The It Factor - Interview with Marc Ecko

I remember my friends in the business were selling to Patricia Fields [a designer who had a store on Broadway in the Village] or Extra Large [the Beastie Boys’ store in the Lower East Side and L.A.]. I’d walk into these stores; they’d be as big as my desk, and all the T-shirts sold for $36 each. It didn’t make any sense to me. I wanted to have my T-shirts where people bought their sneakers. I remember going to Dr. J’s on Market Street in Newark, N.J., to pick up sneakers. I wanted to buy T-shirts at the same place I bought sneakers. But my peers at the time said, “Oh, my God, how can you sell there?” I’d say, “Because I want [my T-shirts] where real people are shopping and where people are going to see them. I don’t want it to be an inside joke.”

Maybe it was delusions of grandeur or maybe a little bit of a Napoleon complex, but I wanted to be the Ralph Lauren for my generation. I wouldn’t be about silk ties and peak lapels, but I aspired to what that meant in terms of the breadth and scope from a brand perspective. So I put my head down and I focused on that.

RL: So you were a designer and a marketer while your competitors were just designers.

ME: I didn’t know what the word “marketing” meant until I hired my third marketing executive. It was less about having marketing chops and more about having the common sense that the consumer was going to validate me. I was bold enough to not let anyone try to define my consumers so narrowly.

RL: You market to the 13 to 30 demographic and for a long time you were part of that demographic. As you get older, do you worry if you can still serve the 13- to 30-year-olds?

ME: My demographic is growing, but I don’t worry about getting older. Look at Bill Parcells, Tom Landry, Vince Lombardi or any great coach in history; especially coaches that were once players. How does a guy like Parcells manage to get guys a third of his age to break themselves for him? I’m going to get older. I can’t forever be in the sweet spot of my demographic, but I could compel my staff to heed some of my life experiences so that they could be more effective design leaders, marketing leaders and executives. Age and the fact that I’ve gotten to travel the world makes me more astute with the business and less emotional.

Growing Up on the Job

RL: How do you spend most of your time now? Are you providing leadership, or are you still getting involved in a lot of the details?

ME: You can’t micromanage your way to success and you can’t get overly caught up in all of the details. I micromanaged this company for the first six or seven years. I’d wonder why I couldn’t keep my really good designers. It was because I was micromanaging them and they would go work somewhere else. I didn’t have the tolerance to allow them to get some blood in their mouths. It’s no different than how I am with my two-year-old now. She bangs her lip on the stairs and I tell her, “Shake it off, put some ice on it. You’re OK.” But she’s my third child. With my first one, I was like, “Oh, my God, call the hospital. She’s bleeding!”

So, am in the weeds on everything? No. I’m more engaged with certain projects. For instance, right now we’re doing a lot of research for potential new licensing opportunities, and I will get very, very heavily engaged in the global, big idea there. Once the big idea is set, you have to let the ship ride its course. I am not going to be so arrogant to think that the first thing that comes out of my head is the absolute ideal thing for the market. No one person can do that, not even Steve Jobs.

RL: As a business owner, what do you think was the biggest mistake you made?

ME: Oh, goodness! I’m constantly making mistakes. I don’t know that there’s any one big one.

RL: In ’98, you had a big cash problem. Your business was nearly $7 million in debt. Was that one of your biggest mistakes?

ME: I almost went bankrupt, but that wasn’t my biggest mistake. They were dumb mistakes: not being aware of supply side, not knowing how to ship and receive, spending more than I had, not knowing how to keep a budget, and not knowing how to be unemotional about design.