This Is Not a T-Shirt

There are a million solutions for every problem; it just depends on how you look at it. So much of life, I learned, was about perspective—the way you frame and reframe a question to fit your answer.

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.

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.

How many brand owners can attest to community action like this? When you build a brand centered on people over product, you are reminded time and again of the strength of these personal bonds. This Is Not a T-Shirt is not just a book, it’s a conversation, it’s a piece of advice, it’s a relationship.

The secret: knowing when and where to position yourself when the pendulum swings your way and the moment hits. You can’t control the cosmos, but you can study and get in position for its curveballs. This is an education culled from time and experience and patience—those very things that neither money nor Instagram followers nor power can buy. Time.... See more

T. S. Eliot once described hell as a place “where nothing connects with nothing.” Dissociation has historically been a major source of unhappiness in people’s lives. Humans long for connection; we want to feel that our lives have value and significance.

To them, it was a simple equation. Statistically, declining brands—like ours at the time—are risky bets. They assumed they could predict the future of our business with Excel sheets. What they failed to quantify was our heart and avarice and how underdogs favor harsh climates.

But we weren’t just a clothing company like many of the upstarts at Agenda. We were assembling a community, and these types of fellowships are near impossible to break.

We are imprisoned by the narrow mindset that passion and talent are sowed sparingly, while the resounding truth is the same for me as it is for anyone else: we care madly for many different things.