REVOK OF THE SEVENTH LETTER. Dropping in June of this year, keep your eyes out for this one..

The Hundreds Summer 12 Lookbook is now available for your viewing pleasure! Hitting stores in the next two weeks, keep your eyes open.

So a few weeks ago, I posted this story on how we started our brand, silkscreening our graphic tees with a local printer, and then years later, eventually buying them out… Well, now we’ll take you behind the scenes of our screenprint shop in downtown Los Angeles:

by bobbyhundreds

Can you be mainstream and still be cool? It’s a question we are forced to ask ourselves at The Hundreds. Although we aren’t nearly a mainstream brand, we continue to grow and flourish, and one day we will stand at that crossroads. So, can you be mainstream and still be cool?

In short, the answer is Yes. Although “Cool” is subjective, I think most people would agree that household brand names like Apple and Nike and Kanye West are still, in the most general sense, Cool.

It’s hard for me to reconcile that with the philosophies I’ve held my entire life, that Cool is a by-product of exclusivity, rarity, and the underground.  As someone baptized in subcultures, to go mainstream and above-ground was to forfeit.  Stay core, stay poor.  That’s the mantra.

As a teenager in the ’90s Southern California punk scene, in my Dickies and Converse, a band like Linkin Park was everything I stood against.  This band didn’t represent me, they couldn’t speak to my underdog sensibilities; in my eyes, they bathed in the mainstream, and they swam with the current.  As soon as a band enlisted in the “Furious 5 at 9″ on KROQ (the top 5 songs of the day on L.A.’s alternative station), they were dismissed as my sworn enemies.  And a band like Linkin Park, perhaps the most popular rock band of our generation, couldn’t get off the Furious 5 at 9 if they paid.

Mike Shinoda’s dealt with it.  As frontman for Linkin Park, he has weathered the detractors and the parodies and the critical assassination.  But at the same time, he has also been showered with the dedication of millions of loyal fans worldwide, built a wildly successful music career, maintained longevity, and blessed influence on an entire wave of bands that followed.  I’d say that’s pretty Cool.  Very Cool.

As I sit here with Mike in the very recording studio Linkin Park concocted their new album, Living Things, not only are my ears open to the music, but so are my eyes.  I see the weathered instruments that have bled into this record, the sleepless nights stained across the piano keys and guitar strings, I see the scribbled lyric sheets splayed across the bookstand.  As we talk about the record, I grow to understand not only what this band has done, but what they are doing.  Ask any thirty-year-old about Linkin Park, and they’ll sweep them into the rap-rock abyss.  But ask a teenager who Linkin Park is, and they’ll sing a different tune.

Literally.  They will sing a new song, unfamiliar, perhaps unrecognizable to anything you know.  Because while the rest of their peers faded to black, Linkin Park never stopped evolving and making new music.  Yes, their ’00 debut rap-rock album Hybrid Theory struck diamond, but they have made 4 contrasting, borderline artsy, records since, sold over 50,000,000 albums, and scored two Grammys.  That’s Cool.

Living Things debuts June 26th.  It’s by far the band’s best, most comprehensive work, surprisingly jumpstarting with LP’s familiar, heavy rap-n-roll sound of yesteryear.  The first two tracks are like old friends to Linkin Park fans and critics, reunited after the band strayed and searched and experimented with the avant-garde.  My favorite Linkin Park album was their last, A Thousand Suns, because it played like a book is read.  It was cerebral and heady, it was an emotional story that had weight.

Don’t get it twisted, Living Things doesn’t ditch that.  By the third song, you are jarringly pulled into uncharted territory.  The music grows in brooding intensity, it has an exotic flavor, tinged with modes of everything.  Linkin Park, you may know, was originally titled Hybrid Theory (as their introductory record) because their ethos was to fuse and mix the things they loved — not just music genres, but artistic elements, ethnicities, cultures.  This album hearkens back to that philosophy, it’s a sonic cornucopia: heavy bass lines and dubstep-reminiscent back beats, Chester Bennington’s otherworldly vocals screeching over punishing guitars.

Living Things is an accurate gauge of where Linkin Park sits right now at this point in their career.  Most, if not all, rock bands never make it this far, especially in this climate of sleepy Bon Iver music and crybaby rap.  Plus, this many creative personalities and egos, on the road, performing, writing together, for over a decade and a half.  Think about it, how many radio acts from the mid-’90s are still crushing it?  That’s Cool.

I follow Mike a couple miles away to the studios where Living Things is being mixed.  Lead guitarist Brad Delson is in the back, we talk about work, we talk more about personal lives.

Then they introduce me to Manny, the mixer.  Although Manny the Mixer sounds like a kid’s cartoon, what this guy does is anything but child’s play.  Two decades in the business, he earned his stripes in the days of early ’90s West Coast rap, and has the harrowing “Behind the Music” tales as evidence.  He just finished that new Bieber “Boyfriend” single and is currently toiling on John Mayer’s album.  He does his best to explain the science of mixing to me, but it’s alien jargon.  I’m overwhelmed by the sea of faders and convoluted tentacles hardwired into cabinets.  But at the end of the day, I see what it takes to make these records.  I can almost fathom what Linkin Park does to achieve creation.  It’s not an art you can pay to download, process with a filter, ReTweet, or learn through a Youtube tutorial.  To make a powerful record that communicates a story and a mission, that speaks to legions of followers,… takes brains, it takes heart, and it takes fists.

And that’s very Cool indeed.

by bobbyhundreds

THE HUNDREDS & BROMANCE RECORDS AT THE SAGUARO PALM SPRINGS. COACHELLA WEEKEND 2012.

The Hundreds brand ambassador DJ Flipout has been tearing up Telus Ski & Snowboard Festival and it’s only four days in. Check out the recap video from KINGSNOW’s party at Garfinkels this past Saturday.

From coast to coast, The Hundreds has got the skyline covered.

Here on the corner of Fairfax an Rosewood, we just put up our latest billboard for the The Hundreds by Don Pendleton collaboration.

And on the other coast,… is there any more prime placement than this?

The Hundreds New York takes over Times Square.  Yup, right behind the New Year’s Eve ball:

SABER OF THE SEVENTH LETTER / AWR / MSK. Dropping in June of this year, keep your eyes out for this one…

The initial few hundred bucks we ever scrapped together from our personal bank accounts, Ben and I put towards screenprinting our first t-shirts. We asked an acquaintance of ours to help us out; he had a small 2-color press in his backyard, so we dropped off a CD of art files and a boxful of blanks.  It was 2003 and we were off to a bright future in apparel.

Or so we thought.  Weeks went by. Then months. Nothing.  Excuses turned into straight-to-voicemail, turned into frustration. We had lost almost an entire summer waiting for our tees, our first accounts had been promised deliveries that were weeks late, and our precious blanks were held hostage in some woodshed in the Valley.

So we showed up on our friend’s doorstep, unannounced, and demanded to see our product.  One by one, he pulled each crumpled t-shirt from the floor mess. The first tee’s graphic was a little too high in placement.  He shrugged, “It’s not so bad,” and picked up another. This time the print was upside down.  A little flustered, he tossed it aside and grabbed the next shirt.  The print was on the wrong side. “There’s always a margin of error,” he justified, “you have to expect a few fuck-ups.”

“Then how do you explain this?,” Ben asked, as he reached down and handed our friend a completely blank t-shirt.  No print anywhere.

And that was that.  15 minutes later we were sitting in the car, doors flung open, staring at the roof with the sun glinting in our eyes. “Our company’s over before we even started,” we wailed in self-pity.  That was everything, all our cash that had gone into the blanks — right down the drain with the ink washed from the screens.

We pulled ourselves together and somehow managed to peddle off a fraction of the t-shirts that were somewhat presentable.  With that money, we faced our next dilemma.  Time to find a new silkscreen printshop.

A friend of Ben’s referred us to a shop she had once used for a project, also deep in the Valley, in fact not too far from the Screenprinting Shop of Horrors that crushed our dreams just a month prior.  We walked into that office on a blind whim with a photocopied linesheet of our next season of offerings. We thought we were sitting on Streetwear gold, but the guys who ran this shop could barely suppress their snickers looking at these misguided 23-year-olds with big dreams and shallow pockets.  ”How many t-shirts are you guys trying to produce?” they entertained us, as the stale cigarette smoke hung in the air.  The sticky carpeted floors caked in soot and old paint, the abused pool table re-appropriated into a makeshift worktable, and the counter actually an old bar top, the “office” was built-out to mimic a dingy watering hole. “I dunno,” we responded, “maybe like a hundred shirts?”  That was about all we could afford to print, and furthermore, about as much as we thought we could sell.

They laughed. This time out loud.  ”Guys, do you know how many kids come in here trying to start a t-shirt line?  We don’t have the charity for that.  Do you know what ‘minimums’ are? We do million-t-shirt orders for the State of California. We don’t have the time to separate your artwork, burn the screens, and run the machines for 100 t-shirts. Go somewhere else.”

But we weren’t going anywhere. I mean, what did we have to lose?  Remember, our company had failed before it had even gotten off the ground.  We had nothing to our name except a few t-shirt sales sprinkled around Los Angeles, mainly to friends of ours anyways.  So we fought for it.  We negotiated a deal that the screenprinters couldn’t refuse (In the end, I think they caved because they either felt sorry for us or wanted to get us out of the way of the baseball game).  So when we were back at that bartop a month later with a re-order, they were amused.

And when we were back again after a few weeks with a brand new catalog of fresh designs, they groaned, but capitulated.  Hell, why not?  It was the slow season. So it went, for months, then years, bickering back and forth about measly sample runs and odd-placement hits, 4-color pocket prints and reds that weren’t quite the right red.. until one day our screenprinters called us and requested a meeting.

As they sat in our conference room, the first time we had seen some of them outside that french-fry-laden bar, they cut to the chase.  It simply did not make sense for us to pay the middleman anymore.  The print shop had gone from tolerating The Hundreds’ trivial jobs to dedicating the vast majority of their business to our odd-placement t-shirts with red prints on colorful pockets.  From a financial perspective, it made way more dollars and sense to take all the machines, screens, ink, and labor and just do the printing ourselves.  ”Buy us out,” they flatly suggested.  It didn’t take much convincing once we considered the quality control benefits, the ability to monitor our work more closely, run extremely limited numbers of t-shirts without having to meet minimums, and best of all, always being on time.

And so we did.  We bought the print shop.

The Hundreds has owned and operated its own screenprinting shop for years now. Aside from ourselves, we actually do a number of private jobs for friends’ labels (yes, competitors) within our industry, although you’d never guess who.  Equipped with a 16-color press, a 12-color, a couple of 10s, and sample stations, it’s like Willy Wonka’s factory but for t-shirt creations.  We’ve always prided ourselves on having the best concepts and artwork, but the key ingredient to our graphic tees is the printing.

Every t-shirt of ours comes with a story.  That’s how we’ve built The Hundreds since day one.

But this is the story where our t-shirts come from.

by bobbyhundreds

THE HUNDREDS EYEWEAR SPRING 2012. Coming soon to a stockist near you!