followers. I’d upload my photos into Adobe, process them, and sew a storyline around the last few hours from smoke-filled boutique back rooms, hospital beds, airport lounges, and after-hours venues. Trade-show weeks were the worst. We’d stay out all night partying in Vegas, and while everyone else retired in the hotel rooms, I’d stumble through a blog report of the day’s developments. The next morning, I wouldn’t recall having written any of it. But it was this consistent frequency that allowed us to establish a trust with our readers. They knew that as soon as they woke up (I published every night at 2:00 a.m. PST), I’d have their morning streetwear newspaper ready for them.

  The blog era was a moment in time during which content creators spoke their minds with total abandon. Before blogs, Nielsen ratings and advertising dollars drove television, radio, and print media. When social media ousted the blogs as the number one source for online content, the popularity contest ensued. The endless pursuit of followers, likes, and comments husked the culture of originality, auto-tuning everyone’s voice to the same dull frequency. Blogs, on the other hand, started off as side hustles and passion projects. Without scores, most bloggers weren’t tallying followers or gamifying their storytelling. They didn’t cater to anyone or curate their messages to grow their audience or turn profits. With no Explore page to measure themselves against, they furnished their unique personal narratives through their own styles and cadences.

  In contrast, today, designers and artists are obsessed with peer review. They need the validation to continue. We’re talking hacking the algorithm, dressing the “influencer,” and assuaging the masses. Instead of carving out a niche, the next generation of entrepreneurs is glomming on to the masses. They aren’t defining a world for themselves. They are molding themselves to the world.

  I had the luxury of crafting my brand identity for years before I met my audience. I attribute much of our longevity to the blogging spirit and this fundamental mantra: DIY and DIFY. Do it for yourself.

  Even though it’s impossible to escape the social media rankings, I rarely check the trade news, mind the industry gossip, or monitor market trends. Of course, it is important to have an awareness of customers and competitors, but I do my best to design for myself, write to myself, and conduct my business how I perform best. I know I could have ten times the Instagram followers (and sales) if I formulaically posted what streetwear kids want to see: expensive jewelry, hot girls, and Drake memes. But that’s not me, and I don’t want to sound like everyone else. Why would I want my voice lost in the crowd? I’d rather stand onstage with the microphone.

  * * *

  “PHARRELL KNOWS about my blog?!” I’m stunned, dumbfounded. I’d been blogging for years and was, of course, aware that somebody was on the other side. Family members would occasionally make an awkward remark on something illicit they’d seen (hazards of the trade), and friends would ask to guest star. Google Analytics was beginning to take shape, but I didn’t trust it. Frankly, I just didn’t care to keep score. We weren’t monetizing our traffic against advertising, and I couldn’t see how knowing the numbers would affect my course of action. Every time I pounded away at that blog, I was speaking to me—like my eight-year-old self, writing in a lock-and-key diary. I’d log my memories, spill my guts, press “Publish,” and shut my laptop. As far as I was concerned, I was singing in the shower.

  Imagine my shock when Dominick DeLuca from Brooklyn Projects told me that Pharrell Williams had brought up something I’d published on thehundreds.com. My friends Tofer and Todd Tourso had just printed a new season of T-shirts under their fledgling brand, Plain Gravy. I’d featured one of their tees on the front page: a stark purple font spelling out “Pharrell Can’t Skate.” Pharrell had taken to skateboarding, even adopting the nickname “Skateboard P” and raising the eyebrows of members of the core skate community. P was one of my favorite music producers, but his skateboarding felt contrived (in retrospect, I was afraid of what the pop spotlight meant for skate’s underground nature, and Plain Gravy’s T-shirt epitomized this frustration). So I blogged about it.

  Dom asked, “What’s your problem with him skateboarding?”

  “I didn’t make the shirt!” I said in my defense. “Does he care? And more importantly, why does he read my blog?!”

  I never quite figured out if Pharrell felt rubbed the wrong way about it, but members of hi
s clique certainly were. “Bobby Hundreds is a hater!” Lupe Fiasco declared on the Weekly Drop podcast weeks later. And I certainly wondered, if Pharrell was reading my blog—even if he had just heard about it recently—who else might be following what I had to say?

  For the first time since I’d started blogging, Ben and I logged in to our analytics and retrieved the stats.

  Millions. Millions of unique visitors were poring over my words every month, studying my photography, talking shit, and discussing our brand. There were millions of people waiting for me on the other side of the looking glass.

  They had found my diary.

  13.   GET UP KIDS

  THE HUNDREDS WAS growing thanks to my blog and our T-shirts, but word had also spread through good old-fashioned word of mouth.

  “How did you get your name out there?”

  It’s a common question from fresh entrepreneurs, maybe the most common. Where to begin? Most start-ups look down the road, and the open frontier overwhelms them. There’s so much ground to cover, especially in the age of social media. You kick the doors open with a bold, brave idea and immediately feel small and insignificant in the ocean of competitors. “How will I convert everyone?” you wonder.

  I get it, but you’re getting ahead of yourself. It was never our aim to make customers of everyone. We just needed someone. Never underestimate the power of influence in one-on-one encounters. One person’s zeal can arouse a movement and compel a community to action.

  Passion begets passion.

  If you are madly in love with your cause, that fire will stoke a flame in others. The Hundreds was born of a single idea, a spark that precipitated a wildfire.1 Speak to the people, one believer at a time. Think of the way a presidential candidate campaigns. Breakfasts in small-town diners, talks in town halls, and meet and greets in family backyards. There is no shortcut to people’s hearts. There is no viral craze that will convince your audience overnight. The routes are long and onerous, but warm handshakes and baby photos win elections.