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I went and I wrote a business plan.
I wanted to be a lifestyle brand and I write up this story of educating, change, and healing overcome.
Educating, change, and healing overcome.
That's what Echo stood for.
I mean, it's very earnest, right?
Well, I am painfully earnest and there will be people listening to this totally vomiting on the earnestness.
But fuck them, because that's real.
That's what it was. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm GuyRoz and on the show today, how Mark Echo's love of hip hop and graffiti gave him an iconic edge as a street wear designer and helped turn his company, Echo Unlimited, into a major force in fashion.
In the United States alone, there are 26,000 fashion labels.
Incredible. Most of us only know a handful of them and usually just the big ones.
So it's not a stretch to say that standing out as a fashion brand is hard.
Really hard. And for the most part, just a teeny fraction of these brands will last more than a decade.
The unicorns are labels like Levi's and LL Bean.
They've been around for more than 100 years.
But even having an impact for a few years is a significant feat.
And back in the 90s and early 2000s, Echo Unlimited managed to do just that.
The brand was started by a guy named Mark Echo, along with his partner Seth and his sister Marcy.
At the time, and this is the early 1990s, street wear was just starting to get traction in the US.
Brands like Stussy, Fubu, and Supreme were even showing up in fashion magazines.
Eventually, street wear would kind of take over fashion, even luxury brands like Prada jackets for hundreds of dollars.
Eventually, he got his jackets into the hands of rappers and musicians, which led Mark to start the brand.
Echo Unlimited and its iconic Rhino logo started popping up everywhere, eventually hitting over $100 million in sales.
Now, by the end of the early 2000s, the brand was in decline, but Mark was really smart about looking for opportunities that could capitalize on youth culture.
And the most influential brand he eventually built was Complex, a media company that focused on things that mattered to a growing subset of young consumers – sneakers, hip-hop, fashion, sports, and pop culture.
Mark Echo was actually born Mark Milikovsky.
He grew up in New Jersey in a town called Lakewood, along with his twin sister Marcy, who would eventually become his business partner.
And even though Lakewood was a sleepy town near the Jersey Shore, Mark says it was a really interesting place to grow up.
What I recall Lakewood for was just its intense diversity.
Growing up there, you're like, you're a product of your environment, so you're in it.
It wasn't like that I was conscientious of it.
It just was. You know, I went to public school, my neighbors, people lived next door to me, you know, across the street from me.
It was a very mixed race, very mixed multicultural experience.
So tell me about how you fell in love with hip-hop.
What do you remember, like, listening to or hearing or resonating with you?
I remember being in probably fifth grade art class at Princeton Avenue School, and there was this awareness of this emerging cultural trend.
I remember some kids that when the buses were pulling up, there was like a group of kids that would be doing literally like backflips and breakdancing, you know, spinning on their back.
Like in the middle of the lunchroom.
And I just was like, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen.
But I also was seeing there was a big BMX culture that was happening at that time.
Kids started to wear all of those kind of like neon, acidic colored clothing that was starting to come up through skate and skate culture, dyno brand, GT, vans, airwalk.
So suddenly, I think that it's about the age for most kids growing up that sort of pre-middle school, I'd say from fifth to eighth grade, where they start to badge like a little chick born new to the world.
They see these signals of like who their cultural mother is or father, right?
And it's a part of, I think, how we're hardwired to sort of culturally fit in.
So I was drawn to that. And then instead of just drawing Spider-Man, you know, I would draw what we saw on album covers.
Or when I'd go into Queens and see graffiti on the subway cars, I knew that there was a movie called Wild Style because people were talking about it.
And there was Beat Street and there were the Fat Boys.
So you were just reacting to what was around you.
I guess one of the things that you kind of got into was learning graffiti art.
I don't think you were actually going out and vandalizing buildings, or maybe you were.
But I think you got into like using airbrush tools and like kind of painting graffiti style.
But you were trying to like hone your...
You just do some gratis and then you start selling them at 10, 15, or I would do bulk.
And then it's 50. And then people would ask for more elaborate things.
And you know, come junior year, I was getting really good at it.
So this was from eighth grade through the time I started the business in 93, I was every year building that business.
And to the point where I was making thousands of dollars a week.
Wow. When I was really...
When I would allocate time.
And these were like custom t-shirts?
Custom t-shirts, custom denim jackets.
People's names or people like...
Very elaborate. Very, very elaborate.
Like I remember someone brought me a cover of like Thanos.
This one of this very elaborate cover.
This is a comic book, yeah.
A comic book, like an Avengers comic book.
And it's like Thanos with the glove.
You know, this is before I think of like MCU.
And I think that's when I was like, oh shit, like I'm good at this.
I think I charged like $500 for that jacket.
Wow. It was very elaborate though.
It took at least six days.
And then I would hand paint it and then I would hand embellish it.
I'd go to the Michaels or Joann's Arts and Crafts and I'd even go into Manhattan occasionally.
I'd go to the... In the Garment District.
Go to the areas where they sell rhinestones.
I'd buy high quality rhinestones.
I'd hand laminate them on.
Sew them on, whatever. And just create these really elaborate custom bespoke things.
Wow. And my father was into photography.
And so I was the great blessing and gift he gave me was the...
And some of the most valuable time in my life was the time in the six by eight foot closet that had been converted to a laundry room and a dark room.
Watching him process film, printing photos and being exposed to ideas like composition and burning and masking and all of these sort of ideas that I ended up eventually seeing when I got into Photoshop years later.
He had a hobby, a side hobby.
He did. Yeah. I know that your dad studied to be a pharmacist and then eventually became a real estate agent and I think your mom was also a real estate agent.
Yeah. Yeah. You went to college, you went to Rutgers and you decided to study pharmacy.
You had become a pharmacist.
Was that like, were your parents encouraging you to do that?
Like, hey, this is a steady job.
My dad never once suggested it.
In fact, the opposite. He hated it.
All he did was talk shit about standing on his feet and he was so happy to get out of pharmacy.
But if we rewind to that period, you could graduate from pharmacy school and at that period, at that time in history, if you worked for Big Pharma, let's say, and I had a sense of marketing.
I wanted to be maybe on the marketing side of Big Pharma.
You could make like at that time and graduating in 1990, 65 to $85,000, like right out of school.
Right out of school. Big money.
That's big money. I mean, I graduated in 97.
My first job was $30,000 a year.
I was like, wow, this is insane.
Right. Right. So I only applied to one school, Rutgers College of Pharmacy.
I applied early, got accepted and didn't look bad.
Only applied to one school.
So you get there and you're starting to be a pharmacist, but you keep this kind of side hustle going.
My whole identity. Yeah.
And that's when suddenly I started to realize and I could self articulate that something unusual happened for me and Lakewood.
Because suddenly here I was in a new environment and suddenly I was engaging in a social milieu with kids that weren't all from Lakewood.
In fact, Lakewood was the anomaly and suddenly it was like the white kids were like, why are you trying to be black?
And then the black kids are like, why are you trying to be black?
You know, it was not the same vibe that I got in Lakewood.
And my identity was wrapped up in building Echo airbrushing, ECHO airbrushing at that time.
And I would do parties. I did a party called the Hip Hop Bazaar called up Ralph McDaniels, you know, Video Music Box, try to get them to come and like record live from the event.
Yeah. That was a TV show in New York, right?
Yeah. Yeah. It was like a public access Hip Hop TV show.
That's like, okay, now you're starting to build the media infrastructure around this phenomenon.
Now BET is emerging. Now there's YoMTV Raps.
Now come 92, 93, right? So that was my thing.
And I was doing gallery exhibitions.
Of your shirts? Of my shirts and my art.
I also painted on like, you know, murals and stuff.
Tell me, because you were already calling it, it was called Echo airbrushing.
And it was ECHO. Where did that name come from?
Well, that's the backstory to the TWINDOM, right?
The being the fraternal twin.
My mother had no idea she was carrying twins.
She went to the OBGYN months before we were due and was complaining of this sort of kicking bullet in the bottom of her abdomen and then like under her breast and she didn't understand.
She was like, is my baby doing a split?
Is he punching? No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's just an echo in the fluid.
You're fine. And she was like, but I'm so big, I'm retaining so much from my mother is massive.
They did not know there were twins in there.
They just said, oh, there's an echo in the fluid.
In the fluid. The doctor did not know until I was born.
They delivered Marcy and they said, there's another one.
And my dad almost fainted.
That's wild. So it came from there like that word echo that was just part of family lore.
Yeah, that's it. And my mom was still raising money for the Malcolm X film and he's coming up short and he's going around to college just doing, you know, grassroots marketing.
He went to Rutgers and to talk about it.
Rutgers to talk about it.
I would like hit him with a swag.
Oh, you just go, you go right up to him and just hand him stuff.
Yeah. And so I did that to rest in peace.
Chris Lighty to try to get to, you know, Q-Tip and tribe.
I did it for Chuck D. I did it for Keras one.
You were hoping to do what?
Just to, to connect with them for what purpose?
I was looking for like, I was so delusional.
I was looking for an investor.
It's a little bit of this kind of trusty universe approach to things and a little bit of this sort of my reality that the most effective means of marketing are these sort of nodes of trust, you know, between people.
And I couldn't say that then, but I understand that now that establishing that distributed network of heat and trust and understanding of what you do is the most powerful fundamental thing you need to do in building a network of communication.
And none of these guys were interested in investing in giving you cash.
They just didn't know what to do with me.
And they themselves were trying to figure out how to raise money for their own thing.
And by the way, how much cash did you think you needed to raise?
I had no idea. Yeah, but you knew that you couldn't do what you were getting.
They would buy an Armani jacket or a Levi's jacket or be some champion sweatshirt.
And when they would ask me, you know, what, I said, no, no, you bring the blank.
If you don't know what to get, order this one.
And on the strength of that alone, you were pulling in two, three thousand bucks a week?
Yeah, they're purely paying me for the art.
It was for the application of the art.
Wow. So I guess somewhere around this point, you changed the name of your business from echo airbrushing to echo unlimited, which is still a version of what the name is today.
And so can you tell me like in your mind at that time, this is I guess around 1992, what did you think this business could be?
So we knew that there was a visual aesthetic identity emerging within the culture of this sort of tribal communication amongst each other, how we ID with one another.
We start seeing this brand getting a lot of attention called Stussy.
There's this brand getting a lot of attention called Cross Colors.
This brand getting a lot of attention called Tommy Hilfiger.
We started to see these sort of people daring, kind of stepping out to build their version of consumer product businesses.
So here I am doing one at a time and something like, well, what if I could screen print these things instead of doing them one at a time?
Because you were hand making each one.
Yeah, it was impossible to scale.
It was impossible to scale that.
Right. And you still needed to, I mean, you felt like, I guess you felt like you needed to find somebody who had the know-how, right?
And most importantly, the cash to help you turn this into a real business.
So tell me about how you met your partner, Seth Gersberg.
I think you met him in like, like 1992?
Yeah, it's 92. Yeah, I meet him first like a year before.
He pulls up to my house, I'm painting, I'm doing one of these like really, you know, crazy pieces.
I'm looking at this guy, he pulls up in a shiny candy apple red Mustang, right?
With chrome wheels. I'm like, what the hell is some of my age driving around with this card like for an old man?
Number one, I appreciate that car today.
But at that time I was like, you know, who is this dude?
He's got dirty ass denim shorts, dusty Timberland boots, like with dirt going, grime up his legs.
He's coming from a landscaping gig because he's got a landscaping company.
And so he starts to tell me what he does.
He's like, I have a landscaping company, but I also do, I buy and sell architectural artifacts.
I just got back from Vienna.
Wait, sorry, like, are you talking about like antiques?
Like, like ancient or antiques?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not ancient.
I'm saying he would go to parts of the world where they were doing redevelopment or new construction sites.
And he was in the pawn business basically.
And but going to construction, where demolition sites, buying things that were being demolished, reselling them.
Okay. And he was, and he said to you, yeah, let's go into business.
I'll give you money. He's like, this is good.
If you want to do something, let me know.
Okay. Let me know. What do you need?
What do you need? What's your ask?
I didn't have an ask. I think initially feel like this was name of his brand, Echo ECHO is going to have to change.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Reyes. So it's 1993 and Mark has officially launched Echo Unlimited with $5,000 in cash from his new partner, Seth Gersberg.
And there's also a third partner in the mix, Mark's twin sister, Marcy.
Yeah, and to Seth's credit, which he deserves a lot of credit for, as the business started to take off, I renegotiated the deal and it was like 33, 33, 33.
Yeah, so your sister had a third.
He had a third. You had a third.
Okay. So he was going to bring in the money because he had some experience and he was just a year or two older than you.
Yes. And so, okay, now you had some money to start making t-shirts and you had some, I mean, you had already worked for the previous couple of years building relationships in the hip hop community.
What was the first step in like starting a business?
Like, did you guys get an office?
The three of you were you, did you stay in Lakewood, New Jersey?
Did you move up to New York?
Tell me about the first things you did once you were like, all right, we got a business.
I went and I wrote a business plan.
Okay, what was in there?
I wanted to be a lifestyle brand and I write up this story of educating, changing, healing, overcome.
Educating, change, to heal and overcome.
That's what Echo stood for.
It's very, I mean, it's very earnest.
I'm not criticizing it.
I'm not mocking you. It's very earnest, right?
Well, I am painfully earnest and there will be people as well, right?
In terms of my, in our sort of socialization, I would share.
I wanted their advice. I would ask for their advice.
What do they think? If they want to help, they want to come with me on the road and always was a no.
So, and so I was making friends with people that were more like me, that were entrepreneurial.
And then they started to help me.
I mean, you had this plan for a lifestyle brand, but initially to bring in money, you had to sell products.
You had to sell the things that you made, which were shirts and jackets.
And so tell me what you, what was the first thing you did?
Did you buy a bunch of shirts and start to mass screen print them?
It was a little bit more technical than that.
I wanted to bring the elaborate aesthetic, which was if you look at those like old concert T-shirts and rock concert T-shirts, like, you know, some of these T-shirts today, those, the ones that are early references are worth thousands of dollars.
But that was an aesthetic that was not being captured by the streetwear market.
It was not being deployed because of the technical constraints, because the barrier to enter was to make the color separations was very expensive.
Yeah. I did this, this, I was doing these very elaborate pieces of art that I was showing.
And at the time I had the art that I wanted to get produced looked more like these multi-color, eight to 10 color screen prints on black.
Most of what you saw in the streetwear market was printed on white.
And here I was looking at my works getting increasing elaborate, increasingly, you know, high resolution, I would need, you couldn't produce it.
They had to be simple. They had to be simpler designs, essentially.
They had to be more elaborate designs than what the market was doing.
More elaborate. Okay. So you, you knew that you had to basically create these elaborate designs because that was what, that would stand out.
But I think up until this point, you weren't really selling your stuff in shops.
It was like person to person, right?
You had to get your shirts into stores.
So how did you... That's right.
Tell me how you started to do that.
You would take, you would get them printed and then you would go walk from store to store in New York City?
Yeah. It was, we bought the first six styles on spec.
Wouldn't you say styles?
The cuts of the shirts? Oh, I bought blanks that were available.
And I had six pieces of art that I'd identified.
And these are just like champion t-shirts or like Haynes t-shirts?
Yeah, whatever they were, Annville or whatever at the time.
And there were, you know, no labels in the neck that said Echo Unlimited.
They were just sort of very maverick.
You would go to these boutiques and presumably these are boutiques that are selling this kind of stuff.
Yeah. And you would walk in and say, hey, can I talk to the owner or the manager or something like that?
It was a mix of things. We did exactly that where we would go hustle door to door.
You know, we'd go to Patricia Fields and on Broadway, we'd go to the extra large store, you know, go to Dr.
J's. We had no idea that there was a buyer.
Oh, no, you have to speak to this buyer.
Some of the smaller mom and pops were like, yeah, I could talk to you.
They met the time. It wasn't that we wanted to sell it on consignment.
It was because they'd say no.
And after a month of back and forth, them saying we really like your stuff, but we'll only take it on consignment.
We had to pick a path. And does consignment mean that you actually get paid?
I mean, of course. No, of course you don't.
Yeah. Do I get paid? They take it?
Or what do they say they say it didn't sell?
No, you know, some of them would pay really slow, slower than you could afford.
And you would convert them into a viable account.
And some were just basically lecherous and just were basically taking advantage of all the young entrepreneurs hustling.
I wasn't the only one not getting paid.
Let's be clear. And I knew it and it did start to sell, especially in Manhattan.
And we eventually then did a trade shows, right?
So we started to learn about, oh, you should go to a trade show.
You should go to the the Javits Center.
They have a trade show and here's Action Sport Retailer in San Diego.
And so, okay, you're doing consignment.
And I'm imagining that in year one, you know, even if these things, these t-shirts are selling, you guys aren't like rolling in cash.
No, no, but it was real. Like we were getting feedback, like calls, like over the weekend, you have more stock.
Like that t-shirt's blowing out for us.
Some of the styles started blowing out.
And people just discovered them in the shops.
They'd walk in and be like, whoa, what's that?
Yeah. And it was also the emergence, you know, time and place.
Let's put ourselves in back into space and time.
And in that vector of space and time, this was this emergent thing.
And who are my near peers now?
It's Fat Farm. It's triple five soul.
It's Echo Unlimited. It's PNB.
Supreme's just coming up.
Yeah. And you embellish it with a print or a transfer of some type.
And you had to go beyond that.
If you wanted to go beyond that, you had to have a nonverbal label.
It didn't, something that just because saw it, like they see the crocodile and you're like, that's Lacoste.
Yeah. Because I was like, I got it.
It's the Rhino. You know, you could call me Ernest.
But I do believe that God puts things in your path that you, if you ignore them, you could say that they are just trivial things.
But outside the garage of where I airbrushed for years, my dad had a collection of Sand Driftwood rhinoceros statues, like little wooden, they were like janky little $5.
Yeah. And as a kid growing up, I used to play with a bunch of meeting obviously, like, you know, the herbivore, fierce, but gentle pack animal survivor only goes forward.
Like I learned these things anecdotally.
They become a part of the sale of why, but they weren't there from day one.
And the rhino would just be, it would be a shirt with the rhino on it or it would be, the rhino would be a small little part of the shirt or what?
Well, I started to produce cut and sew.
And then I tested one capsule that was like all rhino and it was just the Echo Unlimited discreetly and stencil font, very kind of military hunting look.
The buyers were very resistant and then we placed it and it blew out in sales.
And once it penetrated the market, the buyers that accepted that stuff actually had good performance with it.
I think by, let's say by year three, like when you introduced the rhino, do you, so this is like 96, 95, right?
Maybe something like that.
Was it just the three of you or at this point, you know?
No, we started building a team.
We graduated from the office in my apartment and we graduated to South Revenue Jersey to our first office that became a hub for us.
Yeah. I want to sort of dive into the overall business because I know, I mean, you're doing, by 1995, you're doing like, let's say $15, $20 million in revenue and sales, which doesn't mean you're profitable necessarily, but...
No, we were horribly unprofitable.
Yeah. So this is the thing, like from what I get, Shit show.
You were like bleeding cash, right?
I mean, we were, the big problem is that we were, we didn't have the leverage on the manufacturing side.
So the manufacturing infrastructure was not refined yet.
You were making it all in China?
We were importing, I had really bad agency production deals.
We were making in Taiwan, we're making in China, we were making in a bunch of places.
And when we started to do the cut and sew thing, it was like, it's a different kind of game.
So we didn't fully understand that.
Yeah. And we tried it a couple of times and got burnt really bad.
We would build something and I'd say to you, okay, it's going to come winter delivery too, top of the new year, and we would ship it in like spring, like heavy garments.
Because we were late, we had no leverage with the makers.
So the importing, getting enough, even to fit in a container, we didn't have enough critical mass so that the efficiency is in shipping.
So those things led us to a conclusion that we need a partner in manufacturing.
So we find an agency partner, which is a really bad deal, really bad.
One of those Javits Center trade shows, I walk as a consumer.
I start walking it now, not as competitors, but I start looking at who's making what.
And I just start asking them, do you do private label?
Can you make me? How did you make this?
Could you make it with my label?
Right, if I pay you. One guy I just happened to meet will call him Boris, okay?
Okay. Or something, for a little reasons, because it ended up in a real shitshow.
So Boris says, yes, I can make them.
There's a brand called SMP and it was a hot snowboarding brand.
Like I wanted to make that level of product.
So he says, all right, we make a deal.
You do the fulfillment in the warehousing, Boris, and the making.
You fund the making and we'll split 50-50 on the revenue.
I'll pick up the marketing costs and we'll go season by season and we'll commit to like a three-year deal.
Right? But you can't mark up the freight on board pricing, the FOB pricing, right?
That's the price before it leaves the country of origin.
Then there's like your landed price.
You can't mark that up. Deal, sign the deal.
Okay, and you're going to split it 50-50.
Yes. That's my recollection.
This is not a court of law.
It might have been 51-49, I don't know.
He's financing it, entirely financing it?
Entirely financing it, but I'm financing the operation at the sales cost, the marketing cost, the advertising.
Okay, so the first season we do it, everything works.
It all works. This is going good.
The second season we do it, there's a speed bump.
Oh my gosh, we get to facts.
Edward C. Hyman, Echo Design Group, ECHO, Season Desist.
Season Desist, what does that mean?
I'm Echo. My mother gave me that name.
Here comes the earnestness, right?
Here's the superpower and the weakness.
I'm Echo. What do you mean, Edward C.
Hyman? Who is he? Oh, he's dead.
This is a company 75 years old.
I'm a trademark on this brand.
You need to change the name of the brand.
They were called Echo Design Group, and this is like three years into your business, and they say you cannot use that name anymore.
Right. Business is going like this.
I have this new production deal with this agency partner.
I've got goods with ECHO embroidered on them, advertising campaigns that are getting a ton of hype, ECHO on them.
I'm funding that. If I don't ship my goods to pay all the debt for the advertising, this is how I got underwater.
The name Echo you could not use anymore.
You had already made clothing with ECHO in it.
First of all, did you have to recall that stuff?
That's exactly what was going on.
When I say pump the brakes, halt the production, there was stuff in pipeline.
Yep. They were out about to ship in the midst of peak manufacturing.
They were about to punch an embroidery, and you can't undo that embroidery.
Once it's punched, you can't undo it.
Yeah, but you had to stop that before it happened.
Yes, we had to stop it. By the way, how much merchandise are you talking about?
Two, five, $10 million worth of stuff?
It was probably like, don't quote me, but it's probably about $8 million worth of stuff.
Okay. $8 million is just a car cost, not like the value in the market.
You knew that you were not going to fight this.
You were not going to fight this Echo design group.
Oh, I tried to fight it. Okay, but?
I lost the fight. Just with the name, you decided to change it to ECKO.
It's still Echo. Also, you legally changed your last name to ECKO.
Yeah, that took about a year after that, but yes.
That was because by having your name as the name of the brand, nobody could challenge the trademark because it's your last name.
It was legal advice and it was also kind of funny and confusing because I was so stubborn that in my agreement with Echo design group, I'm like, I will change the trademark, but I am Mark ECHO.
And for like three months, I went around with, oh, Echo Unlimited, ECKO, but I'm ECHO.
And it was confusing and my sister was like, why are you doing that?
I'm like, I don't know. It's so stupid.
People are spelling the name wrong and they're still getting it wrong.
Like, what am I doing? And then my lawyer says, you know, Mark, it probably will, like, let me do an analysis and a discovery on what this can mean for the marks if you legally change your name.
And if you intend to start marketing Mark, M-A-R-C-E-C-K-O as a mark in itself, which we hadn't contemplated.
I hadn't labeled, I hadn't put my name on things yet.
Yeah. So, and I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
And I'm like, oh, well, Tommy Hilfiger does it and Ralph does it and Ralph was, you know, it's not Ralph, it's not Polo Ralph Liftschitz.
It's Polo Ralph Lauren.
Ralph Lauren, right, right, right.
Exactly. That's his last name.
I changed it to Ralph Lauren.
Yeah. So, okay. So you've got, you changed the name.
Meantime, you've got this brewing challenge with, actually, I want to go back to this challenge with the partner in just a moment, but I want to ask you overall from what I understand.
You're still a relatively small company, but from what I understand, you guys were spending money like crazy.
What were you spending money on?
Advertising. Advertising.
Like, but crazy. You were spending more than you had.
Oh, for sure. Where was it?
Okay. Advertising, you were buying splashy ads in magazines.
It was expensive. What else were you spending on?
That's pretty much it. This was peak, you remember, magazines were forces of nature.
I mean, there was no YouTube.
No. There was no, there was no other, I couldn't get on TV, print magazines, if you were in the pages of Thrasher magazine or the pages of the source and PC gamer spin, it should cost money and they, they're selling full retail.
And I, yeah, maybe I can negotiate with them and get crazy terms.
I get 180 day terms to pay and they liked us.
They were rooting for us.
And that's what we did. We got over our skis.
And the calculus, we weren't spending too much.
It was the, we were spending to plan, but the plan was to have shipped goods and then to have cash flow.
So suddenly what would have been cash flow now was suddenly stuck in this, this legal quagmire.
So you, so you basically, you basically decided to change name.
Meantime there's this perfect storm happening because you also have this issue with your, this partner that you guys partnered up with, hoping that it would create better efficiencies.
You'd be able to scale and, and have higher margins, but turns out he was kind of skimming off the top.
Turns out Boris was marking up on the FOB prices, broke the deal, breached the deal, milking both ends.
So when you discovered this, right, when you found out about this, what did you do?
I mean, cause you had, you had this partnership with this guy and you felt like, did you confront him and say, Hey, what are you doing?
Of course. And I got more evidence on about six styles or so that were price manipulated.
So then we very aggressively sue for them breaching using that those six price points as evidence, they then say, no, that's a mistake.
That's not true. That's not enough evidence.
So then they countersued because we're trying to get our inventory out and break the deal.
And they're like, we're going to fight this out in court.
And they knew they had us because we couldn't afford not to ship the goods.
We needed to reconcile this shit show.
I needed a completely new manufacturing infrastructure.
Okay. I needed to learn everything that they were doing.
I needed to cut those guys out and they were willing to go full nuclear.
So you guys enter into this battle with this guy.
But from what I understand, and you wrote about this in your book, there's all this merchandise that was being stored at a warehouse, I think in LA.
Yes. Right? Okay. And you and Marcy, your sister and Seth decide to basically take it back.
You decide to kind of raid this place in the middle of the night and just grab all your merchandise, which- Probably not the best form.
Not the best idea. But tell me what the circumstances that led you to do this and what you did.
Oh, it was just, it was righteousness versus effectiveness.
We probably didn't consult our lawyers all the way.
We felt- I'm sure you didn't consult them at all because they wouldn't have been like, this isn't a good idea to go to the warehouse and take your stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I think we were just young and stupid and thought we were robbed.
And I was very hostile. Why?
I just, you know, I just got my feelings hurt.
I got punched in the nose with the ECHO to ECKO.
So I was going full cowboy.
So there was this sort of posture that we were taking.
It was not by force. We went in and showed up with like goons and guns.
I mean, I showed up and we showed up just saying like, okay, like here's the paperwork.
You guys are stealing. Give us our shit.
And then obviously that, they locked it up, locked us out.
I don't remember the exact, you know, when they make the movie one day, it'll be very dramatic.
So you weren't able to get your stuff?
Hell no. When we come back in just a moment, ECKO Unlimited runs into so much debt that it has to withdraw from a big trade show.
But then Mark figures out how to turn that absence into a major advantage.
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I'm Guy Razz. So it's around 1997 and Mark has just attempted to raid the LA warehouse where a shady business partner has been keeping their merchandise.
The two of them then wind up in court and each claims the other is in breach of contract.
And we knew that we could win a case, but we didn't have the funding option to go forward.
Our lawyer pulls us aside one day in court and he's like, guys, we could fight this, but this is going to be six months and you might not be here to tell the story because you guys are going to go broke unless you settle this in some way.
And so that's what we did.
And so what did it take? How much money did you have to pay him to buy him out?
It wasn't even like that.
It was just like a sell-off period and we're going to play nice and we're going to slowly migrate the goods.
And we've renegotiated the royalty term.
This whole thing imploding.
But I think you thought maybe a way out is just selling the brand to Levi's or Nautica or Periel.
So a couple of other brands and you went to some of these brands and offered it to them, right, Echo?
Well, it wasn't just us wanting to sell it.
It was more the market signaling that there might be an opportunity.
When we started talking to more grown adults and listening to the attorneys and exploring the options, we hired a banker to learn, okay, well, what would it mean to perhaps have a partner to come in and do the back of the house ops, kind of liberate me on the design and us as a team on the sales and marketing.
So we put out a live wire and there was people circling.
People started circling.
We did this sort of banker exploration to see what the market could offer us in the event of a sale.
And you couldn't find anything that looked good, basically, at the time.
We found things that looked good.
Just the terms were not fair.
What was the best offer you got, do you remember, in terms of Dollar amount?
Oh, goodness. More than 30 million?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So why wouldn't you take it?
Well, Levi's tried to cut my sister and my partner Seth out.
After we were like the two yard line doing a deal, you have to understand they were basically going to be purchasing it.
It probably wasn't that much.
It was because you have to remember I had so much debt at the time.
So they call me in to see me one on one.
And I don't want to disparage all the people that were a party to that deal are no longer there.
But there was one gentleman who worked in their international business and one of their finance people pulled me in.
I thought that he wanted to just talk about whatever kind of little button up details with me.
And I knew that I was sort of the galvanizing force, but my partner is my road dogs, was my sister and my partner Seth, was my brother.
And when they not so subtly alluded to the fact that we really don't need them for that long, maybe we'll just keep them on for a year.
And we said peace out. And our friends at Nautica, we got to know the CEO at the time.
He loved us. He thought we were great.
And then as we get to the one yard line to do the deal, he's like, my board won't approve it.
It's a mission creep for us.
We can't afford to do this right now.
We just newly public. He got scared and pulled the deal.
Okay. So now you are, this is around 97, 98.
You are in pretty bad financial situation.
You've got a lot of... It was more like a debt deal.
And it was a very much an angel, good guy deal.
There was nothing about taking a piece of the marks.
He was that generous. He had some protections in place.
We knew that we got our hand slap.
We learned to be on better behavior in terms of our marketing planning and be more fiscally responsible and maybe not be as cavalier with the advertising.
And we said, if we just put our head down and focus, we could do this.
And if we could use our weakness at the time, which was the being underwater financially as some sort of Tai Chi strength, maybe there's a way to sort of harness that reality of not being able to afford to be at a trade show, having to be low key and basically do this whole thing like we called wear is echo.
And a magic trade show, we could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars there creating the spectacle, couldn't afford to do that.
So we... This is in 97. Yeah, yeah.
You could not afford to go to this show, which is a really major show.
Yeah. At the time, it was like blowing up.
And we paid for the booth to hold the space and we couldn't get the money back, but we didn't have money to produce the booth itself to ship people, to build the booth construction, the union, all that stuff.
So we just put a sign in the middle of an empty booth, wear is echo.
Wear is echo. That's what it said.
Yeah, wear is echo. That was your campaign.
That was your strategy to say, let's just end that was that.
And what about outside the convention center?
Oh, stickers everywhere.
Giant stickers. Stickers.
And the stickers said wear is echo with the brand logo on it.
Yeah, we got fine till, you know, took a couple years to settle with the city of Vegas, but full proper like 11 by 17, full page, like paper glossy stickers that were like impossible to take off.
Did that actually gain attention for you?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. In some good ways and some bad.
Yeah. Yeah. Did it result in sales at the trade show?
Huge sales. Huge sales, not the trade show in our office.
Hmm. Because people set people what?
They were just like, wow, these guys are clever.
They just were rooting for us.
And we started to build the muscle of properly building production and manufacturing infrastructure.
We put our heads down. Marci became a world class operator.
I became a much more focused merchant, right?
In understanding how to build an online that was not as ad hoc, getting really good at color separations on the T-shirts, like crushing it on new innovations and screen printing, pushing my screen printers to the limits to do things that no one was doing at the time in terms of colors, high density, ink, gloss, all sorts of techniques that were very novel at the time
that have since become wildly mainstream.
If you looked at the market, you wouldn't even, your eye wouldn't see it, but at the time we're a big differentiator.
And who were your customers?
I mean, was it young men mainly?
At the consumer level, yes, it was young men's.
We managed to break into Macy's and it started, the business started to really, it started to become durable.
They got the bugs out of the system and we grew up.
And what was your, what was the biggest seller?
Was it T-shirts? No, the core competency was fleece hoodies.
And people started to associate, stylists, why weren't they taking the brand into their roots, especially at the men's fashion magazines.
And I found that offensive, you know?
And I had this thing like from the, from the media side, they were like, you're too black for GQ and you're too black for the skateboard magazines, but you're too white for the source magazine.
And it was all that same narrative over and over.
I just was like, let's take three and a half million for a year for the next couple of years and let's incubate a magazine.
Right? And like, cause the marketplace is showing us this, that they're not getting convergence culture.
I had this thesis around convergence and that cool doesn't discriminate or live within these silos in the way that the media industry is the sort of design constraints of the past.
And I was looking at just the multicultural reality, looking at inwardly at my company, looking at my staff, looking at my own family and saying, this is not where the puck is headed.
Someone needs to answer that.
Let's go for it. And to my partner's credit, Marcy and Seth, they bought into the vision.
And how are you going to, I mean, this is a magazine with an editorial team and writers and all this stuff like, what did you know about running a magazine?
Well, some people are just that good, I guess.
No kidding. No. I mean, did you hire an editorial team?
Did you hire a? Of course I did.
I didn't know how to run a magazine.
I start to hire consultants, someone, a newsstand consultant, help me structure the org.
You need to hire a publisher, an editor in chief.
And we were sunsetting a showroom that I still had.
I wanted to move to a bigger showroom in Manhattan, but I had two.
I was opening two showrooms and we converted one to complex and we just went for it.
And so the idea was you would have your, essentially your own publication.
You wanted this to be a culture lifestyle magazine.
I wanted to earnestly build the most culturally relevant media platform for my generation.
And it would focus on things like sneakers and food and pop culture and music and sports, like all these things.
Convergence culture. That's what I would label it as.
Okay. In the meantime, I guess around the time you founded complex, you started to work on complex, you made a conscious decision that you wanted to build up you as a brand because I guess you felt or the feeling was that not enough people knew who Mark Echo was and that could be helpful for the Echo apparel side.
Is that about right? Well, yeah.
It was a bunch of things that were happening.
It was just the sort of professionalization and maturation of the business.
We started to license Echo Unlimited successfully.
I launched Echo Red, which was a women's wear division.
I was having a lot of growth.
The mousetrap, if you will, of our infrastructure was becoming quite serious.
What was once a company underwater, now we had very sophisticated lines of credit, you know, with big banks.
So I started acquiring businesses.
I acquired Zoo York. It was just a part of us looking forward.
Okay. What is the picture?
What are we building for here?
I mean, as part of, you had these, they had complex, which is growing as a magazine, but within a few years, the print version of complex was struggling.
It was really hard because it's expensive to run that.
It was really hard. Why?
Because they were all online.
So why would you pay for the print if you could just get it for free online?
Right. And I guess there were also challenges or some issues with the Mark Echo Enterprise.
You guys had some racked up some debt and then you're in the middle of a financial crisis.
You had a lot of real estate, you know, because you had showrooms, you had stores.
Yeah. You had that retail quite aggressively.
So you had like those 2006 leases in 2008.
And I think at your peak, you had like 110 stores.
That's right. So it wasn't so much that complex was in trouble, but we were.
Yeah. And we were the only funder.
So, you know, they were just breaking even.
So even though the, and was the Mark Echo brand, I mean, even if it was the clothing we're selling, the clothes and the apparel was selling, you guys were over leveraged.
We were energizing the brand and sort of doubling down on quality rather than quantity.
And there was, and he was trying to feed the machine, this beast that we had built.
And he would say to me, Mark, you know, we've been through this, you know, we've had ups and downs.
This is not the first time I'm telling you could push through it.
And I just felt like, no, this time is different, mate.
And we can push through this.
And I don't want to because I feel like the, it could be corrosive to the brands.
We were just doing too much, you know, we're running a full retail business.
We're running an outlet business.
It was too much. We needed to focus.
And Seth was like, no, this is cycles.
We'll get through it. We can get through.
And he was more gung-ho.
And I said, I don't agree.
Yeah. And I'm curious because this is happening in the middle of a financial crisis.
And you guys had to resolve this in some way.
And I'm going to kind of oversimplify what happened.
But basically you decided that you would sell your stake in Mark Echo Unlimited to an outside partner called Iconics.
And I guess they bought about 51% for $109 million that was according to reports at the time.
And then Seth would still get to keep a 49% stake and you would essentially kind of leave the day to day.
You wouldn't be involved in the day to day as much with the clothing company.
But just to get back to this, I mean, $109 million for 51% stake in the company in the middle of a financial crisis.
I mean, that seems like a really great outcome.
I mean, so was it. I mean, it seems like you guys did pretty, you know, you did okay.
You did pretty well. We did do okay.
I landed the plane with a wings on fire.
I sold my equity interests to make room for Iconics to buy my position.
There was a payout for me and I would keep complex and I would get a royalty on the gross sales of the business forever.
Got it. So from what I gather, initially this was great.
Like walked away with, you know, a nice chunk of cash.
Oh, it wasn't great. I mean, as a maker, as that empathetic, maybe saccharinly earnest kid who loves design, it was like suddenly having phantom pains of the hand that was once attached to your body gone.
So that divorce came with one thing.
And suddenly the sort of mousetrap of, okay, I IDA once every week that cycle of I draw something and then you get the prototype in and then you're gluing and taping the prototype and you're the manipulatives of like that sort of auto-didactic learning the craft of the trade, which I was becoming good at was gone.
How about your relationship with Seth?
What happened to it? Oh, it was very icy and we've since totally reconciled our relationship and I love him very dearly.
How long did it take before you guys?
Oh, years. So it was years of not speaking.
Yeah. Yeah. It took a solid, I'd say five, six years.
So he stays on with Mark Echo.
He was the 49%. Yes. And you focus all of your attention now to complex media, which was also having some financial challenges.
Well, I mean, well, the business was break even.
But now we had a, and this I give all the credit to my good partner, excellent operator, Rich Antonello, who became the CEO of Complex, but I hired him and he was doing a great job.
I mean, to his credit, you know, to land the plane with investment, with venture investment in the crisis years, which was crazy.
If you think about it, you think it was crazy to sell the company as I did, which was also a blessing.
You're right. I should be grateful that it landed in the way that it did.
And in my heart, I'm grateful, right?
But it didn't come without some brokenness, right?
Okay. Let's talk about complex because I know now you're out of the Mark Echo enterprises and complex is your main work.
Did you, I mean, you say that you were kind of, you were sort of depressed at this time when you left Mark Echo, but did it also, did you throw all of your energy into complex?
I started to. And then Rich knew my professional woes.
The way I'm talking to you is how I've talked to him and Ernest and I explained the things that were bothering me creatively, professionally.
And he was like, let's, let's like get involved in the operation, dude.
Come be, like, come manifest the brand.
So I started operating back into complex.
You really kind of shift, you shift towards video, digital video.
And one of the, I think turning points was this first week feast, this like complex really becomes known for, it's sort of like at the time.
I mean, vice was starting, you know, was really kind of coming into its own and complex.
They were the darling. Right.
Yeah. And, but you guys were also making videos and content that was really starting to turn around.
I mean, complex started to become profitable or started to make money.
Started to make a lot of money.
And it started to become a business that also had a better multiple than a, a, a parallel business.
So it was an interesting thing.
And then here have different relationship with inventory, right?
You know, it's like inventory is vapor, you know, it's, it's, what's on the hard drive, you know, it's production costs.
It's a much different business.
And I was thrown into the deep end.
And there I was on the road with big buyers and doing, you know, up fronts and running production and being like sort of the little, the sort of more Maverick version of vice.
And 2016 you got out of that business.
And at the right time, because it's a tough business.
And as we've seen with vice and other and Buzzfeed and complex and others, but, but tell me about, I know that it was acquired by Verizon and Hearst.
I mean, it turned out to be a prescient move because of course the whole industry would, would go on to crater in some ways.
And, you know, we know the story about vice and, and Buzzfeed and, you know, Buzz, we've told that story on the show.
I mean, there have been enormous challenges even in the, in the print industry as well, Condé Nast and, you know.
Oh yeah. It's in another phase of reinvention right now.
But when, when they acquired it, you did stay on with complex, right?
You stand for, for some time.
I stayed on. I, there's just like I stayed on at Echo just in a much more sort of advisory consulting.
Yeah. Well, in, in, in the nature of comp, in the Echo business, I get a royalty.
So my, my sort of feedback, it just, I don't have to be in it operationally in a deep way.
We're going to sort of, this is not really totally my brand today.
Oh, I think, you know, that feeling of it's not totally your brand came before I sold the company.
Mm hmm. Okay, when you start to develop, when you develop IP at that level of international distribution, this sort of hyper localization starts to happen that starts to, that really creates some dissonance as a, as like the sort of chief creative officer or the, or the creative director.
Because there are certain functional things, be it climate, be it color palette fabrication, fit that start to Frankenstein the business in a way that it's very hard to explain to a lay person.
So when I would travel the world and see my brand on people's backs, it had this sort of multiple personality thing that was going on anyways, that was emerging, you know, things were happening, pockets that weren't all the way tuned to my Bluetooth, right?
It wasn't like my creative Bluetooth.
Yeah. But to answer the question, when I see the brand today, is it, is it the portrait of what I would make it if I was fully steering it?
No, but that is the nature of this business.
I think you could say, you know, for me, it was the 30 year anniversary.
And the fact that some of my old peers and colleagues that worked for me were still there, call me nostalgic, call me earnest.
I wanted to work with them again.
It just felt good. And it was like no strings attached.
Yeah. It was like, do what you want.
Mark, when you think about where, where, you know, what you've created and the ups and downs of it, but also the amazing success that you've had, you know, as an entrepreneur and failures too, as we've outlined, which is part of the journey.
But how much of where you got to now do you attribute to timing and luck and how much do you think has to do with the work and the grind that you put in and just the sheer effort?
I think that the luck is an incredibly real thing.
The first bout of luck was being a twin and having a twin sister.
So if you took that out of the equation, I probably would not be speaking to you right now.
I've been lucky in marriage.
I've been lucky in having my partner Seth, even though we had a professional divorce and we eventually totally reconciled and I love him.
I learned things that was, it was going to the university, the super smart, you know, I've been lucky to grow up in Lakewood and have the diversity that was around me.
So yeah, luck was a big part of it, but it was also, I believe, talent and skill and a relentless belief in yourself, which at times probably sounds irritating to the listener because there's probably moments that are somewhat cringe worthy, like this guy sounds like an arrogant prick or he's not listening or he sounds so earnest.
There is a little bit of this sort of mania that you need.
And I think the thing that I attribute most of it to, and this is a completely, it's not this podcast, but maybe a different one, is where the grace of God has given me the opportunity and I do not discount that.
And I know that, you know, it's a different conversation, but I do think that's an important part of the calculus.
It's Mark Echo, co-founder of Echo Unlimited and Complex Networks.
Last year to celebrate Echo Unlimited's 30th anniversary, Mark came back briefly to design a limited edition collection with some of his most iconic designs.
He said he thought of it as a love letter to 1993.
Hey thanks so much for listening to the show this week.
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It's full of insights and ideas from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs.
This episode was researched and produced by Catherine Seifer with music composed by Remtine Erebleu.
It was edited by Neva Grant with audio engineering help from Gilly Moon and Quacy Lee.
Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, J.C.
Howard, Alex Chung, John Isabella, Elaine Coates, Keri Thompson, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, and Sam Paulson.
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