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CASE IN POINT: NikeTalk.
NikeTalk was a forum, a message board like Reddit, often uncredited as an early leader in connecting the dots for sneaker and streetwear culture enthusiasts. The website was just a black page with red font and blue hyperlinks. But it was the community, the people who used the platform to work together, that made NikeTalk powerful.
I’d first logged on in 1999, while I was still in college. My friend Jesse had introduced me to sneaker collecting, but I wanted to know who was informing him. He pulled niketalk.com up on Internet Explorer and gave me a tour of the different rooms. There were discussions on various retro Nikes, as well as current releases, rumored drop dates, and sneak peeks.
Most of the guys (and the occasional lady) were hunting for Jordans. Nike was beginning to reissue Js to a generation of young adults who had thirsted after the first editions of Michael Jordan’s footwear in the 1980s. My favorites were the classic Jordan 1s, the cement IVs, and the black Vs. Back in grade school, Jordans were like iPhones. Every year, there was a new Tinker Hatfield design to love or hate. These weren’t straightforward Nikes with laces, a canvas upper, and a rubber midsole. Jordans were designed like military-grade airplanes or Transformers. Like Voltrons for your feet. They made you cooler. They made you jump higher. And they made you more popular.
The majority of us had parents who’d winced at the thought of buying their kids $90 sneakers. But as adults, we were more than happy to make room in our budget for a pair. And Nike fed into the nostalgic demand.4 Of course, much of this collectors’ obsession was fostered by Japanese otaku culture. The Japanese made the trend exotic and cool but eventually made sneaker collecting even more obscure. There was no centralized source from which you might get your sneaker news—no StockX or Sneaker Shopping—so the real heads plugged into NikeTalk to gossip and share. I don’t know the numbers, but I’m sure there couldn’t be more than a few thousand of us in the world who were truly dedicated NikeTalk users. Lots of prominent personalities on the message board would go on to be known for their role in street culture, like the celebrity jeweler Ben Baller, John Mayer, Anti Social Social Club’s Neek, and the rapper Wale. Ben and I were also big NikeTalkers.
This wasn’t a coincidence. At every point in this story, we were on the front lines of progressive street fashion, whether intentional or situational. The media likes to think that cool culture begins with elusive influencers and mysterious socialites, but the sneaker-collecting movement (which segued into streetwear’s modern iteration) was led by nerd-ass firebrands trading shoe news behind computer screens. These collectors were feverish, educated on the subject matter, and looking to build together. It’s that unbreakable passion that catches on with any trend. It was hard to ignore the fastidious upkeep of the marbled leather on Jesse’s Jordan IIIs. It was easy to get swept into the fanaticism running through the message board once a phone pic of Pharrell’s Ice Cream sneakers leaked. These guys cared so much, believed in something beyond the walls of their office cubicles and their mundane lives. In my opinion, it wasn’t about shoes at all. They’re just leather moccasins with air bubbles. It was about the community, the nod of approval, and the respect of your peers.
And then there were sneakerheads like Ben and me for whom consuming and trading weren’t enough. We wanted to be on the other side of the frenzy5—the brand side. We couldn’t make shoes and didn’t work at Nike or adidas, but we did know how to print T-shirts. Who was dressing these guys from the ankles up? Here was a predominantly male audience that not only cared about how they looked but were spending hundreds of dollars at a time on their outward appearance. Yet there was no brand or aesthetic that signified a sneakerhead. NikeTalk members dressed in everything from premium streetwear like Supreme and Bape to Orange County surf labels like Volcom and RVCA. There were the athletes in Nike head to toe, the clean-cut J.Crew types, and the sneaker collectors in the South who paired Air Max’s with Southpole and Mecca. Outside a couple sneaker-specific T-shirt labels like Skoold in Korrectnuss and Well Bred, nobody was out there capitalizing on the rest of the puzzle.
The Hundreds’ first marketing endeavor was seeded on NikeTalk. Fashion bloggers have built entire careers on Instagramming their ensembles, but in the early 2000s, kids influenced each other’s dress in threads like “What Did You Wear Today?” WDYWT, for short. It was NikeTalk’s most frequented link, featuring thousands of pages of mostly boys posing in their bathroom mirror with their favorite kicks on (this would come to be known as the selfie). They were trying to stunt on each other—hurt each other’s feelings with a fresh pair of Supa Dunks or almond AF1s—but they were also learning how to style their outfits from one another. Instead of a generic T-shirt, Ben and I started injecting our T-shirts into product grids, mimicking the layout of the Things Organized Neatly Tumblr. I paired our chocolate-brown “Love” T-shirt (a photo of Don King and Mike Tyson together with neon-green lettering) with the jungle-themed Safari Atmos AM1s. Pink was trending courtesy of Cam’ron’s Range Rover and Pharrell’s and Kanye’s upturned-collar Polos, so Ben took the bacon-themed DQM Air Max collaboration and juxtaposed it with The Hundreds’ burgundy-and-hot-pink “Big Money” tee.
The NikeTalk community loved The Hundreds because it belonged to one of their own. Like any niche fan base, they asked themselves, “Why support an outside corporation if you could big-up someone from the community?” They could now promote their brethren and be on the forefront of the next big thing. Sneakerheads were also dying for bold, colorful apparel to match their loud and splashy shoes. In mainstream urban fashion, the more popular labels emphasized earth tones and muted neutrals. On the other end of the spectrum, NikeTalkers hankered for lemon-yellow hoodies with turquoise designs. Some popular Nikes, like the kaleidoscopic Viotechs, combined every color in the rainbow. They didn’t make much sense with a dark navy track jacket, but a shoe like the Union Air Max 180 really popped with our “Make ’Em Scream” multicolored T-shirt.
Today, it’s not odd for a young, straight guy to be super into his clothes. And in a strange twist, men’s fashion is even dictating women’s fashion. Just a mere decade or two back, however, Americans weren’t comfortable with boys being as into shopping and style as girls. In a homophobic culture, this behavior was perceived as effeminate or gay. People have forgotten this, but at the time there was even a pejorative term for heterosexual dudes who cared about fashion: “metrosexual.” We can thank Kanye for opening up the dialogue on men’s fashion enthusiasm, but sneakerheads were the ones who gave straight men the pass to be engrossed with their wardrobes.
As sneaker culture proliferated in the mainstream, the demand for streetwear labels grew. Specialty footwear shops like Undefeated, Atmos, and Foot Soldier weren’t the only stores accommodating sneakerheads anymore. Practically every city now featured a sneaker boutique with some variation of an exclusive Nike account. Aside from the shoe wall, those shops had racks and hangers to fill. So, they called on upstart T-shirt brands like The Hundreds, Spoon Fed, and Undrcrwn to round out their orders. There were also those shopkeepers who highlighted the clothing as much as—if not more than—the shoes. Where once stood outlier streetwear boutiques like Behind the Post Office, Supermax, and Mathlab, a new crop of street fashion stores flourished. Ben hung a whiteboard above his desk in my apartment. Together, we wrote down the fifty best boutiques around the world, focusing on those that not only understood our genre of streetwear but stocked the names which we wanted to sit alongside. One by one, we scratched them off, and by the end of the year we were stocked in all fifty stores. In4mation in Hawaii. UBIQ in Philadelphia. Colette in Paris. The Hundreds was growing and sneakers were booming. Streetwear was taking hold and putting pressure on the giants. All of a sudden we went from having a concealed culture to a full-blown industry on our hands.
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THE HUNDREDS got a lot of fast and thirsty press in those days. Although streetwear would need another decade to break aboveground, o
ur brand was on the forefront of this internet-led, brand-centric, renegade entrepreneurialism. The 2008 recession knocked the wind out of stalwart American companies that adhered to classic business models like Blockbuster, Pontiac, and Virgin Megastore. The larger fashion labels that couldn’t adapt to internet trends also suffered a direct hit, causing department stores like Mervyn’s to shutter. Anchor Blue (a store I had grown up shopping in, under the Miller’s Outpost name) closed fifty stores at once and petered out over the years.
Small businesses absorbed the brunt of the recession. On average, the Small Business Administration claims that nearly two-thirds of all small businesses will not survive their first two years. But the recession stretched that margin further. Between 2008 and 2010, the recession caused 170,000 businesses on our level to shutter. Eighty percent of those that survived had no employees and made less than $45,000 a year. Yet while the economy was going down in flames, The Hundreds was not only insulated but accelerating, and the journalists could only wonder how.
In October of that same recession year, Inc. magazine awarded me and Ben two individual spots on its annual “30 Under 30” entrepreneurs list, right above the Tumblr and WordPress guys. Most of the other picks were Silicon Valley or finance MVPs. Ben and I were the odd men out, wearing T-shirts and Jordans in the magazine’s group photo. My bright green zip-up hoodie was a sharp contrast to all the suit blazers and shiny shoes. While the shutter clicked and the bulbs popped, Ben and I whispered to each other—as we often do when we find ourselves at such inexplicably monumental milestones—“How the hell did we get here?”
Rob Walker was asking himself the same question. In 2006, just a mere thirty-six months into the brand’s life, the author and veteran journalist contacted us through our website’s email form. He was curious about what we were doing and how we were doing it. For the next twelve months, he’d fly out from New York to observe, poke, and prod us. He followed us to the print shop and asked us questions like who our parents were and what we thought about malls. And he sat behind our booth at the MAGIC trade show in Las Vegas. Rob was most intrigued by The Hundreds’ attitudinal principles. He sensed a punk rock ethos in the approach. At the time, a twenty-six-year-old Bobby told him, “It’s just the idea of trying to be rebellious, or trying to be a little bit anti, questioning government or your parents. Trying to do something different.” Whereas punk culture incorporated style and iconography to augment the music that was the heart of the subculture, Rob wrote that with streetwear “the symbols, products and brands aren’t an adjunct to the subculture—they are the subculture.”
Rob Walker’s New York Times Magazine cover story (wherein he also discussed the labels aNYthing and Barking Irons) was titled “The Brand Underground.” His seven-page write-up was the first mainstream, long-form piece on not just The Hundreds but contemporary streetwear as a whole. The cover art featured a photograph of a white T-shirt with three questions screened onto the front:
CAN A HIPSTER T-SHIRT BE AS INCENDIARY AS A ROCK ANTHEM?
IS A COOL LOGO SOME KIND OF MANIFESTO?
DOES SHOPPING FOR WEIRD NEW STUFF MAKE YOU SUBVERSIVE?
The article resonated not just with New York Times readers but with fans and critics alike from around the world. It was our first mainstream press, and for most people who’d read Rob’s story, it was the first time they’d heard of The Hundreds. And they didn’t exactly know how to receive this story of two cocky kids with a swank T-shirt brand.
“I think Rob Walker gave today’s hipster youth too much credit in his interesting article (July 30). I think what he describes is a new breed of entrepreneur rather than a new artistic or social movement,” a reader named Ted argued. “Offering a fashion alternative to kids looking to express their individuality is not art; it’s just good business.”
Ted’s sentiment was meant to be critical but echoed what a lot of business analysts at the time thought about The Hundreds. We had a four-hundred-square-foot store but were selling over $2,500 a day in T-shirts. That was more dollars per square foot than the biggest department stores. Meanwhile, Macy’s and Nordstrom had never heard of us. Trend-forecasting companies reported that high school kids were ranking The Hundreds’ notoriety next to established lines like Quiksilver and DC. And there were no bells and whistles; we were printing our T-shirts on the same Alstyle Apparel blanks with the same ink as any other garage start-up. No celebrities hawking our goods, no skate dream team to explain our popularity. Most notably, no family capital, investors, or venture capitalists to whom one might attribute our rapid growth and success. We didn’t even have the means to produce broader advertising or marketing campaigns. So how were we connecting with the kids?
The answer lies in our dedication to community building. The Hundreds is an utter anomaly in the fashion world, following no previously established business model. So, I can’t attribute our success to anything other than community. And the blueprint has, in fact, always been there. Ted was right: our brand was just another run-of-the-mill business. What he didn’t appreciate, however, was that at its center were Ben and I—two streetwear and sneakerhead fans, just like the rest of NikeTalk—who were simply sharing what they loved with a supportive audience. People were buying other labels because of the image association, their perceived value, and the clout that came with them. Our customers were moving toward us because they had found kinship.
I tried skateboarding; I dove into hardcore. I adopted sneakerhead culture and even stuck my toe in the legal field. I thought I’d finally found a permanent home in streetwear. Then, in founding The Hundreds, I found the hundreds.
14. UPSIDE DOWN AND BACKWARD
THE OTHER DAY, a friend showed me an app on his phone. You take a photo of anything, upload it onto a T-shirt template, and within two days you get your physical T-shirt in the mail. You can even order a crate of these if you want. There are websites out of China that are doing the same with cut-and-sew apparel. Factories will make you one-off jeans or jackets featuring your logo and design. If you have a Shopify account, you can set up a personalized online shop within minutes, connect it to your bank, and have a full-blown clothing company up and running out of your bedroom by lunchtime. I saw this, closed my eyes tight, ran headfirst into a brick wall, and came back from the dead to tell you this.
This is how we made T-shirts in 2003: first, we’d buy an allotment of blank T-shirts from a gray-market wholesaler downtown. These were slightly defective goods that the manufacturer had dumped on some grumpy Korean garmento in Santee Alley—T-shirts that were too short or too long or off by a shade of purple. Because these were the remnants of much larger orders, they came in assorted and unordered sizes and colors. We couldn’t afford to place the minimum order directly with the manufacturer, so we were stuck sourcing boxfuls of weird tan shirts containing twice the number of XXLs as mediums. But we took what we could get and designed around it.
Speaking of which, I didn’t know how to design and prepare T-shirt graphics when we started The Hundreds. I knew how to draw. And I knew how to shoot photos. But I didn’t have the requisite design programs, let alone the skill set, to convert my art into digitally usable screen prints. I ripped copies of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator online and have taught myself the programs over the years. That first summer, however, all I could muster were font treatments of “The Hundreds” and stencils of scans of my photographs. Paired with some gimmicky Photoshop effects, this was the extent of our first season’s graphic design prowess.
Next was the hardest step: finding a screen printer to transfer our art onto T-shirts. Back then, once a year, someone would drop off a cinder block of telephone numbers and addresses on your doorstep. The Yellow Pages are an encyclopedic directory of businesses and residents in your area. One option was to blindly call screen-printing shops in our city to inquire about minimum orders and pricing. Another option was a referral from a friend. There were no crowdsourced reviews to narrow the search.
Ben, Mak, and
I pooled our cash, throwing in roughly $200 to $300 each. We assumed that would cover the blank T-shirts and printing costs. Ben’s brother Jon had a friend who had a manual one-color printing press in his backyard. We’d already tried the arts-and-crafts route, buying an eight-by-eleven-inch Speedball kit and trying to screen print our T-shirts individually. It was like watching fourth graders conduct a class project that was just bound to fail. Jon’s friend’s name was Alan. He would go on to be a well-respected tattoo artist in the Valley. But at the time, he was a struggling artist whose hobbies included homemade screen-printing projects.
“Sure, I can handle that for you,” Alan said over the phone. “How many shirts?”
We had about one hundred blanks in that cardboard box and handed our entire inventory—the whole company, really—to Alan later that afternoon.
“I’d say give it about two to three weeks,” he added. Ugh. That seemed like a long time to wait for our dreams to come true, but we had to be patient.
Between my courthouse internship, applying to Law Review, and filing the business paperwork, I found that the third week came faster than expected. We were eager to hear from Alan.
This Is Not a T-Shirt Page 9