This is not a T-Shirt: transforming culture one t-shirt at a time
Some books you read for entertainment others you read for education, then there is This Is Not a T-Shirt by Bobby Hundreds, co-founder of The Hundreds. A mix between business book, autobiography and streetwear history.
The Hundreds is a streetwear brand that came about in the early 2000s when Internet was still very meta and streetwear brands were an underground thing. Supreme was a niche skateboard apparel brand, Kobe Bryant was starring in Destiny’s child videos (when he wasn’t winning championships) and MTV was still playing music. The world has changed and so has The Hundreds so I guess it’s quite natural that Bobby Kim (Bobby Hundreds’ real name) felt the need to tell the story of the brand he co-founded.
I came across The Hundreds by accident and a bit late to the party. Two years ago, I fell down a Youtube rabbit hole and this BluePrint series started playing. In a 2017 interview, Bobby Kim sat with Complex to talk about how he turned “a t-shirt into a streetwear empire”.
I instantly fell in love with Bobby’s approach to brand building. He was all about building a community and not bullshitting people. From that moment I was hooked; this is exactly what I’m about. I wanted to know more about the brand and I was curious to see how it would evolve with the times.
Then, earlier last year (remember 2019 when the world was still normal?), Bobby made an announcement about the release of his book, a sort of memoir that would retrace the story of how he built The Hundreds with his business partner, Ben Hundreds. I immediately bought it and waited patiently for my delivery.
The book contains stories of Bobby’s childhood and teenage years as well as the more practical side of business. You get to learn about the successes and the fails. The ups and the downs. The highs and the lows. But the reason why I wanted to tell you about this book is mostly because of how necessary it is.
Of course building a brand is exciting and it’s always interesting to know the story behind the success story. But more than that, for the first time in a long time (ever?), I felt like I could relate to what I was reading.
See, Bobby Kim is a Korean-American man who grew up in the USA. And like many people with immigrant parents in a western country he has a particular set of experiences that only people in the same situation can understand. I think a lot of Asian-Americans can relate to his story but I also think it will resonate with many children of immigrants. I know I did and I was born to Morroccan parents in Paris, France.
Usually when I read business books the story is almost always the same. If I had to summarize it it would be something like: “white man who comes from a comfortable middle-class (or higher) family makes it big thanks to a smart yet simple idea (usually tech-related), a little bit of hustle, a few people who believed in him and a big buy-out.” Now, I’m not saying there aren’t different stories out there or that these people don’t deserve to be successful. By all means, they do. What I’m saying is that every time I read these stories I have to substract so much of it to make it work for me that, in the end, it’s simply not helpful. It just ends up being a nice story that doesn’t really hold in my reality.
When I read Bobby Hundreds’ This Is Not a T-Shirt however, I felt all the elements that meant something and were important to me were there. The pressure of having to belong somewhere without ever belonging because you’re always between two worlds. The idea that people have expectations of you because you come from a specific ethnic background conflicting with the desire to just do you. Not conforming to what society expects of you. Deciding to live a creative life even though no one around you has ever done so and you don’t know anyone in the field. These are a few of the many reasons why this book felt so necessary to me. Not many of us, children of immigrants, take the time to tell our story. Often, it’s because we don’t really come from cultures that encourage it. We might also tend to be more focused on making it (and not losing it) than telling the story of how we made it. There’s also probably the fact that we’re simply just starting to see the first generations of people in a position to do so (Internet has given a plateform to anyone who wants to tell their story so we’re introduced to many new stories and points of view). Reading this book made me feel like there’s a place for people like us and that, most importantly, we can be our own examples.
Sometimes people come to me and ask for advice on how to make it in the creative field. Of course, I tell them about hard/smart work, to be curious and to keep a positive attitude towards what life throws at you. But one of the most important thing I usually tell them is to find their people. We all have our own people. These are the people who will get us and from whom we will learn the most because we trust they know what we’re about. Your people are not necessarily the ones that look like you but they’re the ones who look at the world the same way you do. You might disagree on this and that but the core elements are there. They’re your community.
About Community
In this book, I didn’t find the usual start-up talk about community that only really implies instagram follower count. I found a story about how a brand can build a community around common interests, all while putting humans first. I didn’t find the side of streetwear that was only about the hype but, instead, stories about what streetwear brands meant to young people in the early 2000s and how it evolved from there. I found a tale about how brands can build bridges, how they can help people find their identity and make something of themselves.
The name “The Hundreds” comes from the idea of strength in numbers and this book perfectly encapsulates what that means. We’re stronger together and one of us can change things for all of us.
