This Is Not a T-Shirt

by Bobby Hundreds

  I admired the serene brook that flowed in the Undefeated store on La Brea and the skate bowl inside Supreme’s new Fairfax location. These artistic touches were conversation pieces that had nothing to do with selling clothes and everything to do with relaying a message. The artist Tofer Chin installed Corn Mouth, a diorama of a journey from good to evil, along one of our walls. Although the art took up valuable retail space in an already cramped store, it gave the shopping experience life and was what people first remembered when they thought of The Hundreds Los Angeles.

  Out front, I dug out two grave sites, one on each side of the door. I’d raided a local prop house that supplied the skeletons for the Pirates of the Caribbean films and planted two sets of skulls and bones into the ground. I also buried spray cans and my broken skateboard. The installation symbolized my and Ben’s fossilized remains; the message was that our life experiences and souls were kneaded into this store. The artifacts were an homage to the California culture that raised us.

  It worked to our advantage to be short on space. The staff couldn’t get away with being assholes in an intimate environment. I know it’s cooler to have dickheads crossing their arms behind the counter and making everyone feel like diarrhea, but the elitist vibe doesn’t align with us as people or as a brand. We aim to hire chill, welcoming shop kids who greet the customers and make them feel at home. They also retrieve sizes and colors, even though much of the inventory is stacked up in the front for the customers to sort through. Our staff ends up doing their share of refolding and hanging, but it also means that the customers feel comfortable in our home and feel a stronger connection with the brand. Which ultimately means they stick around longer and have more opportunities to spend their dollars.

  * * *

  I LIKE to say that we don’t make stores; we make stories.

  As important as The Hundreds Los Angeles is for selling clothes and marketing awareness, its primary function is to provide a shelter for our community and lifestyle.

  To fertilize this brand ethos of “People over Product,” we teased the store opening months before with our first annual Labor Day Block Party. There’s nothing Ben loves more than throwing a good event. He saw the opportunity to bring the burgeoning Fairfax streetwear neighborhood together by shutting down Rosewood Avenue, firing up a grill, and having friends DJ throughout the day. Streetwear is pegged for its product collaborations, sometimes to a wearisome degree. But we champion the human collabs as well: relationships and partnerships have made the culture strong. As new brands moved onto the block, one by one, Fairfax grew disjointed and awkward. The customer knew something was happening there, but without any camaraderie the neighborhood felt forced and unripe.

  The Hundreds’ Labor Day Block Party changed that. On the hottest and most humid day of the year, the indie brands, the upcoming cool kids, and the shop clerks came out to fraternize and support the scene. Designers flew in from San Francisco and New York, got hyphy and inebriated, and linked. Then they blogged about it. Within a week, all eyes were on Fairfax. The brands themselves were already generating noise. Now that they had joined forces and were working together, a network was mobilizing. For four years (until the City of Los Angeles shut it down permanently), we produced that Labor Day Block Party, and it only got rowdier and more influential. Fairfax—as we know it today—happened for a lot of reasons. But most of those reasons can be traced back to those hundred-degree afternoons on Rosewood. (Anyone who says otherwise either is lying or doesn’t know their history.)

  So, by the time The Hundreds Los Angeles opened in February 2007, this spirit of community insulated the walls. As impressive as the build-out was, our audience fast learned that the shop had less to do with the structure and all to do with the company it kept.

  Our friend KB Lee and I collaborated on an exclusive New Era baseball cap for the store. KB was inspired by a Polo reference, incorporating a navy twill crown with a soft mustard-yellow leather brim. I reduced “Rosewood” down to “RSWD” to mimic Polo’s four letters. The hat sold out in hours, but RSWD lasted forever. First, the shop kids adopted it as their clan; then our customers took up the flag. As The Hundreds cast its net wider in the mainstream, RSWD has come to stand for our core tribe. On any given afternoon, you’ll find bands of kids parked on our bench and curb, barbecuing on the former store manager Five’s grill, or huddled around the utility box facing the shop. Rolling blunts, playing a game of S-K-A-T-E, or talking barbershop BS.

  The church isn’t the building. It’s the congregation. Generations of youth have passed through our door and camped out on our sidewalk, not just to buy product (they can do that online) but to live the experience. It’s like The Hundreds is their favorite band and our stores are the concert venue. You can buy our apparel elsewhere and soak up the culture through social media, but to witness the real thing, you’ve got to see and hear it live, the way it was intended. Our clothes are essentially concert merch. You purchase the gear to prove to the world that you were there.2

  At our first Black Friday sale in 2009, the first kids showed up two days before with sleeping bags and folding chairs. It rained that week, and at night temperatures dipped low, even for Southern California. On Thanksgiving, parents dropped off trays of turkey and gravy for their kids so they could partake of the holiday. By then, the line was inching around the corner. When we opened our doors in the early-morning hours, however, I noticed that the first few campers barely bought anything, if anything at all. I caught one of them on the way out. A heavyset brown kid with bad skin and foul sneakers.

  I looked down at his empty hands. “Nothing?”

  The kid shook his head.

  “And your boy, he’s only getting a couple T-shirts. You guys slept out here for two nights, just to buy two shirts? I don’t get it. Why?”

  He stank. This kid hadn’t showered or brushed his teeth in two days, and it smelled like four. God knows where these dudes were relieving themselves.

  “To say that I did it,” he answered with a crusty yellow grin. “Nobody else can say shit.”

  * * *

  A FEW months after our L.A. shop opened, a collective of San Francisco brands and stores invited us to participate in a local warehouse sale. We were riding off the high of our first store opening and were curious as to other potential markets for The Hundreds stores. Could the Bay Area be one of them? There were no analytics to gauge hot spots. E-commerce wasn’t instrumental enough to measure where our customers were coming from. So, we traveled constantly, feeling out the vibe of new markets by hanging with the locals, research shopping, and getting the lay of the land.3

  We crammed boxes of old product in the back of Ben’s Explorer, burned the seven-hour drive from L.A. to S.F., and pulled up the next morning to throngs of hypebeasts camped outside an abandoned downtown building. It wasn’t until we were inside the warehouse that we were told most of those kids were there for our booth. We unpacked the boxes halfway before the crowd did the rest for us, tearing into the cardboard in pandemonium. Ben and I literally had our backs up against the walls, the folding table in front of us barricading the kids who’d formed like a mosh pit. All we could do was laugh and hold on. We had run out of stock by mid-morning. I could feel the eyeballs crawling on us from jealous vendors and curious shopkeepers.

  “These L.A. motherfuckers. Who do they think they are?! In our town?”

  Until that point, Ben and I had had an idea of the size of our following in Northern California. We were always told we were an L.A. brand with a SoCal aesthetic and that our designs wouldn’t resonate in the Bay Area. I never understood this logic and refused to subscribe to it. There was a lot more Giants orange than Dodger blue in the crowd, but it sure looked to me as if NorCal kids still appreciated dope T-shirts and baseball caps. The naysayers, the gatekeepers, and the excuse makers would attempt to sell the same lie to us about New York, Europe, and international markets overall.

  “You’re an L.A. brand; it won’t work here!”

&
nbsp; Nonbelieving distributors told us to stop writing “Los Angeles” on our clothes, fearful our hometown association would hinder sales. Meanwhile, nobody handcuffed those limitations on New York or Tokyo brands. It was a ruse to throw us off the trail, a speed bump to derail us, but our success at that warehouse sale was the truth. Turns out people appreciate quality clothing regardless of where it comes from, whether it’s West Bumblefuck or Maysville, Kentucky, or Los Angeles, California.

  By the fall of 2007, less than a year after we had opened The Hundreds Los Angeles, we found a home in San Francisco. The building at 585 Post was a shuttering uniform shop on the sloping corner of Post and Taylor with cumbersome interior pillars, a parking garage belonging to a neighboring building, and a hostel upstairs. But when we looked at the space, we imagined another frontier. The shop had more than double the square footage of our first store, it was located on the border of the touristy Union Square shopping district, and right around the corner on Sutter the local brand Huf was holding it down as the city’s skate/street centerpiece.

  Ben and I hired our same architect friends (TylerSpencer) who built THLA, but with more cash in our pockets and higher expectations to fulfill, we cranked the volume to ten. The idea was to make a clothing store feel like an amusement park. We installed a replica of Peter Pan’s Skull Rock on the back wall (because we likened ourselves to the Lost Boys in our brand narrative) and hung the clothing on curved fasteners that symbolized Captain Hook’s “hand.” Half of the store was encased in sleek Kubrickian cabinetry with blinking lights and levers ripped from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A monolithic mirror greeted you at the door, as it does the apes in that film. The rest of the store was assembled with black cavernous rock, molded from the same quarry where the California gold rush began. The next evolution of The Hundreds Los Angeles’s expanding art installation: we wrapped those pesky pillars in the S.F. store with hundreds of skulls (these now represented not just Ben and me but our community) and lifestyle-related cultural artifacts like broken vintage skateboards and spray cans. The result was a dark, super-futuristic cave that merged yesterday and tomorrow—equal parts French catacombs, California culture, and sci-fi spaceship. The store cost us roughly half a million dollars to build. The literal bombproof sliding laboratory door alone cost us $15,000.

  And it happened again. The kids started camping out days in advance. We opened our doors to a line that stretched down the block. I can’t say I wasn’t a little disappointed that none of the customers seemed to appreciate the intricacies of the build-out once they’d entered (they were more interested in scooping up the limited Hieroglyphics collaboration T-shirts). But word soon spread about The Hundreds San Francisco. Why would a fledgling streetwear brand go to such lengths to build a store like this? Why didn’t they just work with IKEA fixtures and save that money? Was it really necessary to dim the lights and play roller-coaster sound effects whipping around the speakers to make it feel as if you were in line for Disneyland’s Space Mountain? I know I’m biased, but ten years later, The Hundreds San Francisco remains the coolest shopping experience in the history of the world.

  Twelve months later, we opened our third store, this time on the East Coast in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood. Playing off this recurring theme of time, The Hundreds New York was designed by the acclaimed architecture firm Johnston Marklee and was imagined as a store designed for today, aged eighty years into the future. Stanley Kubrick’s presence was again referenced in the build-out, with an overpowering monolith running along the ceiling. To preempt the N.Y. haters, we launched a stealth wheatpasting campaign in the months leading up to our grand opening. Our posters shouted, KEEP THE HUNDREDS OUT OF NEW YORK, and were plastered across downtown and the boroughs. We even made The Hundreds stickers that were intentionally designed to look as if they were torn or scraped off. When our friends wore the “Keep The Hundreds out of New York” T-shirts out in the streets, native New Yorkers would shout, “I don’t know what The Hundreds is, but I don’t want it here!” The message board trolls and bloggers had a field day with the movement against The Hundreds New York, jumping on the bitter bandwagon, ignorant to the secret that we were behind the campaign. By the time our store opened, we were orchestrating our own backlash, which made it easy for us to deflate once we carried out the big reveal.

  For our fourth and final flagship, we set our sights back home. With Rosewood Avenue barely able to accommodate the inpouring of traffic and sales, we convinced ourselves that Los Angeles could afford two The Hundreds stores. The Hundreds Santa Monica debuted ironically on April Fools’ Day, sandwiched between the Promenade tourist trap and Fred Segal. Our sales history came full circle by moving next door to the fashion boutique. Seven years after we’d sold our first T-shirts to Fred Segal’s streetwear department, we erected a shop not more than twenty feet from our original home.

  Design-wise, The Hundreds Santa Monica was devoid of the theme of time altogether. Stanley Kubrick’s influence returned with a stark white space that felt eerily Clockwork Orange yet antithetical to our darker themes. I returned to the grave site conception from our first store on Rosewood Avenue and expanded the installation in Santa Monica to include even more relics born of subcultures we admired and in which we’d participated. Beyond skateboards and spray cans, there was a surfboard, the Judgment Night soundtrack on cassette, Kids on VHS, and a turntable. Here was a comprehensive study of our inspiration pool, frozen in time. Everything that fueled our imaginations and influenced our lifestyle and aesthetic.

  We teased the space by slapping together a Garfield collaboration pop-up shop. Our opening party featured a group art show with Barry McGee, Dave Choe, and Slick, and a signing with Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis. The line was so long that it wrapped around the block twice. At one point, I’d gazed over the second-floor balcony at the sheer number of people inside and out. The photographer Mark the Cobrasnake was standing next to me, muttering to himself, “And I thought streetwear was dead.”

  It was 2011, and we had four stores that were pumping out the brand across both coasts. Not only was our own retail cracking, but it seemed wherever we planted a store, the surrounding wholesale accounts benefited from the energy as well. And as our stomachs grew, so did our eyes. The next logical step was going overseas. We could start slow and safe with our northern neighbors in Vancouver, but Ben and I really wanted to do the unthinkable and hit Tokyo or Seoul next. We outlined blueprints for a Paris pop-up and flew to London to check out vacant spaces on Carnaby Street. But less than a decade later, three of our original four stores—The Hundreds New York, The Hundreds Santa Monica, and The Hundreds San Francisco—would end with a whimper.

  On paper, The Hundreds stores were a bright and shiny success. Real businesspeople—the kind who carry briefcases and use acronyms like “EBITDA”—were popping boners over our numbers. We were drawing heavy profits in lean locations with low overhead. Hundred-thousand-dollar months with only a few hundred feet of selling space, even though we were selling the same product on the internet and at five other shops nearby.

  For most shopkeepers, running one store is a life’s career. Here we were, steering four of them in different cities while introducing a footwear brand, a print magazine, a digital content platform, and—oh yeah—a clothing line. Our charts were stacking commas and zeros, and the lines kept growing outside our big releases. But while everything was baking a golden brown on top, the retail business was burned and charring on the bottom. We were outrunning ourselves, fueled on adrenaline and hype, neglecting any infrastructure or strategy. It’s as if we were the fastest marathon runner in the forest. We had no idea where we were headed or how long it was going to last. We just kept sprinting and charging into the dark, unaware that the trail ended just beyond the tree line.

  22.   BLOW UP

  Rather be forgotten than remembered for giving in

  —Refused, “Summerholidays vs. Punkroutine”

  SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING within The Hundred
s, attracting a lot of attention and dollars, but silently eroding the foundation; it was almost untraceable and invisible at the start, a slow-moving infection.

  Strange as it sounds, we didn’t have a logo for the first three years of the brand. There were variations of “The Hundreds” written out in different fonts and hand styles, but we didn’t lock in a visual identity. I just wasn’t ready to commit; I needed time to get to know The Hundreds. You don’t tattoo a toddler. I had to feel out the brand’s character and personality before marking it forever.

  Until then, we lined the business with T-shirts and cut our voice with graphics. Like a breakthrough pop artist blitzing the Billboard charts, our T-shirt designs were instantly recognizable, even though people didn’t search for us by name. We were known for conceptual tees like “California Is for Haters” (a flip of “Virginia Is for Lovers”) and “Mousey” (Mickey Mouse reimagined as a Nike Dunk–loving hypebeast)—conversation starters that were reminiscent of nineties skateboarding’s subversive parodies.

  Our first hit came in 2004 and had the phrase “Hip-Hop Is Dead” stenciled onto the front of a stark black T-shirt. I came up with the message late one night in the library as I was listening to Power 106 on my headphones. As a hardcore kid, I was familiar with the “Punk is dead” doctrine (inspired by a Crass song) after mainstream radio and Hot Topic fashion got ahold of melodic pop punk bands. By the early 2000s, the authentic rap music I espoused and loved also felt abandoned, bastardized by a cannibalistic record industry. I didn’t understand this next generation of rap, nor was I meant to. The music was dumbed down, derivative, diluted. Hip-hop was a shadow of its former self.

  Hip-hop was also quite literally dead. The nineties crystallized rap, but by decade’s end we had lost our generals: Biggie, Pac, and Big L. I wanted to include their likenesses on the T-shirt as homage. There was no Google Images to source photos of these rappers, so I hunted for old Vibe and Source magazines in libraries and used bookstores. I cut their pictures out and scanned them into Photoshop. Then I billed them on the back of the shirt with hip-hop’s other fallen luminaries: Big Pun, Jam Master Jay, and Eazy-E. “The Hundreds” was spelled out in a Compton-style Old English behind the figures. But that was inconsequential. Even though nobody had heard of the clothing company, they rode with the statement.