This Is Not a T-Shirt Read online

  From the start, we met people on their turf. There were no convenient hashtags to spread the word. There were no trending topics to kick-start fads on social media. There was no social media to begin with! The internet was still in its infancy. Most people lived their lives off-line and off their phones. So, the kids didn’t come to us. We had to physically deliver our message to them. We sold T-shirts to our friends and begged them to tell their friends. We seized opportunities to set up folding tables at underground hip-hop shows and fund-raisers. Some of these activations didn’t necessarily align with our brand, but we didn’t have the luxury of saying no. Beggars can’t be choosers, and who were we to be picky? Even if we sold only two T-shirts at an event, that was still two more than we’d have sold if we’d just stayed at home talking about our dreams.

  At that time, we couldn’t even afford to meet the print minimums on business cards, die-cut flyers, or stickers. In our first office—my studio apartment located behind an In-N-Out—Ben used to sit in the front room at a rolling side desk where we kept an inkjet printer. My station was in the bedroom, so my morning and evening commutes lasted about three and a half seconds. Many mornings, I’d wake up to the sound of Ben opening the heavy iron gate outside my front door. He’d poke his head into my room, toss a half-eaten bagel on my bed, and rattle off the day’s to-do list while I wiped the sleep from my eyes.

  After I’d showered, we’d take our corners. We couldn’t see each other from our desks, so we yelled back and forth from around the doorway. I was stuck in my artist’s head, clicking along vectorizations and writing missives to our blog readers. Ben would be on the phone, hunting stores down, trying to make a sale, or following up on overdue payments or lugging boxes of shirts back and forth from the printers. It might be hard to believe today, but in those first years he was the one packing boxes for stores and shipping out orders to online customers.

  During this time, Ben also took to reading our general info email. (That’s right. Singular. Email. You might be surprised to hear that in 2003, we weren’t exactly inundated with them.)

  “Some kid just wrote us!” Ben shouted out on that brittle January morning.

  This was new. “What does he want?” I was on a deadline and had to get this next round of T-shirts to the screen printer by Friday. It was Thursday and I was three graphics short.

  “Um, hold on.” I turned down my music and could hear Ben mumbling to himself. “He wants to know if he can be a part of our street team.”

  “What’s a street team?”

  “No clue. Maybe it’s getting kids together to mob the streets with posters and stuff?”

  “Right. Tell him we don’t have a street team.”

  “Okay.”

  I turned the music back up. Quicksand’s album Slip was on repeat.

  Scared of what you’re thinking.

  “Bob, he wrote back!”

  “Who?”

  “That kid! His name is Scotty. Asking about the street team we don’t have.”

  “What does he want now?”

  “He wants to know if we can send him stickers. He says he’ll post them around the Valley.”

  “Tell him we don’t have any stickers!”

  “Okay.”

  She wonders,

  How long, have we been senseless.

  “Can we send him any flyers? He’s wondering if we have flyers.”

  I shut my computer and walked over to Ben’s desk. I’m not sure who was driving me up the wall more—this kid or Ben.

  “We don’t. But I guess I can design and xerox some? Where are we supposed to send them?”

  “He said to meet him at the Basement show on Friday.”

  My key piece of advice for bootstrapping brands is to capitalize on any available resources, especially if they’re free. Ours was the first generation with widespread access to the internet. We were the first to take a crack at the web’s ability to spread information. It was an equalizer. And it provided free resources in every one of my most cherished fields of interest. But building a brand takes more than just an internet connection. Sometimes it takes a bit of ingenuity: street smarts, if you will.

  I wanted to make thousands of flyers without dropping mad loot, but the Kinko’s in the nearby strip mall charged a dime a copy, and that added up quick. Back at school, as an editor, I had keys to the Law Review offices on the far end of campus. The select few of us on staff found sanctuary there between classes or studying for final exams. To keep us satiated, the school provided the Law Review members with free coffee, free highlighters, and most important of all, free photocopies. So, one night, I typed “thehundreds.com” in un-kerned Cooper font on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper. Then Ben and I holed up in the library after class. Once everyone had gone home, we took the elevator up to the Law Review office and locked ourselves in the photocopier room. Ben stood guard while I churned out thousands of flyers on the law school’s tab.

  I’ve made a lot of memories building The Hundreds into the brand it is today. I don’t remember much about the strip clubs and the private jets (and there were strip clubs and private jets), but I do remember nights like those. The faint chemical smell of printer ink heating up, the white-hot bulb flashing against the wall, Ben and I chattering into the morning over the clamor of the copy machine, talking about the future of The Hundreds.

  * * *

  I DIDN’T know what to expect of Scotty iLL, but it wasn’t hard to find him in the crowd. The Basement (now extinct) was a hip-hop shop in the Valley that was well-known for offering graffiti supplies, art shows, and underground rap performances. Cornerstone rappers from KRS-One to Jeru the Damaja performed on the Basement’s narrow stage throughout their careers. But tonight, it was the local collective L.A. Symphony’s turn. A bobbing sea of heads in dreadlocks, painter caps, and beanies billowed with the beat as Flynn and Pigeon John rapped back and forth. Off to the side of the stage, a stocky, gnomish white boy in a XXXL T-shirt shook our hand. His wiry Jewfro and scruffy facial hair suggested he was thirty-five, but his enthusiasm and devilish grin betrayed his real age of sixteen. Scotty was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. He was one of those savants. He’d just landed in sneaker and streetwear culture by accident. Perhaps if he’d grown up in Silicon Valley, he might’ve developed a game-changing app. If he’d stayed in his native Boston, he’d maybe have gone Ivy League. But Scotty grew up in Valencia at the foot of a Six Flags theme park.2 He’d fallen in love with skateboarding and, by proxy, with street culture.

  These days, everybody’s an expert. You can google it all—who’s behind the brands, how they started them, where the designers drew inspiration. Scotty, however, not only had memorized the internet gossip but also had his own IRL sources who’d divulge classified intel. We were technically in the industry, but this precocious teenage outsider had deeper connects in the New York, Hawaii, San Francisco, and San Diego street scenes. He was up-to-date on sneaker releases, inside beefs, and which brands to watch out for. Accordingly, he had been observing us from afar and believed in The Hundreds’ culture-driven ethos. It was what prompted him to reach out to our general info email.

  Scotty walked us to his Camry and popped the trunk. Pink Nike SB boxes and broken skateboards toppled out. It looked like a skate shop stockroom during the Christmas season. We cleared a space between a pair of Alife RTFT slip-ons and some Wu-Tang Dunks and transferred the box of flyers to his car. His face lit up. He immediately grabbed a fat stack of paper and walked Ventura Boulevard, littering doorsteps and windshields and diner counters with the endless supply of rectangular sheets. He promised to take them to school the next day and spread the word. And we believed him.

  Malcolm Gladwell has written entire books on ambassadors like Scotty iLL. There are the creators, and there are the fans. But it’s the Scottys who proselytize on the corners and convert the crowds. They build the bridges between islands and make nations. Today, they’re called tastemakers or influencers. Ben and I calle
d our street soldiers the Bomb Squad. They have an infectious spirit and a commanding authority. The best brands recognize this gift in people like Scotty and capitalize on it.

  For the next year, Scotty harassed Ben for a job. Ben ignored him. But Scotty kept running out of flyers, and we continued to print them for him. No matter how many times we told him to go away, he’d pop right back up like a prairie dog. His time came, fortuitously, on a cold and soggy morning at the top of Finals Hell Week. By this time, our inventory was stacked to my apartment ceiling. We had begun the business with a scant handful of fresh-pressed T-shirts, which I’d neatly laid out in my towel cabinets. We filled orders as they streamed in—five shirts to Portland here, ten shirts to Houston there. Season after season, the sales mounted exponentially. In a year’s time, I’d find myself carving a path through canyons of cardboard boxes full of T-shirts in my living room while Ben packaged deliveries in my bathroom. My girlfriend stopped coming over—mainly because there was no couch to sit on and the TV was blocked by crates of T-shirts. Once Ben and I couldn’t get to our desks anymore, we realized it was time to shell out some cash for real storage.

  Behind my back alley was a public storage facility that was kinda pricey but convenient. We reluctantly signed up for a ten-by-ten-foot space with a roll-up door. Ben would spend most of his afternoons alone inside our storage container armed with headphones and a tape gun. Nevertheless, once final exams hit he couldn’t ship orders out fast enough. He scrolled through his phone and found Scotty’s number.

  “What are you doing today?” He paused to let Scotty attempt an answer. “Well—not anymore. You gotta get here in thirty minutes. You’re up to bat.”

  Scotty got there in twenty-nine and immediately started running that glossy masking tape across the box flaps. Package after package, day after day, Scotty implanted himself in the operation. Within months, he went from packing and shipping in the storage unit to becoming our intern—running deliveries, picking up print jobs, and rolling blunts for Ben once the dust settled on the workday.

  The next fall, Ben came to me and said, “I’ve been thinking … I feel like we should start paying Scotty.”

  “What! Why? Is he complaining?” I still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of paying ourselves yet, let alone the intern.

  “No, I think he’d work for free forever if we asked him to. But I think we should.”

  I sat on it. Scotty had done a lot for us, and I couldn’t imagine The Hundreds without him. He had become a part of the family.

  Ben sensed my hesitation. “But don’t worry!” he said to comfort me. “I’m just gonna pay him minimum wage. Peanuts!”

  I relented.3

  * * *

  THE GOAL was (and continues to be) to bring people into our community and introduce them to The Hundreds’ ongoing story. We believed that if we could know our customers as friends, they’d support our business. It wasn’t as crucial to us to pry dollars from their hands or pick data from their hard drives. That was guaranteed to come later.

  We used what we could to direct people to thehundreds.com (and then @thehundreds on social media). We threw parties and curated art shows, collaborated with other brands and held restaurant takeovers. Our flyers were showing up all over Los Angeles, and not just by Scotty’s doing; I’d made the art free and downloadable on our website. I designed a series of absurd and shocking mock ads that would be stapled onto telephone poles selling weight loss pills (LOSE 500 LBS. IN A WEEK!) and get-rich-quick schemes (MAKE $5 MILLION AN HOUR) with “thehundreds.com” tagged along the border. We announced Nirvana reunion tours and garage sales for used body parts and kids wheatpasted them around the world. The most downloaded flyer was a silhouette of a girl’s face with a trucker cap. What Pharrell had initiated as a cool headwear trend had rapidly devolved into a Von Dutch punch line. Newly minted TMZ stars like Tara Reid rocked truckers hard with their Juicy Couture sweats. The flyers pointed to the hat and shouted, “Take it off, Stupid!” and “Boy, that looks dumb!”

  I liked flyers (and stickers, once we could meet the minimums to make them) because they functioned outside the digital space. Paper that could cut your fingers. Ink that could stain your hands. “Getting up”—an old-school graffiti term for writing your name up high for the world to take notice—required jumping out of the car in the middle of a busy freeway or scaling a rusty fence. Alternatively, publicizing The Hundreds on the internet was easy and almost lazy. It felt cheap to me and ephemeral. Plus, there was a disconnect: If it didn’t feel meaningful and enduring to me, would the casual observer take it seriously? I’m the kind of guy who prefers to meet people face-to-face as opposed to via conference call. I need to sense a human link. As companies transitioned to online advertising, brands started to take less advantage of the streets. Anyone could slap a rotating web banner on a Google ad, only to be forgotten moments later. I wanted to hit people IRL, off freeway exits. So, we did just that. While everyone was moving left, toward the internet, we cut right, toward the physical, permanent world.

  The flyer campaign was clocking a lot of mileage, but the mark was too broad and unspecific. (Remember: Don’t aim to make customers of everyone. You just need someone.) As fun as it was to confuse forty-year-old mothers in minivans with our ads on the 10 freeway, forty-year-old mothers in minivans were not our target. We had to sharpen our focus and zero in on a younger market.

  Where could we find a concentration of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds—tens of thousands of young people equipped with open minds, seeking independence from their parents’ institutions, and searching for their own brands to identify with?

  * * *

  BEN HADN’T set foot on the UCLA campus since he’d graduated.

  “Do you see any security guards over here?” he asked no one in particular.

  We were still in shock over how effortlessly we were able to roll onto the college campus in the dark of the night. Ben’s brother Jon had tagged along, sitting in the backseat with thousands of our flyers, still fuming hot off the press. We’d driven straight from the law school copy machine to Ben’s alma mater in Westwood. We’d planned to reupholster the campus with our propaganda while the students slept. We scurried across the quads, courtyards, and lecture halls like frenetic mice, puncturing student organization signage with flyers and annihilating bulletin boards with staple guns, glue, and wheatpaste. We figured, “Hey, at least it isn’t graffiti,” nestling into the gray area between criminal vandalism and public nuisance. “If they don’t like it, they can just pull the flyers down, right?”

  By the time we were done, there wasn’t an inch of exposed space left at UCLA. You know those stories of farmers waking up to crop circles on their land, clueless as to how a prankster accomplished such a supernatural feat in the dead of night? The next morning, students traversed the dewy grass to a school they hardly knew. There were so many sheets of white paper layered in certain areas that it looked as if it had snowed. The popular advertising adage says you have to see something three times before it sticks. That day, the Bruins witnessed The Hundreds’ name fourteen thousand times over.

  We had only been asleep a few hours before the first complaint hit our in-box. From the head of UCLA’s Veritas Forum:

  I am writing you in order to let you know about several signs that were recently ruined at UCLA, and in the place of the missing/destroyed signs is a large number of flyers bearing your company’s logo and website stapled to the sign. There are also other flyers bearing your company’s information stapled onto the posters of other group’s signs at UCLA. We are planning to gather the other affected student groups, contact the university, and file a complaint and/or legal action against your organization. Please contact me ASAP to let me know about any arrangements that could be made.

  By lunchtime, a flood of outraged emails from students, professors, and faculty would fill our in-box. They ranged from polite grievances to blinding hate mail. The grand finale closed out the fireworks a couple days later,
after the student groups convened with the administration. A formal letter from the Office of the Chancellor, University of California, Los Angeles, declared that Ben and I were not only banned from UCLA but disallowed from entering all UC campuses up and down the West Coast (including my alma mater, UCSD). If we broke this order, we would be subject to arrest and legal consequences.

  Two years later, I recounted this story to a lecture hall full of UCLA students not more than five hundred feet from where we’d set off the midnight raid. UCLA’s Campus Events Commission had gotten wind of The Hundreds’ rising success and invited me to speak to the university students, telling me that I’d be in good company—previous guest lecturers included presidents, tech founders, and celebrated movie stars. Since then, I’ve been invited to speak at four other University of California schools.

  * * *

  OF COURSE, the internet—even in its prehistoric form—played a pivotal role in getting our name out. And while I’ve often been asked to speak on the secrets of social media—on amassing followers on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat—I don’t have a magic touch or some kind of inside track. I simply obey two rules: (1) see the numbers as people; and (2) look at the platforms as mere tools.

  Every generation has access to different tools with which they might connect with each other. When I was a teenager, we photocopied zines, writing and editing and collaging material in order to communicate our worldview to strangers. When we started The Hundreds, zines were digitalized into blogs. And since the late 2000s, social media has been the primary tool. The answer isn’t the tool itself (VR and AR technology aren’t going to miraculously solve your growth problems). The solution lies in facilitating human connection. You must understand that it is our nature to long for relationships. People will always go to lengths to find each other. They’ll migrate across continents, cross oceans in ships, and even explore outer space to make contact. As a brand, you should focus on making it easy and convenient for them to do just that. Today, it’s a text-messaging platform and tomorrow it’ll be Demolition Man–style cybersex, but if you center on binding communities, you’ll always have a way to foster a large and loyal audience.