Bobby Hundreds | Founder of The Hundreds | Assembly

my name is Bobby Kim I'm also known as Bobby hundreds i co-founded a men's streetwear brand 13 15 years ago called the hundreds hopefully some of you have heard about it if I've done my job right and I also co-founded a women's brand called Jennifer and we also do a bunch of other little things I don't need to really get into but it is the hundreds 15 year anniversary this year I was born in Baltimore Maryland to create American Korean immigrants first generation so I'm second generation that's me I I don't think I realize it for the longest time because I kind of grew up a little bit marginalized feeling a little bit disconnected from my own culture but growing up in an immigrant household and being a person call it really did inform my personal story and my career and especially the brand I'll show you why there we go so before getting into that I was always very creative always into making things I love to draws into art my mom was an artist never had any formal schooling so it was never quite that good at it but I just liked making things with no end process more than just the just the process of it there was no and and gold there was no vision of it hey Cisco so I just like making things always that's me wallowing in my emotions when I was 15 very fimo an angry person I don't really know why I felt so disconnected it might have been with the aforementioned feeling like I was growing up in a community that really wasn't mine I grew up a minority in a minority town I was a middle child that was all these things so I think I was always seeking some type of a connection with the community you know my high school I was one of you know 2% Asian Americans in my entire school I grew up mainly around Latinos and whites and and just the kinds of music people listen to the the popular culture that was happening in the 90s at the time I just never really resonated with me and so I found a community in skateboarding because in skateboarding that was where all the square pegs were at the time it might feel different now I don't know if it's the same for a kid I can't speak for them but skateboarding was very much a minority driven act in a sense of we had very little representation we didn't feel like we fit in anywhere else and so I was drawn to the culture even more than the actual activity or what would later be deemed a sport I was never that good at skateboarding but I skated and so I started concentrating on all my creative endeavors like art and photography and so I started getting really into taking pictures film photography at the time this was before digital this was Chad Muska during the frontside flip at a demone in town I started getting found a new community also in the punk scene so in hardcore and punk and growing up in the local music scene music scene it was the same kind of feeling that I found in skateboarding where was all the square pegs and I felt like I finally had a community that spoke to me that really meant something so I started shooting a lot at hardcore shows being a part of the scene getting involved printing scenes and writing things etc etc at a certain point I started freelancing a lot for magazines because I was interested in art photography and writing and I felt like in publishing I could kind of combine all those interests into maybe it could be a viable career 9/11 happened and it kind of just raised and leveled the publishing industry and so I was like well maybe I'll go to law school which sounds totally counterintuitive it was in a lot of ways but because I was such an argumentative person I was such a I was very much an activist minded person I was involved in a lot of political rallies and just local grassroots organizing from the time I was a teenager I thought maybe law school would be a good thing for me in school I met my partner Ben who became my best friend and we connected through the community of street wear now at the time this was 2003 street wear was not even street wear was definitely thing but it wasn't even being labeled as street wear at the time there were street culture street fashion but it was really just t-shirt brands that were kind of coming up as a response to some of the larger companies that in this sense it would have been like magic back then to million-dollar booths by fat farm urban labels and there's a lot of these younger kids that were coming out saying that is not my community that doesn't speak to me I'm gonna create my own thing started developing my own community so we started the hundreds together and what the hundreds was really doing was taking this idea of my writing my photography my art design and using the Internet to congeal it and make it a singular project was cohesive for example I would make a t-shirt graphic like this it had some kind of a message or social justice commentary and I would tell this story and then purpose and meaning philosophy behind it through my blog now this was a years and years before social media so we had to use blogs at the time to kind of get our message out there and there there's so I started designing more and more t-shirts that would do this now this idea of a brand that was transparent it was connected to the founders voice I personally think it was very much ahead of its time again this was three or four years before Twitter five six years before Instagram and it even started so the idea was that I would draw something that was on my mind I would talk about it on the website I would print t-shirts you'd go out and support the merchandise but it was really just all being a part of this narrative that I was building it was really my personal narrative every night I would go home and start blogging and then I started doing it too and three times a day so I would come to an event like this out photographed people tell their stories on my website in the hundreds calm and the hundreds calm started becoming its own community in its own culture in itself we started making more clothes beyond t-shirts we started showing a trade shows like this this was that bread and butter in Berlin but we started making more cut and sew and then the cut and sew collection just started to grow and we became a full-range men's streetwear brand in every sense of the word this was pretty much our first office is my studio apartment is behind an inn and out on Venice Boulevard in LA smelled like grilled onions every day there was no air-conditioning it was it was a it seems crazy that we ran the entire operation out of that room there's these little cabinets there that's where we held all our inventory but we fast outgrew that space and then we had success oh so then this was our next office been found spot in this local neighborhood called Fairfax it was a sleepy Jewish neighborhood historically Jewish neighborhood lots of Jewish bookstores Kenner's deli Israeli eateries and suprema just opened up about seven months before and Reserve had been there before that which was eventually turned into the fresh drive flagship so we set up office in this space and that was all our inventory on those racks on the left or wasn't much and just started grinding our asses off and people started knowing that we were there because I would broadcast from there every day through my blog I would tell people this is what working on these are the t-shirts here's who came by today here's who you should know about at that time street culture and kind of cool culture in general was really focused on New York was focused on Tokyo and London and we felt like LA had something to offer even though at the time we were more known for like Paris Hilton and rhinestone trucker caps and reality shows and we were like now there's a really cool scene here we want the world to know about it so we're going to start talking about it more my blog and they started to become a clubhouse we had success with a sweatshirt is called the Paisley sweatshirt it was our first big hit of many hits to come and that sweatshirt we dumped all the money and profits from it we put it back into developing a store in that same space that was our office the reason why we did that was because everyone knew to find us there they knew that we were there every day they knew that I was broadcasting and so people started traveling from around the world to live this blog in real life that store eventually multiplied into this store next to it and the store to the right so we ended up taking all three stores and then rosewood which is a street we're on kind of became our hub and our own little universe I haven't addressed this anywhere else actually but we are actually we took the corner spot now if you guys know about Fairfax and rosewood so we're building a new store literally as we speak like to fly home tomorrow to keep working on it and it'll be open on March 1st it is our biggest and best store today it's amazing so we basically we just have the whole building at this point our culture our community started to grow our staff became our friends and our friends were our staff and then those people just started to multiply and then they all started ending up going on and doing other cool things like I'm trying to see here okay so the guy all the way on the left is neat he started antisocial social club there's a popular there's the Benji in the back who was our graphic designer turned into a big artist ooh me to the it's heart kind of hard for me to point out who these people are but Umi opened a shop in in Seattle and Tacoma actually and he runs the Tacoma Street West scene out of a shop called etc so what happened was that our team and our community more or less became our brand evangelists all around the world this is our staff in San Francisco so that word-of-mouth philosophy of Beek of brand evangelism was always our primary form of marketing our secondary form of marketing has been collaborations so a lot of people know us mainly for special projects Cobra did projects and this is where we take the community of the hundreds and we start to cross pollinate them with other communities that have diehard Anish fan bases for example Disney was a probably our biggest early collaboration this was a project that put Disney on the map in terms of younger guys Disney's always been very popular with women and with kids and so they saw this thing just explode kanye blogged it when he had Kanye University at the time and we had lines up at all our stores across the country cross pollinating the hundreds with adidas and NBA adidas furniture fans with Madonna kheh DeLorean the BMX world paintball hot sauce fanatics first-time Tapatio changed their bottle and they put Ben and I on the bottle Garfield fanatics Garfield is how I learned to draw growing up this is a preview of our next Garfield collaboration to celebrate our 15-year anniversary so Jim Davis himself is drawing these comics and incorporating our logo and it took me maybe almost a decade or realized that the hundreds was never really about clothing or in terms just the actual apparel the soft goods itself it was always more about the community it was always about this universe that we were participating in whether it was the street wear to sneaker community or it was our own community and so we started to just really building this mantra of people over product always the people are the most important part the culture is the most important part that's why people are getting involved and interested in the clothing the clothing is important it's very important this is what our collection looks like today this is our current spring line we make great clothes don't get me wrong but at the end of the day it's really about the community it's about bringing people together telling their stories and using them to tell our story to the rest of the world so I kind of the way I look at it is I never quite found a home so I guess I had to build it for myself and that's what the hundreds is so that's it for my talk and I kind of just wanted to leave it open at this point if anybody wanted ask any questions and we can just go from there I kind of like keeping these things pretty free you can go I'm Kelly I'm actually a student and I have a question about women in the future of street wear it's such as male-dominated industry where do you see the future of women coming into that industry thank you that's actually that's a very important question right now so something very interesting is happening is it okay if I sit down you guys just cool fireside chat style okay so there's something very interesting going on right now in our space I don't know if it just has to do with the street fashion street wear or fashion on this level of things but I've been noticing that when I go out and speak now the questions used to always be very typical they were like what are your favorite collaborations do you have any advice for my brand what can set me apart how do I become like Virgil like very expected questions for the time being now when I'm finding when I go out and speak are a lot of these social justice minded questions activist oriented questions I don't know if it's just the nature of our brand but I also want to believe it's just the climate that we're living in the social climate so those kinds of questions I love if people have more questions like that please ask them her question was about women and street wear in general Leah from Mary did the mob wrote an amazing piece today that I was helping her on helping her read through this weekend I want you to read it if you have time she tries to hit it head-on she did an amazing job it is really hard out there for women for people to speak up in general about this issue with women and street wear because street wear historically has been very extremely unkind to women in many ways in terms of representation in terms of how we have been depicting women as far as even on a t-shirt I'm guilty of all of it in terms of how we hire in terms of the women that we're putting in executive roles in our companies that's the that's the problem right the main problem is that we don't have representation in companies even if we're hiring women we're not putting them on executive levels as I started to do this I personally started to do that with the hundreds our brand changed so much overnight and I don't know if you guys have felt if you're familiar with our brand the reason why our brand has changed over the last two years just there's a lot I can point to a number of factors one of them is just that we got more women involved and we brought in their point of view on an executive level so I would hope to see that more in the future in terms of women's brand themselves brands themselves I think there's so much opportunity I started Jennifer as a response to this idea that women are just wearing men's clothes that's great and I think that's a pretty cool aesthetic well I just want to wear like a baggy t-shirt that amends brand wears that makes like supreme or whatever but I also think it's important for there to be women's brands that are for women designed by women and are specifically catered to women and have nothing to do with men and I wanted to make Jennifer in such a way that men wanted it and they couldn't have it just the same as men are women always just like man guys have all these cool clothes now one I want to wear that stuff well why can't there be women's brands that are the same way but in Reverse where guys are looking at like I wish I had that sweatshirt well you can't because it's your girlfriends or wives or your just your friends who is a girl so I think there's just so much opportunity I feel like we're at a point now in men's street where traditional immense tree or even if it's high-fashion where we've kind of reached a ceiling in a lot of ways and people are like well I feel like it's over or like street wars ed or this idea of like our genre street where it's gone or high fashion is just kind of over street wear yeah maybe so in a lot of ways but then you're neglecting this entire universe of women street wear where female voices are warranted and we need them that just can carry us on for another 20 years so hopefully that is the future I hope more and more if you were involved in the space that you were just more empathetic and more open to hearing about it and just thinking about it like I'm basically putting the call on everyone here on how we can include that voice more in streetwear because it's kind of that it doesn't exist as much as it should so okay so anything what else what else we got yep my name's Zack were from a new accessory brand out of New York quick question I guess a little more expected but speaking in collaborations looking back did you find there was a him when you should jump into collaborations was there could you have been too early getting into collaboration you had to kind of create your brand first or no not at all okay so collaborations in themselves if you look at them collaborations are always like the hot topic right why it's like supreme and Louis Vuitton like that's what people think of as a collaboration if you think about a collaboration it's really just where all ideas begin right like my brand is a collaboration between my story and my partner Ben who I showed up there that was us coming together I could not have done this on my own it's a the reason why it works is because it's two completely different people like Ben and I are yin yang like he's small round and furry and I'm like tall and like I can't grow a beard you know like on every little level like I'm into brunettes and he's into blondes like but the collaboration these ideas coming together is where the hundreds blossomed so it's never too early for collaborations that's how all great ideas all great things really begin I that's how I always think of collabs sure you have like the collabs all the way on this level that are just straight up licensing projects or like alright we're going to split a profit here and there but then collaborating is just you talking to the person behind you people around you this idea of agenda and why I'm always a proud proponent of these trade shows and even something like complex con assembly is this idea bringing so many different kinds of people together that wouldn't necessarily have come together otherwise right so look at how many people in this room are trying to get a dream off the ground or have experience in this game there's so much wisdom to offer from every level I was just talking to someone backstage who's like killing it in the digital world he's half my age and I was just like fascinating listening to this guy I learned so much more than I could ever give him so that's all collaboration sometimes it turns into like a physical product that the world can buy and they're like oh these sneakers are like Nike collaborating with so-and-so cool that's a good collaboration but I want you to think of collaborations on a grander scheme of like can we do a collaboration to raise money for homeless people or can we work together on thinking of a better way to design a trade show like those are the collaborations that I feel like might not get all like the media attention and spotlight but that's what makes our world go around that's just being creative so philosophically I love collaboration because it always speaks to this spirit of what I was just dressing before of community and we all need to be working together constantly to keep moving things forward it's not just about what you've done and how you can do it on your own what else anything you can ask typical questions - I don't mind hey how you doing I'm trying to find out do you feel like the hundreds yell are more instinct driven or more you go by with a successful design ism do you go by more of what other successful designers have done in the past like you look at a Ralph Lauren and see this blueprint like oh shoot Ralph Lauren came in like this kept it consistent with the designs or do you go by like this is just the way we feel we're gonna do this in yeah a mixture of both or what percentage of each oh man it's hard to break down the percentages on that I can't parse it that way I would be lying if I didn't say I was influenced by everyone from Ralph Lauren to to Virgil or to anyone out there that's killing it Cisco the guy who's sitting to the right of you is an amazing designer he's also the future he has a brand called never made that you should check out here but I learned and I'm inspired by all these people whether or not I want to do what they do to be honest like I could never draw like the way Cisco does and I don't think my brand has ever suited to be like that but I'm inspired by his vision I'm inspired by his energy so I think I take points of inspiration from all these people but at the end of the day it's really just my story it's it's the for the way I look at brands always it's just a conduit for me to meet you I can't meet everybody in this room today there's no time there's not enough of me to go around but you can meet my brand everywhere you go you can see my logo you can find my clothing in stores that's a way for me to handshake everyone that's in the world like as it's a totally ego tripping narcissistic way of looking at life but my goal through my lifetime here it's like I just want to meet everybody I want to inspire everybody I want to learn from as many people as possible how can I do that so my brand is like an avatar now so now I have one of me in every store I sell to in every city in every country in the world I'm out there if you like my brand you'll probably like me if you don't like my brand you're gonna hate me you know it's almost synonymous there's a lot of things that I don't hit it every time on the head like sometimes I make things that I'm not necessarily proud of or aren't indicative of where I'm at at that point in time but for the most part the brand is just a reflection of me on all levels so whatever I'm going through it shows up in the brand it's always been like that that's my philosophy on branding other people do it completely opposite and it works for them but I don't see any other way of doing it outside of that Andrew Klein I'm with backbone PLM software within the design process I would imagine you guys would have you know amass awesome ideas do you have a unique a sorting process to kind of whittle down to come to a final line I'm sorry say that sorry the microphone as you guys design I'm sure that you amass like all these creative ideas do you have a unique way to whittle that down from an assorting standpoint to create the final collection yeah for sure from like a merchandising standpoint we've been doing this for 15 years which is long to some for me I feel like it's not nearly enough but I feel like we have pretty much a good idea in a sense of where the pulse of the culture is at and also just our audience we've done such a good job and been very intent about curating our audience constantly this idea of editing our community down to exactly what we want it to be I'm as proud of that as I am about like a jack what we make or like a cool collaboration or party we throw this idea of who is our customer and constantly shaping it over and over again and defining also who our customer is not my goal is not to win over everyone in the world like I don't want everyone in the world buying my stuff I don't even know what that sounds like to me a very soulless brand that doesn't stand for anything I'd rather just nurture a specific customer and let them again be my brand evangelist and go out and tell their communities about it so I feel like we just have a pretty good idea of what that kid is if he is a kid and yeah we work with the team we're constantly you know we make for example if we're talking t-shirts we have we start off with like a tea and then we just keep working on them keep working on until we narrow them down to like 12 for the season so it's a very very long editing process at at the base I'm a writer right so as you know like all stories they come through the editing they don't actually come through the writing the writing is like the free-flowing spear so part of it it's amazing it's beautiful but to act create a product in the end it's about how you edit it and so I'm big fan of editing someone yeah you had a question hi my name is Chris and my brand is ease label my question is you've been around for 15 years so how did you create longevity in the brand since the market is kind of easy to enter right now I feel like a lot of brands will come in and then die out and I want to be the brand that lasts as long as you did and the second part to that question is within your longevity in your time span what was your lowest point and how did you get through it okay so you're right it's the markets very open right now so there's a zillion t-shirt brands and every music artist has a merch brand that's kind of disguised as street wear and it's great you know I actually think it's really awesome street wear one of the charming aspects of it is that it's for a lot of young people's their first foray into business whether they know it or not they are all entrepreneurs and so one of the coolest parts of doing this for so long is seeing born a fine restaurant and the chef comes down he's like hey man I used to have a streetwear brand you know I was trying to do what you guys did realize it wasn't for me I started making food and I run a business but they're all entrepreneurs and that's what I saw growing up in the hardcore scene too was all these kids that were so about DIY and creating their own jeans and making their own music at the end they all turned out to be pretty cool like entrepreneurs and individual individual businessmen so in that sense I'm all for it I think it's like really cool the idea that you have to sustain as long as possible just the fact that you're thinking that way you have an advantage because from what I've heard and just it's listening to as many young people as possible people aren't trying to stick around as long as we have I just think that's kind of just the nature of like this generation but people are more interested in just flipping their brand as quick as possible they want to be in the game for two or three years make a ton of money sell to somebody else and move on that's cool I think it's exhausting I'd much rather do it my way because my end goal really is just to again like continue to tell my story I didn't like you have to try to think back 15 years ago when we started this brand there was no money in street work it was like not a sexy market there was no industry though term didn't even exist so to even get into this space was to be like yeah I'm gonna be poor forever but I just want to do because I can't not and so I still think like that it's not this idea of like oh I need like a billion dollar supreme valuation you know I don't need it's like that is not that's never crossed my mind what's cross through my mind is how do I keep making things like how long will people let me stick around for and keep doing this like how much more can I stick around just to meet people and meet young people and be inspired and create stuff that's why I said at the beginning that I was always an artist but with no real end goal outside of the process I just like making things I actually never really stick around for the release of anything like by the time something comes around I'm like I don't pay attention to like how it did or like how well it was received I don't care like if it did great cool if it didn't do great I'm like it doesn't matter what I got out of it was just making stuff so if you kind of have that philosophy I feel like you can just stick around forever even if the hundreds ends up just being me at the end of the day I'm the only customer I'm the only one working for it that's fine I just wanted to make stuff your second question about the lowest point I don't know I get asked that question a lot like lowest points and highest points and I really don't have an answer like if to me success and failure relative sometimes when I look back on and it's always with time that we have that hindsight to see like what really happened there sometimes we have like huge successes with things monetarily will make like hundreds of thousands of dollars in a day well that did really well when I look back on it five or six years later I'm like oh that did our brand a huge disservice it wasn't something that was on brand for us I did it for the money and we lost a lot of our core audience and we lost a lot of trust with our core audience because of that project so yeah it gave us a lot of money in the interim but at the end of the day wasn't a big ones or it wasn't very good for us and then it also works vice versa where things that will have will go through periods where we just get completely knocked down right like our sales are just sliding we're not what's going on we had to go through those eras to really work on the nuts and bolts of the business so the next time the pendulum swung back our way we were ready for it and we were like on point and just started crushing everybody else so I don't know they're really I mean I don't have a low point right I'm not in a low point right now of the business so I can't even say and when I look back at what I thought were low points there were high points for us like we needed to go through them so I don't know it's all relative that's how I feel about it yeah in the back if you guys are bored here more than welcome to leave sorry I know this is not again this is not for everybody always yeah my name is Sarah I'm from Dallas and I have a brand called We the People I just have a quick question for your design process is there ever a time where you kind of second-guess one of your items and how do you overcome that do you end up pushing it into the you know visit or into the sales because you know it's going to work or do you just kind of kill it yeah of course doubt is so much a part of what we do I can't lie and say it's not like there's always it comes up but I don't know you take a leap of faith you're just willing to lose a lot of money and you just make it happen you know I don't know to say like but it is you know to be doubting to doubt yourself to doubt your brand to doubt your product it's very natural what you're doing in creating your brands are selling or even if you're a retailer and you have a store every day is completely unwritten right like this is cliche but you have no idea you're setting the future you're like you're you're actually making history happen every day and what you do so who knows like who's to say what's gonna happen who's to say that it's gonna work or not like that's very natural for you to be doubting in fact it may be it's healthy because then you're doing something that is completely original it's unpredictable no one else has done it and there's no proven track record of it and what we've seen over time right is that all revolution begins when you do things that are completely unpredictable after off the track and and nobody sees coming so it's pretty cool that if you are doubting something maybe that's a good way to look at it in the glasses Oh actually the mics up here so I'll just should I just follow you wherever you are okay cool my name is Emmanuel young designer from prime life clothing I just want to say thank you first and foremost for showing us that there really is beauty in the struggle secondly I wanted to say or ask when you first were stalked overseas what were some of the struggles that you faced when I was first talked overseas yes sir what was stuck the struggle that some of the struggles you faced when you were stalking oh yeah overseas is rough right overseas other markets are hard especially overseas especially if you're not there very often just to get a read on the people right our world is very diverse everyone comes up through different things and different government structures and different social hierarchies and so unless you're in those zones or in those sectors it's very hard to get a real read on people so it's really smart to work and partner with distributors or agents or just local stores that you trust that can cosign you to bring you into those communities you know you know if we want to talk about let's talk about the importance of a retail in general I feel like some of the panels today have to kind of address that and I know what is the purpose of retail that is one of the reasons why retail will always exist and we need them is that you need a cosign in these communities at the end of the day the digital thing can only go so far you know the guy in your neighborhood that works the shop that is fitting you for shoes and if he says hey man I have this brand the hundreds it's cool you'll never meet me like in the middle of I don't know some random Scandinavian town like I'll probably never go there you know probably never meet me but you know that guy and you trust him because you've eaten dinner with them your kids play soccer together or whatever it is so what he says hey you know what the hundreds they're cool it's like all right man they're cool and so they're your satellites out there I would just say that's really trust on working with the right satellites people that share your ethos we were really imperative about working with distributors that mirrored who we were as personality types and kind of shared our philosophies on things and that's where always the best success came from even domestic retailers and shops it's the stores that we can just like really feel like they were one of us and on our team that our brands have continued to carry through we're in a store called P's and Q's in Philadelphia and I feel like those guys are my brothers and I barely ever see him I talk to him maybe once a year but every time we're around each other we jive and I'm like yes this is our family this is our community right you're the square peg that I'm the square peg and we found our own community other stores don't work as well for us because they just don't share the same philosophy or ethos on things but yeah yeah go wherever you want to go I'm good check question I really enjoyed your your sa complex Khan and I agreed with most of the points that you made in it as crazy as it was I do think it is the future of this whole culture or whatever what would you do to further improve that sort of event further improve that what that sort of event you know like complex contour agenda fest so how would I improve Monta complex yes okay okay so this is everyone familiar with complex con in general it's an it is a remarkable event regardless of what I say it is a remarkable that and it's very important that we have events like that for our culture right now on on the levels of retail in terms of providing experiential for brands I wrote a critique the day after I'm trying to be as honest as I can in all my writing so just so you always know I'm telling the truth I tell the truth about myself I tell my explain when we're doing that in business and why and it seems very again counterintuitive and counterproductive but in the end I'm doing again is curating my community and strengthening my brand trust so with complex on what I raised was I felt like the culture that or the consumer at that point had become so hyper focus more on the product than the actual culture and so what ends up happening in those instances is that in my belief and this is again like my opinion I feel like it's backed up through history is that the entire market will just fall through right so when I grew up I collected baseball cards I loved baseball cards and I collected them for and baseball cards Garbage Pail Kids I collected them for the art I collected them for the stats I really collected them to trade with friends right so it was about this community of like kids who knew about it and need to be like oh I don't got that rookie card and he would trade him and then value started being assigned to them so it was just like well that's five bucks and mine's a hundred bucks and then they started building stores and every town had a baseball card shop I don't know if you guys remember this in the 80s and then they started having conventions and it had nothing to do with actual culture and the trading aspect of the scene it was all to do with value it was like this is seven thousand dollars and this is ten thousand dollars and it became just all about money when things only become about money and reselling and trading what the kids will end up doing is they all start graduating to wait $7,000 I just made eight thousand dollars off a Bitcoin yesterday I don't need to do this or what about cars I'm gonna start flipping property that's hundreds of thousands of dollars millions of dollars so they'll start graduating out of these things I think it's starting to happen right now if it or it will if it hasn't already in the art world I just think sneakers at this point in time in high fashion is almost being synonymous with high are gallery art Virgil starting to enter the art space and so what you're gonna start seeing is a lot of kids are gonna go wait instead of like these sneakers that are 300 bucks I'm gonna buy whatever i'm murakami piece or cause or a long ago or something like that a condo for like 50,000 bucks and they'll start flipping art so it'll have all to do with value being assigned to things monetarily financially outside an actual culture is why you got it into it to begin with so my call to complex con and my asked was can we still focus and reiterate and emphasize the culture part of things again and not make it dangerous for us to be here and not make it in a way we're like kids aren't feeling invited and welcomed into that place a lot of young people are getting into this game now which is great but they're also writing me saying like hey man is this all just about like thousand dollar shoes and like you know chasing up on the new fashion trend of today I'm like no no no no like that is that's always been a part of it like the reselling thing has always been a part of it like even when we gone and it was about sneakers and dunks right and it was all about dunks but it was all about dunk exchanges and it's about these like community events I'm here to try to be that voice I'm an advocate for culture and for community I feel like as soon as I wrote it I got this onslaught and a wave of people that reached out from the industry and consumers alike from kids 50-year olds that were saying yo man I felt like I was alone in this I kind of started losing the the the reason why I got involved in this to begin with and as soon as they started as soon as they saw that I was like no no no you guys we all got into this for the culture and community of things to come together and share ideas and like trade and that was the fun part I feel like we'll start seeing a comeback or I hope you know you're doing it yeah and they're great hat oh sorry mics over there I guess I'll follow the mic around sorry hey my name is a Berlin no company I had the question basically I think I saw you speaking I don't remember where exactly was but you were speaking about how how brands should become more environmentally conscious with how they're producing goods and things like that I'm sorry it's I can't really hear you you I think you spent a while back about how branch didn't start becoming more about immediately conscious about like what they're producing how they're producing it and things how do you think more branch to start living in California I just moved there a year like technology it's like obviously the things that's like driving everything out there like Palo Alto and all that in Silicon Valley I think more branch to start thinking how they're producing stuff for like five ten years now from down the line of how technology is going to eventually take over most production manufacturing and how things are developed like adidas introducing 3d printing into making shoes how do you think that's gonna affect technology is gonna affect brands and how they create and do things okay I think I've got your question a little bit so in terms of production and technology okay so yeah the technology thing I'm not the front lines guy when it comes to technology like I can't tell you always like what's cool what's happening out there again like there's a young kid backstage I was showing me a lot of cool like AR stuff he's working on and I'm like that's rad like I want to learn I want to know how to use that stuff the way I've always looked at technology in business in the marketplace in my world is that it's just a tool my philosophy on everything is that people are seeking connection that's all it is I just feel like it's entropy it's just from the moment we are enter this world it's the moment we leave we're seeking connection and we're just trying to connect with someone else whether it's one person or it's a billion people okay so if it was if we were talking like five hundred years ago how they were connecting whether it was through whatever was agriculture or it was through Wars or whatever it was but they were trying to connect and try to build together and try to make movements happen in our generation what I've been trying to do to connect with people is I use my brand again as his conduit when social media started everyone was kind of looking to me I was like the social media guy because I had a lot of early success on Instagram and Twitter using our brand and pairing it with social media and they're like oh you're like the technology guy it's not like that you're looking at the hammer and you're not looking at the actual blacksmith like you have to look at the person what the person is doing is he's using the resources in front of him to try to connect with another person and so if it's 3d printing if that's how adidas is trying to connect with its cus customer I think it can work you know I don't really know but we'll see how it goes but I think it the only advice I can give to everyone Harry when it comes any cool technology technological advance that comes along is look at it as the tool and how can you use that tool to further connect with whoever you're trying to reach whether it's a friend or someone you love or it's a customer and you're trying to make money off of them how can you use that tool to your advantage in your way in your voice to reach them if you can figure out a way to do that with 3d printing then all the power to eat my name is Andrew and my company is Bala brand and basically I'm just trying to figure out how do you see scale customization changing your brand and you know with manufacturing trends automation and so on and so forth how do you see you know for instance like Nike ID or you know products that are customizable how do you see that being incorporated into your brand and you know where do you see other companies going with that type of ok that's a good question we've never really participated in it I here's a here's a great analogy on my blog up until recently I didn't leave the comments up and sometimes on my Instagram I lock the comments and the reason being is that it again it's very narcissistic but I feel like or I want to believe that people are coming to my brand to hear me if they want to hear themselves they'll start our own bread which I'm a big cheer leader of like please go and do that but if you're coming to my brand you're here to listen to me you want to see what I have to say we've just always followed it I don't know if it's wrong or right but I feel like because we've done that over the years we've really owned this ville and we have a very sharp personality when it comes to the hundreds it speaks a very very clear language but other brands I've seen open-source their logo will ask their customers what color should we do next or what color mm should we keep like that's always like cool and fun like gimmicky marketing to me and it's it's rad here now you're just collecting everyone's email addresses if it's just like you're just collecting data and aggregating data cool like use it for that does it edify your Brandon in any way I don't think so because now I feel like you're giving up your microphone to let someone else sing your song or to start writing your lyrics you can do that one time twice three times but at certain point start losing your voice you know like I'm here to talk people want to listen to me if you don't listen to me go listen someone else or start your own thing I'm a much like don't customize my brand customize your brand that's how that's how I think it should be I have two minutes left my name is Zachary studio from arizona i i'm with the royalty Supply Co and I really like the the part where you said like you're explaining your story when you're telling people to gain a community when you're creating that story is it's something that you try and tell other people to gain into your community or is it something that like your story expands on when I'm telling my story is it something that like does your story grow as well yeah of course my story is constantly growing I hope it never ends right like cuz then it's over I don't want it to end but my story's changing everyday you just changed the course of my story with that question right every time I do one of these things I leave in my story completely changes because now like I can't stop thinking about her question about women and streetwear right I'm like that's very urgent in my mind so now you when I go back to the office that's just like cycling back through my head so now my brand's gonna look a little bit different because I interacted with her and you're a question about stories right like that's gonna resonate with me - so you just shape the future of my story as well my story is always changing my story's like always evolving everyone has a story you know it's like it depends on how you want to tell it but I think everyone is completely endlessly fascinating in their stories like I honestly don't think my story is very compelling I got a book deal of this time last year and I was just like awesome for me but also like why would anyone give me a book deal it's not that interesting I've grown up with people who had way further crazier stories and I have more success in the worlds i but my perspective on things has always been everyone is so interesting in their story because that's their way of trying to connect with who I am as a person and we're trying to just connect and so anytime that happens like I'm all ears like I only hear at all you know so I don't think like anybody stories boring really at the end of the day like I think everyone has something to contribute to somebody else and I one second laughs I guess that's a it goes back to this idea of community Thanks [Applause]

Channel: Agenda Emerge

Views: 21,272

Keywords: Agenda, Emerge, Assembly, The Hundreds, Bobby Hundreds, Liberty Fairs, Capsule Show

Id: n7RhxFQQgYw

Length: 50min 2sec (3002 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018