How I Built This with Guy Raz - ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Growing up in the ‘80s in New Jersey, Marc Ecko loved hip hop, graffiti art, and painting t-shirts for friends. His passion soon bloomed into a full-on business: ECKO UNLTD, a streetwear brand known for its iconic rhino logo. By the 1990’s, the brand had become a cultural force, but not without its share of bad deals, daunting debt, and a close brush with bankruptcy. Eager to keep innovating, Marc launched COMPLEX, a media company hyper-focused on “convergence” culture: hip hop, fashion, sports and pop culture. Within a decade, COMPLEX had weathered the financial crisis, and emerged profitable. After being bought–and sold–by Buzzfeed, it was purchased by a video shopping company for over $100 million, and ECKO UNLTD just celebrated its 30th anniversary. This episode was researched and produced by Katherine Sypher with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon and Kwesi Lee.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And to sign up, just visit gairoz.com. That's g-u-I-R-A-Z.com. Hey, just a quick heads up. There are a couple of bad words in this episode. Nothing that you haven't heard before, but just be mindful if you're listening to the show around kids, just so you know, and hope you enjoy it. When I wrote a business plan,

I wanted to be a lifestyle brand, and I write up this story of educating change to heal and overcome. Educating change to heal and 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 Guy Raz, and on the show today,

how Mark Echo's love of hip-hop and graffiti gave him an iconic edge as a streetwear 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 a hundred 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, streetwear was just starting to get traction in the U.S. Brands like Stusi, Fubu, and Supreme were even showing up in fashion magazines. Eventually, streetwear would kind of take over fashion. Even luxury brands like Prada and Gucci and Valencia are. heavily influenced by streetware designs. As for Mark Echo, he grew up in the 1980s, obsessed with the rise of hip-hop and also graffiti

culture. By the time he was in college, he was airbrushing designs and fastening rhinestones to denim jackets, and then selling those 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 Hager 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 like, intense diversity. Growing up there, you're like, you're a product in 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 it 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 would be pulling up, there was like a group of kids that would be doing literally like back flips and breakdancing, you know, spinning on their back, like in the middle of the lunchroom. And I just was like, that's the... 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, dino brand, GT, vans, airwalk. So suddenly, I think 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 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, I would draw what we saw on album covers or when I'd go into Queens and see graffiti on the subway 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 airbrush tools and like kind of painting graffiti style.

But you were trying to like hone your skill as a as a graffiti artist I guess with I think I looked at it like you know there was the four elements right emceeing you know DJing breakdancing and graffiti I still think that that's a fundamental part of the of the organizing system of hip hop and here I was a very artistic kid you know my dad got me subway art which I think is like one of the bibles of uh this is a book this It's like a coffee table book. Yeah, yeah. Basically graffiti art.

I remember that book, yeah. Very important book. And I think it should, you know, everybody should own it to appreciate because it was a very, very catalytic culturally. So it was either tracing from that or tracing from a comic book. And then it was in the Blackbeat magazines where I would see the airbrushing. And that started to come a little bit later. Okay.

So that fifth, sixth grade, that wasn't quite a thing yet. And come middle school, a guy who. who's one of my heroes and a friend now, I'm happy to say in life, is a guy named Fade, P-H-A-D-E, King Fade, from the Shirt Kings. And in the Jamaica Queens Plaza Mall, he had a little stall there that he was airbrushing,

but he was so Jason, obviously, to all those rappers coming up in Queens and all in the boroughs. You'd see those images, and it was like, wow, I think I found, that was the medium, because it was like sort of an existential way to get to graffiti. through the sort of first cousin of graffiti, which is airbrushing.

You started to, I mean, make your own shirts, right? Inspired by some of these shirts that you saw. Yes. And I guess by the time you get to high school, you started to, people start asking you if you could make them for them. And that was like a bit turned into a business. Yes. To the credit of my uncle, who was the product of vocational education, it was like a diesel engine, you know, mechanic. he encouraged my parents that because my passion was so you know sort of manifest to give this kid a shot

went to the sears outlet bought the air compressor for whatever 80 bucks and started acquiring all the materials picked up my first copy of airbrush magazine which serendipitously talk about like how the universe and how god kind of puts things in your path but airbrush magazine was the only trade magazine for airbrushing. And where is it published? Lakewood, New Jersey. It's like, what are the odds of that? You know? So I said, Ma, can we go meet the publisher? So she's like, oh, I'm going to take you to go. We'll go to the art supply store. We'll pick up some paint. And we'll drive by the publisher location, think it's going to be building. We pull up. It's a residential house. And I literally go knock on the door. I asked for the

publisher. And there was a garage. And he's in there unboxing new magazines, just on racks, inventory in the magazines. So I was like, can I work for you? Can I sweep here? You know? And I did. You did? And he gave me free issues. Wow. And you start making t-shirts for people in high school and selling them. And were you making pretty good cash? Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, better than bar mitzvah money. You were selling T-shirts for like, what, 50 bucks or something? Well, it probably started at like, I mean, as damn near, first you do, like, you just do some gratis. And then you start selling them at 10, 15, or I would do bulk.

Yeah. 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 when I was really, when I would allocate time. And these were like custom T-shirts, like? Custom T-shirts, custom denim jackets. People's names or people like, whatever they was. 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. This is before I think of like MCU. 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 Michael. or Joanne'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 sold 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 then 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 you know, all of these sort of ideas that I ended up eventually seeing when I got into Photoshop, you know, 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.

Same. That's right. Yeah. You went to college. You went to Rutgers, and you decided to study pharmacy to become a pharmacist. Was that, like, were your parents encouraging you to do that? Like, hey, this is a steady job? been 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 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 were if you worked for big pharma let's say and if i and i had a sense of marketing i want to wanted to be maybe on the marketing side of big pharma, you could make like at that time and graduating in 1990, $65,000 to $85,000, like right out of school, right out of school. That's big money. Huge 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 back. Only applied to one school. you get there and you're starting to be to be a pharmacist, but you keep this kind of side hustle going.

It's my whole identity, yeah. And that's when suddenly I started to realize and I could self-articulate that something unusual happened for me in 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 at 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 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. Okay, now BT is emerging. Now there's yo MTV rap now come come 92 93 right. So that's 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 E, C, H.O, like echo, like an echo. Yeah. Where did that name come from? Well, that's the backstory to the twindom, right? 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 both the bottom of her abdomen and then like under her breast and she didn't understand. She's like, was my baby doing a split? Is he punching? 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. My mother was 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 mother. 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 a nickname. It was a nickname.

It was like me. And so here you are. Rewind back to those fifth, sixth grade years. I'm reading subway art. People named Dondy, right? Seen. Tea Kid. Is the whiz.

Yeah. My favorite rapper, KRS1, knowledge reigns supreme over nearly everyone. BDP, I'm like, Echo, educating change to heal and overcome. Educating change to heal and overcome, Echo, I love that. And I was doing really well. So when I did the thing at Rutgers and I did my own solo exhibition, and then I went on like a binge promoting the hip-hop bazaar, and I just started hitting everyone. Like Spike Lee is coming to the school to promote Malcolm X.

He's still raising money for the Malcolm X film. And he's coming up short and he's going around to colleges doing, you know, grassroots marketing. He went to Rutgers and to talk about it. He went to Rutgers to talk about it. I would like hit him with a swag. Oh, you just 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 Karras I won. You were hoping to do what? Just 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 trust the 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. Yeah. 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 doing as a one-man shop.

You had to find a way, because I'm assuming you would go to New York, you would buy a bunch of just plain t-shirts, plain jeans jackets, right? Is that right? Yeah, I mean, my business was the client brought me the blank, so I had no hard cost. Like, all my costs were material and labor. Oh, the client would say, I want you to take this jacket. They would buy an Armani jacket or a Levi's jacket or be some... a champion sweatshirt. When they would ask me, you know, 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 Stusi. 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 screenprint these things, you know, instead of doing them one at a time? Because you were hand-making each one. Yeah, it was impossible to scale. You know, it was impossible to scale that. Right, 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? Yes, 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 car 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 wearing 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 ancient

antiques? 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. But expensive architectural things like stone columns, marble statues, giant slabs of limestone, urns, nothing that were like... Not like from ancient Rome or Greece, but just... No, no, no, but like, you know, at that time through Europe, and there were some countries that were so under development,

and he just hustled. He paid a kid to go to school for him to take classes under him as an alias. He wasn't even shot up to school. And he'd be flying around the country, going to where demolition sites, buying things that were being demolished, reselling them.

Okay. 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 are you need? What's your ask? I didn't have an ask. But you did not, I think, initially feel like this was, This is the right fit. It all sounded like a lie to me, and I didn't believe it.

But you're like in your early 20s, and you need the cash. I was probably 19, I think I was 19 when I met him. And I blew him off. Yeah. He spooked me. He spooked me. And it was, what intimidated me was how good he was. You know, that he was very sophisticated understanding of business at a very young age, clearly had

confident confident one year older but felt like 15 years older culturally we were kind of disconnected i was like very much mr hip hop and this guy comes you know pulling up listening to like Bruce springsteen i'm like who is this guy but there i was relentlessly trying to pitch all these hopeless leads of you know and none of them were to stick it's going nowhere go nowhere so i finally reach out to him And he's like, okay, look, let's do this. You know, 50-50, we'll do it. What do you need? Five grand.

He gave you $5,000 in cash. Yes, no contract. And he knew that the business you wanted to do was to mask. I wanted to make more T-shirts. I needed an inventory. Yeah, right. So you said, all right, great, we'll do this. Handshake and you're in business.

That's it. When we come back in just a moment, Mark comes up with an iconic new mascot, but discovers that the very name, of his brand, Echo, E-C-H-O, is going to have to change. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.

I'm Guy Raz. 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. it 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 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 had it 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 what it well tell me about the first things you did once you were like all right we got a business i went 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 change to heal and overcome educating change to heal and overcome that's what Echo stood for. It's very, I mean, I mean, it's very earnest. I'm not criticizing it. I'm not mocking you. It's very earnest, right? Well, I'm, 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. And I think it's a part of my superpower and part of my weakness is that earnestness, you know? And not really worried what people thought of you. You didn't care if people were like, Oh, I worried about it, but I didn't know how to process it. It was more of a betrayal of like my very dear and near friend group wanted to dissociate with me. They thought I was like corny or delusional or obsessed over the work and you only want to talk about this thing. And there's no oxygen to talk about. And they weren't wrong in terms of where my focus was, right?

in terms of my inner sort of socialization, I would share. I wanted their advice. I would ask for their advice. What do they think? Do they want to help? Do they want to come with me on the road? And always was a no.

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 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 old concert t-shirts and rock concert t-shirts, like some of these t-shirts today, the ones that are early references, are worth thousands of dollars.

But that was an aesthetic that was not being captured by the streetware 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.

So I did this. I was doing these very elaborate pieces of art that I was showing. And at the time, the art that I wanted to get produced looked more like these multi-color eight to ten color screen

prints on black. Most of what you saw in the street wear market was printed on white and here I was looking at my works getting increasing elaborate, increasingly high resolution I would need, and 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. Oh, more elaborate, okay. So 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 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. When you say styles, the cuts of the shirts? Oh, I bought blanks that were available. And I had six pieces of art that I identified. And these are just like champion t-shirts or like Haynes T-shirts. Yeah, whatever they were, Anvil 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 on Broadway. We'd go to the extra large store. You know, go to Dr. Jays. 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, yeah, I could talk to you. The manager was the buyer. And we would just try to put them on wheels. We would sell it on consignment. Why consignment? I guess you had no choice. They wouldn't just give you cash. Well, because some of the stores that we really wanted to get into that were really hot stores at 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.

You don't get paid. They take it. And 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 letcherous 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 trade shows, right? So we started to learn about, oh, you should. go to a trade show. You should go to the Javit Center. They have a trade show. And here's action sport retailer in San Diego. And so, 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, we were getting feedback, like, calls, like over the weekend, you have more stock. Like, that t-shirts blowing out for us. Some of my, 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 back into space and time. In that vector of space and time, this was this emergent thing. And who were my near peers now? It's Fat Farm. It's Triple Five Soul.

It's Echo Unlimited. It's PNB. Supreme is just coming up. Yeah. But West Coast Streetware, like, like, like, Stusi, for example. I think more influenced by surf and skate culture. Yes. And you guys more influenced by, literally by hip-hop culture. I was like explicitly hip-hop and graffiti and my art. It was like my black book. But there was a Venn diagram where those two met. Oh, for sure.

One of the things that I think you did around this time in the first year or so was to introduce the rhino, which became kind of the symbol of the echo brand. Yeah. How did that, come about. It's about three years in. All of the brand was just trafficking under my art and under the Echo Unlimited Wordmark. And I'm at a trade show in Vegas and we're starting to really kind of hit a stride with international buyers and I want to expand beyond t-shirts. I don't want to only do t-shirts. And if I don't evolve a logo mark, that's a non-verbal, non-written logo mark, it's going to be very hard to ID the product. So I walk the main hall and I walk by like a big timberland tree. And I walk by a big lacost alligator. And I walk by polo. And I'm just like, all these guys have a

thing in common. They have like a mascot. And they're able to brand their garment in a way where they don't have to slap type on it. Okay? Yeah. And I knew that if I was going to get into cut and sew, which is my ambition. And cut and sew is like, just for people don't know the industry, it means imported, more technical, constructed outerwear, denim, woven shirts, beyond just printables. What's the business of printables, right?

Where you take a blank constructed garment and you embellish it with a print or a transatl. 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 people saw it, like, you 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 earnest. 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 years. My dad had a collection of sand driftwood rhinoceros statues, like little wooden. They were like janky little five dollar. Yeah. And as a kid growing up, I used to play with them,

uh, with my Star Wars action figures. And I always admired the form and the shape and just the, the sort of ruggedness of the rhino. So I kind of had a hunch like could be, it needed to be a rugged animal. I was like, is it going to be a great dane? Maybe. Maybe. it's a pit bull. It was not a long calculated thing. I didn't have a big narrative. Like, this is it. I want to try this.

I need to have an animal. Yeah. Right? And so I show the buyers the line and they're like, what the hell is this? They're like, we already get that from Timberland or we get that from the North Face with those, that weird mountain. We don't need that from you. Okay, this looks like an outdoor brand.

This looks like a hunting brand. I'm like, exactly. You know, that's what I'm trying to, like, that's the, that's my aesthetic, you know, like I was, you know, Tim Boots and Cargo Pants and this was the aesthetic. Yep. It took on 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 echo unlimited, discreetly in 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 River, New 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 in sales, which doesn't mean you're profitable necessarily. No, we're horribly unprofitable. Yeah, so this is the thing, like, from what I gather, like from the outside, you're looking really hot, like a hot brand, everyone's talking about you, you're making money, hand over fist.

but actually internally you were in trouble. The company was... This is a 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 were making it in China. We were making 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. And we tried it a couple times and got burnt really bad. Like we would build something and I'd say to you, okay, it's going to come winter delivery two, 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 maker.

So the importing, getting enough even to fit in a container, we didn't have enough critical mass so that efficiency is in shipping. Yeah. 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 deal that almost went nuclear. Okay. So you find an agency partner and this actually makes things worse? Right. Yes.

So here's how I get to the agency partner. and it's all my doing, my Frankenstining. I want to make snowboard jackets, okay? Okay. And I want to make outerwear. I want to go after polo. I want to go after Tommy. I have the drawings.

I can see it. I'm visualizing it. But I'm going to preserve this T-shirt business, preserve that foundational essence, but I need to get into this, into the making. So I walk up at 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? Would you make it with my label? Right?

If I pay you. One guy I just happened to meet will call him Boris, okay? Okay? For legal reasons, because it ended up in a real shit show. 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. Yep.

So he says, all right, we make a deal. You do the fulfillment and the warehousing, bars 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 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. There's 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 of the sales costs, the marketing costs, the advertising. Okay. So the first season we do it, everything works okay it all works this is going good second season we do it there's a speed bump oh my gosh we get a fax edward c hyman echo design group e C.H. oh ceasing desist oh season desist what's 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 cheim who is he oh he's dead this This is a company 75 years old. They have the 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. Yep. I've got goods with ECHO embroidered on them.

Advertising campaigns that are getting a ton of hype, ECHO on the. 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. On route, about to ship in the midst of peak, peak, man, manufacturing. They're 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. And by the way, how much merchandise you're talking about, $2, $5, $10 million worth of stuff? Oh, it was probably like, don't quote me, but it's probably about $8 million worth of stuff. Okay. $8 million is just at our cost, not like the value in the market. And so 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. So just with a name, you decide to change it to EC-K-O, so it's still Echo. And also, you changed, you legally changed your last name to EC-K-O. Yeah, that took about a year after that, but yes. And that was because by having your name as the name of the brand, you can't, nobody could challenge a 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, why, what am I doing? And then my lawyer says, you know, Mark, it probably will, like, let me do an analysis and the discovery on what this could mean for the marks if you legally change your name. And if you intend to start marketing, Mark, M-A-R-C-E-C-O, as a mark in itself. Which we hadn't contemplated. I hadn't label. I didn'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 Liff shits. It's Polo Ralph Lauren. Ralph Lauren. Right. Right.

Right. Exactly. That's his last name. I changed it to Ralph Lauren. So, okay. So you've got, you change 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, I mean, you're still a, you know, a relatively small company. But from what I understand, you guys were spending money like crazy. What were you spending money on? Like, advertising. Advertising. Like, but crazy, like, you were spending more than you had. Oh, for sure. Where was them, okay, advertising, you were buying splashy ads and, like, in magazines, it was expensive.

What else were you spending on? That's pretty much it. This was peak. You remember, like, magazines were forces of nature. I mean, there was no YouTube. 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 shit costs money and they're selling full retail. And 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 legal quagmire. So you basically decide to change name. Meantime, there's this perfect storm happening because you also have this issue with this partner

that you guys partnered up with hoping that it would create better efficiencies. You'd be able to scale and have higher margins. But turns out he was kind of skimming off the top. Turns out Boris was marking up on the F. will be prices. Broke the deal, breached the deal. He's milking both ends. So when you discovered this, right, when you found out about this, what did you do?

I mean, because 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 counter sue 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 need 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 L.A. Yes. Right? Okay. And you and Marcy, your sister, and Seth.

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. you to do this and what you did? Oh, it was just, it was, you know, 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, yeah, 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 wouldn't show 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. Yep. I don't remember the exact, you know, when they make the movie one day, it'll be very dramatic. So you didn't, you weren't able to get your stuff. Hell no. When we come back in just a moment, Echo 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.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this. Hey, Guy. My name is David, and I'm an entrepreneur from Albuquerque, New Mexico. My favorite episode is The Lip Bar with Melissa Butler, from the curiosity that got her into lipstick, to the way that she had her prototypes and her products overtaking her home. I believe she really represents the entrepreneur's journey. Thank you so much to you and your team for making this show. I listened to it while working on my own products, and it makes me feel like I'm in a chapter of my own story

that's similar to the ones on your show. It's very inspiring, and thanks again. If you want to share your favorite episode of How I Built This, record a short voice memo on your phone, telling us your name, where you're from, what your favorite episode is and why, a lot like the voice memo you just heard, and email it to us at H-I-B-T-I-D-Wondry.com,

and we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks in future episodes. And thanks so much. We love you guys. You're the best. And now, back to the show. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 1997,

and Mark has just attempted to raid the L.A. 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. You know, 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. Wow. 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 terms or the rev share split or something like that and then the period. And, you know, it was more like we played nice

and we said, okay, let's just settle. From what I understand around this time, you thought maybe a way out of this, because you almost went bankrupt. I mean, this was going to, and you got pretty close to this whole thing imploding. But I think you thought maybe a way out as just selling the brand to like 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 was a, 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 kind of 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 a dollar amount? Oh, goodness. Um, like more than 30 million? Oh, 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 were basically going to purchase the debt, and you guys would walk away with almost nothing. We would put we would walk away with something and some earn out

and to be incentive to stick around. But that wasn't, that wasn't enticing to you. Not especially after the 11th hour, the deal they call me in to see me one on one. And, you know, I don't want to disparage the, you know, 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 pull me in. I thought that he wanted to just talk about whatever kind of little buttoned up details with me. and I knew that I was sort of the galvanizing force, but my partners, my road dogs was my sister

and my partner Seth, it 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 like 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 mission creep for us. We can't afford to do this right now. You know, 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 debt, like tens of millions of dollars in debt from what I understand. And you needed a, you needed a. creditor, you needed somebody to help bail you out. And I guess Seth had a connection to some guy named Alan Finkelman. And Alan was a guy who said, sure, I will give you a loan and help you pay your debt. But I need to own a portion of your business as collateral, something like that. What was the offer? Yeah, the exact terms were, 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 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're called Where's Echo. And 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, you know, the booth construction, the union, all that stuff. So we just put a sign in the middle of an empty booth. Where's Echo? Where's Echo?

That's what it said. Yeah, Where's Echo? That was your campaign. That was your strategy to say, let's just end that. And what about outside the convention center? Oh, stickers everywhere. Giant stickers. Stickers.

And the stickers said, Where's Echo with the brand logo on it? Yeah, we got fine till, you know, it 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. 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. Marcy became a world-class operator.

I became a much more focused merchant, right, in understanding how to build a line that was not as ad hoc, getting really good at color separations on the T-shirts, like crushing it on new innovations in 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, 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 the business started to really, it started to become durable. They got the bugs out of the system and we grew up.

Mm-hmm. And what was your, what was the biggest seller? Was it T-shirts? No, the core competency was fleece hoodies. Fleece. And people started to associate that rhino logo with all like the coolest events that we would sponsor and the advertising that we had took and took forever to pay for. It's still the composite brand awareness was out punching. You know, there was more demand. There's just pent up demand in the market. So in some odd way, all. of the unintended consequences of shipping late or off cycle in some weird ways just created more of a vacuum for demand. I want to shift to this completely, not completely, but this other part of you, this other side of you that many people may know even better than Echo, which is complex. Because while you're running Echo, you decide to pursue this idea of creating a print magazine. Yes. A streetwear hip-hop print magazine. Right.

The idea was that this would be, this would extend the brand, the Echo brand. Oh, there was no doubt. I'm looking at what was, I don't know, our business was probably $150 million in business, right? Something like that. You know, it was north of $100 million. So we're looking at a $12 to $15 million marketing budget, okay, of paid media that I was using for paid media. And I found it very frustrating as I started to become like a darling amongst the publishers who all were very gracious and GQ and details. I said, hey, it's not enough just for the publishers to be nice.

Like, why aren't these peer, near peer editors in chief? they're my same age or sometimes older than me or the stylists, why weren't they taking the brand into their shoots, 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 years and let's incubate a magazine. Right?

Because the marketplace is showing us this, 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 industries, these 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 the stuff like, what did you know about running a magazine? Well, some people are just that good, I guess.

No, I'm 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. Yeah. 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 sunsetsing a showroom that I still had. I wanted to move to a bigger showroom in Manhattan, but I had two. So I was running 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 around. I wanted to earnestly build the most culturally relevant media platform for my generation.

And it would focus on in things like sneakers and food and pop culture and music and sports, like all these things. Convergence culture. That's what I would lay. labeled it as. Okay. And meantime, I guess around the time you founded Complex, you started 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 the women's wear division. I was having a lot of growth. The mouse trap, 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 Zew 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 see, you had these, 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 some issues with Mark Echo Enterprise. You guys had racked up some debt and then you're in the middle of a financial crisis. You had a lot of real estate because you had showrooms. You had stores.

Yeah, we've rolled out 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 were selling, the clothes and the apparel was selling, you guys were over leveraged, right? Basically, you had too many stores, too much real estate. Is that about right? Totally over our skis. How did that happen again? You were so experienced by that point. You were such a smart operator.

You'd brought the business back to $100 million. How did you get to this point again in 2008? Oh, my goodness. You know, I guess not that smart of an operator. You know, the common killer in our industry is inventory. Yes. And it's why we have, you know, there were maximum. things going on in the market. You were at the peak of the real estate industry, right? It was right.

The real estate was cratering, right? It was about to. Amazon was this incredibly powerful, but corrosive force in affecting the way consumer behavior was going to be, direct to consumer online. And so, you know, partially macro, partially our own doing. My partner, Seth, was a cowboy. And to his credit, that kind of wild, aggressive, stretch planning, which had proven so reliable for five years was now going to be tested again in a way that it hadn't been, and banks were collapsing all around us. This also, I'm assuming, really starts to strain your relationship with Seth. I know because there was a falling out. Your sister Marcy had already left a couple years earlier. She was bought out,

and I think she left on good terms, it's your sister. Yes. But you and Seth start to have more disagreements about the future of the business. Tell me about your, what was going on with your relationship as business partners. Oh, my goodness. It was incredible. I could only, I've, you know, I've been very lucky in life to have a beautiful wife,

my wife, Allison, in a long marriage and healthy family, thank God. but I think I experienced a divorce. It was effectively what you see within any sort of divorce where just two parties grow apart and there's divergent sort of point of view on the path forward. And I was becoming increasingly conservative and wanting to lean more into re-energizing the brand and sort of doubling down on quality. rather than quantity. 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 you could push through it. And I just felt like, no, this time is different, mate. And we can't push through this.

And I don't want to because I feel like it could be corrosive to the brands. We're just doing too much. You know, we're running a full retail business. We're running an outlet business. this, it was too much. We needed to focus. And Seth was like, no, this cycles.

We'll get through it. We could get through. And he was more gung ho. And I said, I don't agree. Yeah, 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 at those, 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. Yes. But just to get back to this, I mean, $109 million for a 51% stake in the company in the middle of 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 the 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 for forever. Got it. So from what I gather, initially this was great. You walked away with, you know, a nice chunk of cash. Oh, it wasn't great. I mean, as a maker,

as that empathetic, maybe sacriently 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, a lot of trauma. And I was, my job was to now be that puppet, like that caricature, that mascot. I see.

And it was not my skills. And it wasn't also aligned to my real authentic personality. So, okay. So was this the first time in your life? This is around 2009, where you actually, I mean, you had a salary. you were able to do, you were making money, but was this the first time in your life where you actually had significant money? Yes.

So wasn't that a win in a sense? You mentioned your little young family. No, this is the wild thing. It was the point in my life where I had the worst, I think I had my first proper breakdown. I had so much PTSD of the world collapsing, the weight of landing that plane to get on the other side of that Iconics deal, which was. not a pretty picture. And there were such hostility with those banks that were, it was like a love affair with those banks. I was in a CIT ad for goodness sakes, you know, back in the heyday when I had a,

I still have a plaque around here for whatever, you know, $500 million line of credit that I had, whatever, like, absurd line of credit, which was, you know, you don't do business that way anymore. And those same banks were now, like, breathing dead in your neck. Hostile, like hostile. Like, hostile. Like, You can't run complex and echo at the same time. Shut complex down. These are creditors. These are creditors.

These are creditors. They were coming after you because of the financial crisis. And they were upside down. And they were doing their jobs. It wasn't personal. So you felt this PTSD from the process of unwinding this, even though financially you were successful. And people from the outside are like, oh, my God, high five.

Mark, look, you sold it. You're good. But internally, you're like. I felt like a loser. Wow. I felt like a total loser. And I was depressed. I started getting psychotherapy and try to figure out my new vocation. And I would, I went, I got addicted to working out. And I was the most fit I ever was too. It was a wild thing, really. It's like here I was like more fit, more from an outside perception, more affirmation, but internally. hollow. So those sort of, okay, you did good kid, here's your trophy was never my measure. I'm that kid that was airbrushing t-shirts and sweatshirts. I want to make stuff. I'm a creator. I'm a maker.

Do you understand? I have to use my hands to make something. And suddenly the the sort of mouse trap of, okay, I d8 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 the manipulatives of like that that sort of autodidactic 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 them 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 didn't. 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 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 in earnest, and I'd explain the things that were bothering me creatively, professionally. And he was like, 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 was. They were the darling. Right. 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 apparel business. So it was an interesting thing. And then here, it had a different relationship with inventory, right?

You know, it's like inventory is vapor. You know, it's what's on the hard drive. 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 as ever committed to convergence culture as I ever was, you know, doing the one thing I knew I was good at. You got acquired in 2016. You got out of that business. at the right time because it's a tough business

and as we've seen with Vice and other BuzzFeed and Complex and others 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 go on to

crater in some ways and you know we know the story about Vice and and BuzzFeed and you know BuzzFeed and you know Buzz we've told that story on the show I mean there been enormous challenges even in the print industry

as well, Condonast and you know Oh yeah it's in another phase of reinvention right now But when they acquired it You did stay on with Complex Right? You stand for some time

I stayed on I still just like I stayed on at Echo just in a much more sort of advisory consulting yeah well in the nature of comp in the Echo business I get a royalty. So 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 jump ahead to where we are now because of course, Complex and Mark Echo two brands that had a pretty significant impact on

culture in the United States. You, when you, first of all, when you see, I know in the last year or so, you have actually collaborated with the echo brand again. Yes. On some designs. When you go to the website for that brand today and you look at it, do you recognize it? Does it resemble the ethos and the spirit of what you did create at the

beginning? Or does it feel like 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, when you develop, IP at that level of international distribution, this sort of hyper-localization starts to happen that starts to really create some dissonance as a, as like the sort of chief creative officer or the creative director. Because there are certain functional things, be it climate, be it color palette, fabrication, fit, that start to frank. Frankenstein the business in a way that it's very hard to explain to a layperson.

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. Things were happening, pockets that weren't all the way tuned to my Bluetooth, right? It wasn't like my creative Bluetooth. To answer the question, when I see the brand today, 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. And 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 a 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 going to the university, the super smart. I've been lucky to grow up in Lakewood and have the diversity that was around me. So yeah, luck is 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 cringeworthy, like this guy sounds like an arrogant prick or he's not listening or he's

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 God. There have been moments where the grace of God has given me the opportunity and I do not discount that. And I know that's a different conversation, but I do think that it's an important part of the calculus. That'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. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. And don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter at gairozz.com.

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 Rumtine Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with audio engineering help from Gilly Moon and Quasi Lee. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Jacey Howard, Alex Chung,

John Isabella, Elaine Coates, Carrie Thompson, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening

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