Who owns ecko red

The thing that lines up is that nothing lines up. It's the nonlinear bit, the bit that's not logical. If you understand what the label's about, you're in on the code. Ecko could not get a line of credit.

There seemed to be no other choice but to sell the company, but there were no buyers. As a result, we started getting really crafty. Seth managed to convince Alan that they were somehow related. Alan said, "You know, these kids are young; there are things we can learn from them. He took 80 percent of the company and said he would negotiate down our debt, getting a million and a half paid off right away. He said, "I'll give you the option of buying the company back in two years.

He hooked us up with his vendors and had Marci come to Houston. We didn't know what we were doing. Bar code machine? What's that? We used Alan's know-how and got to look under his hood.

We looked at how he managed his margins, and Marci tried to do even better. Before then, I thought my core competency was to be creative with zero restraint. But if the market wants only one hoodie and not five, don't get all upset that you can't design the others. Instead of focusing on selling the company, we focused on running the company.

We bought it back in 18 months. As Finkelman astutely realized, Ecko wasn't selling T-shirts as much as it was selling a brand. Limited resources forced the company to market its wares creatively. Being in need created a desperate market approach.

You don't compete with dollars. How do you get people to feel something emotionally? So we printed 25, bumper stickers, "Where's Ecko? Music marketing at that time was doing a lot of that.

We ended up doing more sales at that market, commando-style -- twice the volume we did the year before -- by not being there. Everyone in my space would do fashion shows. I love them, but they're very indulgent.

Your buyers appreciate it, but they won't buy more. The editorial community isn't going to change its mind. If I were getting their approbation, I might still be doing shows.

It was one of the best things that happened that I wasn't getting that. Does my buying community really care?

The gatekeepers aren't the goalkeepers. In , Ecko rented a airliner, had it repainted on one side to resemble Air Force One, and brought in a film crew to capture him tagging it with the slogan "Still Free.

For a time, a significant number of people thought Ecko had really breached security at Andrews Air Force Base and graffitied the President's plane. This was YouTube pre-Google. The cynicism wasn't as deep as to, Is that real or false? Everything being put up there was do-it-yourself and had to be.

You couldn't pull that off today. That was a unique window. The consumer with bandwidth at the time was young and savvy. Talk about a loaded object. It became a part of the culture of the brand. I'd much rather have a brand point of view that may make you scratch your head but is brand defining. Ecko set up a website allowing people to vote on what he should do with the ball: give it to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown; send it to the Hall with an asterisk cut into it to acknowledge the controversy surrounding Bonds; or blast it into space.

The asterisk won. Dominating the blogosphere and landing on newspaper front pages everywhere, the campaign garnered millions of dollars' worth of publicity and reinforced the edgy, youthful image of the brand.

The common thread between the Barry Bonds ball and Air Force One is they are both ridiculous ideas, so people would say, "Why would you do that? I thought it would go for more. The Bonds ball was such a loaded object. It was so rich in content. Baseball is the national game. Yet there is the hypocrisy in the baseball culture that helped build it to this level. It was being debated on the Internet. I thought, Take this hard news and make it go American Idol.

It was a social experiment. It was a little P. You had that moment to bid on it. How could you not engage? It was also a little of a liability. Some people were put off by it. But what does your brand stand for? Economically and culturally, we've been on steroids. Everything has a performance-enhancing substance built into the matrix.

This wasn't about Barry as much as it was about the system. It's also getting people to see the way I think. From a marketing point of view, it's something I need to do more of. We had no business buying it at the time. It was a function of Seth and me believing in the skate and street ideas. We originally thought of a license, but then we thought we could double the volume internationally and let it grow organically.

It was affordable and with guys we knew. As much as I was into graffiti and hip-hop, I was also into skateboarding and video games and BMX [off-road bike racing].

Your eyes don't lie. If something is cool and interesting, you shouldn't look down your nose at it because it makes you scratch your head. Ecko's fast growth has been fed by acquisitions in , it bought the outerwear maker Avirex and licensing. Through licensing, the company has expanded into footwear with Skechers , women's apparel Ecko Red , and children's lines under the Ecko Red and ecko unltd labels.

With licensing, it's all about clearly communicating your expectations. Do they understand your ambition and your brand? You can't guide them by saying, "No, don't do that. There are certain competencies in one industry that don't carry over. In footwear, the philosophy in merchandising is so different.

I went through three different licensing partners. My first footwear licensee, I kept arguing because I didn't understand the differences. As good as the merchandise is, you need to have a killer at the licensee driving it, someone who refuses to fail. I had good designers at the two footwear licensees before Skechers. It's more about the fact that Robert Greenberg, the owner of Skechers, gives a damn about the brand.

Even in this depressed economy, Marc Ecko Enterprises continues at a reduced pace to open its own retail shops. It's a way to control your own destiny. In a typical wholesale model, you have to go very broad.

With your own shops, you can test things. You don't have to fight for shelf space. And I think it makes you a better wholesaler, more empathetic to the retailer's needs. We also make a better marketing case and create a more romantic context for the brand than you can in a big-box department store.

You have to do more narrative-based things with the product. In the stores, we could have the Star Wars line, which did much more than a billboard could have done. And it's product. You have to operate the brand from the inside out. This spring, Rutgers University will grant Ecko an honorary degree. Among its distinctive details: buttons that look like pharmaceutical pills.

Yes, there's a business plan for it. I want it to get to a critical mass and see where there is a sweet spot that I can take it and monetize it into other areas. You can test things in your own stores or launch things there with less liability. What Rx will do from the real unsexy, business, blocking and tackling standpoint is it will sharpen our blades for the international commercialization of the Marc Ecko brand. Right now, we don't import denim from Turkey or knitwear from Italy.

I can learn from that experience. I don't have product that is Italian made, and Rx is entirely Italian made. Brazil, Russia, India, China -- all those markets are getting better. As these markets converge, can I take the lessons here and apply them over there? Ecko believes that a large company can retain its edginess. By: Michael Brent.

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