* * *
THIS WASN’T the first time we’d talked about selling to malls, and it wasn’t the last, but it proved to be the tipping point in a discussion that would eventually push The Hundreds into its next chapter.
Ben had initiated the meeting.
After taking a deep breath, he’d said, “We’re about to enter a new phase, and I need you to be on board with this next step.”
We were sitting in my office in our old downtown L.A. warehouse, right outside the fashion district on a nowhere street. The cops had given up on South Wall Street as two rival gangs shared its jurisdiction. Graffiti wars continued in broad daylight. Metal scrapyards and leather makers repainted their front walls weekly. And there was a homeless encampment that inched closer to our doorstep every day.
Ben had called all the head dudes into my office—a space that barely fit me and a desk. We sat on the carpet, the bookcase, anywhere that was free from vinyl figures and Nikes and would take a sweaty ass. The rest of the guys looked down at the floor while Ben spoke. I wasn’t surprised or caught off guard by what my partner was about to propose. There had been whispers of our entering the mall stores for the past year.
“At some point in the near future,” Ben had warned me, “we’re gonna reach a crossroads. We don’t have to open up distribution to the mall, but we have to move more volume somehow.”
The Hundreds hadn’t yet plateaued, and the brand was far from declining. On the contrary, our rapid growth was outpacing our infrastructure. Without any investors or outside capital backing us, and without the power of e-commerce as it performs today, we needed more money to finance our operation. We were adding product SKUs and had to pay more up front to the factories. Staff had gone from five persons to fifty in a couple of years. Our seventeen-thousand-square-foot headquarters was bursting at the seams—a Noah’s ark of salesmen, marketers, and designers. Chairs backed into one another; a private conversation was shared by all. Our warehouse was a Q*bert-styled city of cardboard boxes.
Today, brands like ours have the option of direct-to-consumer distribution, which keeps overhead low. That’s because of the shift in attitudes toward buying clothes online. But in 2010, brands still relied heavily on wholesale distribution for sales and marketing. The only way to reach people in most markets was by selling clothes to the right shops in their neighborhoods. This process required more laborers and operations on the brand side. We beefed up our sales team, took on international distributors, and hired more designers to expand our collection, because all the different shops wanted to be blessed with segmented, unique product.
Despite my ignorance, The Hundreds had evolved into a legitimate business. These were the “clubhouse to corporate” years, when much of our original crew couldn’t keep up or downright quit.
“Nothing was the same.”
Our focus had slowly evolved from being cool to being profitable, and with that came goals and expectations, and that spoiled a lot of longtime friendships. We went from being buddies to being bosses, and not everyone was on board. There was plenty of love lost in the transition, deep beefs that hold to this day with former friends, but the only relationship we cared about investing in—the one that would pay us handsomely back in the end—was between us and The Hundreds and the customer.
Only problem was that in order to sustain this trajectory, we needed to take money (from investors or new partners) or make money. We weren’t interested in letting an outside voice speak for—or take a piece of—our brand. So we would have to either open more of our own retail stores (we didn’t have the wherewithal; after having self-funded and operated four stores in four years, we were panting with exhaustion), intentionally muffle sales to increase demand (which was high-risk at this stage), or open distribution to a greater audience.
We had capped out in sales at the handful of streetwear and sneaker stores worldwide. Next Scotty would conquer skate retailers out of our love for skateboarding and support of the culture. At this time, skate was coming down from a long and dizzying high set off by years of wildly successful shoe sales. DC, DVS, and Osiris had maxed out in core skate shops, so those accounts grew increasingly keen on American streetwear brands that were tangential to retro sneaker culture. As Nike and adidas ate up more share of the skate market, crossover labels like The Hundreds, Huf, and Primitive captured a moment reminiscent of the mid-1990s indie skate brand explosion.
But as the larger skate companies crumbled, skateboarding retailers became saturated with a wave of endemic indie skate/street labels like Dime, Magenta, and Fucking Awesome, and grew resistant to original streetwear. That left brands like ours with little option but to turn up the juice in the malls.
“We’re kinda assed out.”
“I know, I know,” I muttered as Ben broke it all down. “Are we sure there’s no other viable option here?”
As much as I couldn’t see myself personally shopping in the mall, I was never opposed to selling our brand there … someday. Some of the coolest brands are also the biggest: Nike, Apple, Polo. Did the fact that these names weren’t limited, and were found in department stores and shopping centers, make them any less cool? Or, was part of their appeal that they were ubiquitous and adopted by every household?
Plus, consumer patterns had changed, and who knew where streetwear would be in the next decade. As much as I hated when my favorite underground artists made their way into the mainstream, I wondered how long they could survive by playing small clubs and fighting change. The hard reality was that as much as I fancied The Hundreds as a small-time creative project, it was a business. And the point of a business is to make money, to sell for a profit, and to keep the ball in the air for as long as possible. That’s capitalism, folks!
Furthermore, I wanted to do more creatively. With The Hundreds reaching new heights, my scope of possibilities dilated. I wasn’t content with graphic T-shirts and baseball caps anymore. I wanted to design footwear, and I wanted to use better materials in our garments. Yet as much as we valued the importance of quality and appreciated how our designers were learning and growing more sophisticated in clothing construction, we just couldn’t meet the minimums on fabric yardage. Ben and I had our sights set on larger, noisier collaborations with record labels and movie studios, but these were cumbersome licensing deals that demanded minimum guarantees (we were on the line for a specific number, whether or not the collection sold). There’s a thin line between avarice and greed, and although I had little need for extra cash to line my pockets, I wanted a better lining for The Hundreds’ pockets. Literally.
“No matter where I turn, I end up back at the mall,” Ben confessed. “The skate shops are phasing out streetwear. That’s most of our wholesale doors. There aren’t enough streetwear shops out there, and eventually they’ll replace us with a newer, younger brand, because that’s what they do. I know Zumiez is in the mall, but they’re stocking the right brands for us to sit next to. They’re exiting out of the dead surf and skate industry and introducing a whole new generation to streetwear.”
Zumiez, one of the two largest mall-based skate/street shops, was excited to take us on. Our friends were already being prominently showcased at Zumiez, and the store’s buyers were convinced that The Hundreds would excel in some of the major markets. PacSun, the competitor retailer, had also expressed interest in our label. It had almost a thousand stores across America.
“Then we might as well sell to every store in the mall,” I griped. Of course, I didn’t actually mean that, but I wanted to make a point. Although Zumiez and PacSun were considered of a different class compared with other mall retailers, I didn’t see the difference between their stores and a Hot Topic or a Spencer’s. You could smell the grease from the food court combining with the perfumes from Victoria’s Secret in these stores. And no matter where you stood in the building, you’d hear the thumping music from Abercrombie and the grating wails of toddlers at Build-a-Bear. The way I saw it—considering everything I knew and hated about t
he shopping mall experience—if The Hundreds came to be identified as a mall brand, our core customers would surrender their loyalty to us.
Ben answered, “Of course we’re gonna lose a big chunk of our customers, but think about how many new fans we’ll be exposed to.”
In my head, we were already there. It’s a sacrifice that any independent artist faces in transcending their underground appeal. Much of your die-hard fan base, the ones who nurtured your brand from birth, will take your success hard. They don’t want to share you with the rest of the world. They feel special, like keepers of the world’s best secret. Courting newbie fans will inevitably tarnish that relationship.
From a purely business standpoint, there are always more newbies than there are early adopters. A lot more. They’re not the ones who keep the brand grounded, and they don’t stick around for long, but if you’re looking for numbers, that’s where you’ll find them.5 By 2010, our core audience had stuck with us for seven years. But they were starting to graduate from The Hundreds. Most of our young fans started following us somewhere between middle school and high school. Finding themselves among new peers as they entered college, they were beginning to reinvent themselves, creating new identities. And very often, with a new identity comes a new style of dress. Our first devoted fan base was coming of age and saying goodbye to graphic tees and hooded sweatshirts. Some would elevate their style to include trendy, high-fashion labels; some would move into suits and professional attire; and some would start dedicating their hard-earned dollars to sounder investments like property. But every seven years or so, there’s a palpable shift in the trends—and the brands—that kids follow, and The Hundreds was about to hit that moment of flux between its first and its second generation of devotees.
Everything lined up. The mall decision was rational, but I wouldn’t budge. And I wasn’t just fighting with Ben. At some point, I’d realized that this fight wasn’t between me and anyone else in the room at all. It wasn’t between me and The Hundreds, either. I was embroiled in a war with Bobby Kim. I was walled in by this fiction I had told myself. I was living a narrative that making money was wrong, that being popular was uncool, and that growing our business would cause us to concede some shred of authenticity.
I was stuck, and the only way I saw to get unstuck was to run away. So, I did just that.
* * *
I’D RUN away three times in my young life. The first was when I was a toddler, so I don’t remember the specifics. As the story goes, my mom watched me follow my older brother, Larry, out the door; we often played in the schoolyard across the street. An hour or so later, Larry returned with his basketball, but no baby brother.
“Where’s Bobby?” my mother asked.
“Huh? I thought he stayed behind?”
A frantic, neighborhood-wide search ensued. Panicked phone calls were made to my dad and family friends. Eventually, my mom would find me in a barren stretch of dirt bordering a nearby baseball field. I’d been drifting through the dry brush like a stray tumbleweed, totally aloof, my jacket flung over my shoulder, my eyes poised on the horizon, marching into the sun and the infinite beyond, like a tiny Korean cowboy.
I was eight the second time I ran away. My mom and I had been snarled in a nasty argument, one of many that would wound and scar me well into adolescence. I’d penned a tragic farewell letter that was two paragraphs short of a suicide note: “I love you all, but I can’t stay here anymore.” I’d attached the note to my pillow with Scotch tape, stashed my toys and books in a JanSport, and then suddenly realized that I had nowhere to go. In the movies, the runaway folds a PBJ sandwich into a knapsack, hops aboard an empty train car or hitchhikes on the bed of a dusty pickup truck, and wakes up in a magical land. There wasn’t a train station within fifty miles, and in my neighborhood those trucks were driven by racist child molesters. I slumped to the floor, stowed away under my bed, curled up as tightly as I could, and held my breath.
What felt like four or five hours was probably only fifteen minutes or so, but my silence barreled through the house and raised my mom’s eyebrow. I saw her feet come to the door, her voice genuinely concerned.
“Bobby? Where are you?”
I smiled. I imagined her reading my runaway letter, those barbs of guilt hooking deep inside her heart, the regret and sorrow ravaging her existence. Then I felt an unexpected tug. It started deep down by my toes and crawled slowly up my spine. By the time it reached my throat, it closed my airway and choked me. I pushed it upward into my reddening face and felt the tears burst from my eyes. I was feeling pretty freaking sad … and guilty.
My mom’s feet shuffled closer to the bed. Could she see me? I heard the rustle of the paper as she unfolded it. She read the letter out loud, and by this time Larry had walked in, confused and curious (and probably smirking).
“Oh no,” my mother said in Korean to him. “Bobby has run away! What do we do without him? My heart breaks.”
Even then, I knew she was pretending. I’m pretty sure she saw me under the bed as soon as she stood in the doorway. But my imagination had taken creative license with this pitiful scenario. I was already in the final chapter of the saga in my head, with my mother wailing over my limp, lifeless body—a bag of raggedy bones discarded at the bottom of a drainage ditch by a trucker. I was sure that in her final years, with her hair grayed and her skin wrinkled like a peeled chestnut, she would hold on to my ghost, which would follow her to her grave.
“I’m right here!” I reluctantly cried and crawled out from under the bed frame with my head bowed. I sank into my mom’s warm embrace. It felt good to be home.
The third time I ran away would be the last time. Six months later, I’d finally leave the house for good. I had just turned seventeen, and my dad and I had butted heads in another one of our epic fights. I was a man and could fight back now, but instead I bolted for the door, jumped into my truck, peeled out of the driveway, and drove to my friend Peter’s house. Then to Billy’s. Then to Kevin’s. I bounced around for a week, occasionally talking to my mom from my friends’ home phones. That weekend, I returned home—not because I wanted to, but because I’d worn out my welcome sleeping on other people’s floors. I’d run out of rope. My dad and I barely talked for the remainder of that summer before I left for college. I’d hold on to, and channel, the anger that I felt during that episode for years and years to come.
* * *
MY TRUCK kicked up a cloud of dust as I sped away from the office. I couldn’t think straight and bounced around the freeway feeling angry and defeated. But deep down, I was scared. I flashed back to my childhood memories of running away. Here I was, fleeing again, unsure of where I was headed.
Was I just as lost and aimless as I was at three years old? Maybe I was trying to prove a point by causing a scene as I did at eight? Or was it simply time for me to move on, like when I left home for college at seventeen? Had I outgrown The Hundreds? If so, I told myself, I should keep driving and never look back.
11. IN GOOD COMPANY
I COULDN’T TELL what ethnicity he was. Mexican? Cuban? What I could tell was that this guy was brown, round, and furry. Benjamin Shenassafar and I shared the same class section at Loyola Law School. As it turns out, he was Iranian American (or Persian, as he prefers), like the rest of his woolly entourage.
Yet Ben stood apart from the rest of his Persian clique at Loyola. The first son of a second marriage, Ben grew up with his little brother, Jon, in the Valley. He loved the Rams and hip-hop music and had graduated from Ice Cube’s high school. (In fact, if you put him in a Raiders jersey with a pair of sunglasses, he’d resemble an Arab interpretation of the N.W.A. rapper.) And in those first few weeks of law school, there was something else about Ben that caught my attention: he had style. The kid was always planted in a fresh pair of retro sneakers, crispy Diesel denim, and Gucci shades. He’d wear obnoxious lime-green Supreme tees to campus and was the ringleader of his pack. He was the only person to go to law school without ever go
ing to law school. Like in a high school comedy flick, he was the guy who ditched class all year, showed up for the final exam, and would have everyone asking, “You’re in this class?” And, of course, he would score high. Don’t ask me how (or whom he paid), but he breezed through every semester.
“Nice IVs,” I’d remarked. We were standing out front of the lecture hall before class early one morning, and I was admiring Ben’s black Nike Air Jordan IVs.1 These were my favorite sneakers of all time, and they hadn’t been reissued in years, so this guy was either a collector, like me, or about to get robbed.
“Oooh,” he sounded, kneeling down to get a better look at my feet. I was wearing custom Louis Vuitton Air Force 1s, a short-lived trend in 2002 that married street culture with high fashion. By replacing the standard Nike swoosh with one patterned with the Louis Vuitton monogram, designers like Raif Adelberg hiked the price tag from $80 to $350–$400 for a pair. Only a select few indie clothing stores like Union on La Brea stocked these black-market mash-ups. Premium sneaker boutiques didn’t exist yet in America.
“Where’d you get your Supreme shirt?” I was testing him.
“I just got back from New York.”
This was the right answer. In fact, it was pretty much the only answer in 2002. Before streetwear was prevalent on eBay, before it was stocked at your local mall, and before brands started to open their own direct e-commerce stores, your best shot at owning a Supreme garment was to fly to New York or Tokyo and visit its brick-and-mortar stores. This was true for all streetwear of the period—brands like SSUR, Alife, and Recon. About as many American brands as you could count on two hands sold their product in their own store. Then there were the handful of domestic multi-brand shops and Japanese distributors. In short, if you lived anywhere outside these cities, you were working airfare into your clothing budget.
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