YouSaid · the spoken record

Marc Ecko

lines on the record: 109
first: 2024-06-03
most recent: 2024-06-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 cringe worthy of like this guy sounds like an arrogant prick or he's not listening or he sounds so earnest. There is a little bit of this sort of mania that you need. 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 it's a different conversation, but I do think that it's an important part of the calculus.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that the luck is an incredibly real thing. The first bout of luck was being a twin. Having a twin sister. So, if you took that out. 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 that's super smart, you know? 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the way tuned to my Bluetooth, right? It wasn't like my creative Bluetooth. Yeah. But 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. 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 calling 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”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think, you know, that feeling of it's not totally your brand came before I sold the company. When you start to develop, when you develop IP at that level of international distribution, this sort of hyperlocalization starts to happen that starts to really create some dissonance 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 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, you know, things were happening, pockets that weren't”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stayed on, there's just like I stayed on at Echo just in a much more sort of advisory consulting. Yeah, well, in the nature of 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started to make a lot of money. And it started to become a business that also had a better multiple than a peril business. So it was an interesting thing. And then here I have different relationship with inventory, right? You know, it's like inventory is vapor. It's what's on the hard drive and 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 upfronts and running production and being like sort of the little sort of more maverick version of vice. And as ever committed to convergence cultures as I ever was, you know, doing the one thing I knew I was good at.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started to. And then Rich knew my professional woes. The way I'm talking to you is I talked to him in earnest and I explained the things that were bothering me creatively, professionally. And he was like, let's get involved in the operation, dude. Come be manifest the brand. So I started operating back into Complex.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whoa, I mean, well, the business was break even. But now we had, 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 did. And in my heart, I'm grateful, right? But it didn't come without some brokenness, right?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something and then you get the prototype in, and then you're gluing and taping the prototype, and the manipulatives of that sort of autodidactic learning the craft of the trade, which Was gone”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I felt like a loser. Felt like a total loser, and I was depressed. I started getting psychotherapy and try to figure out my new vocation. And 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 was like, here I was 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 sort of mousetrap of, okay, I ideate once every week that cycle of I draw.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, I still have a plaque around here for whatever $500 million line of credit that I had, whatever absurd line of credit, which was you don't do business that way anymore.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't great. I mean, as a maker, as that empathetic, maybe saccharinly 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 my job was to now be that puppet like that caricature, that mascot”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did do okay. I landed the plane with the wings on fire. I sold my equity interests to make room for the 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can't push through this, and I don't want to because I feel like it could be corrosive to the brands. We were just doing too much. You know, we're running a full retail business. We're running an outlet business. It was too much. We needed to focus. And Seth was like, no, this is cycles. We'll get through it. We could get through. And he was more gung-ho. And I said, I don't agree.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 there was, and he was trying to feed the machine, this beast that we had built. 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my goodness, um, you know, I guess not that smart of an operator, you know, the common killer in our industry is inventory. And it's why we have, you know, there were macro things going on in the market. You were at the peak of the real estate industry. It was right. The real estate was cratering, 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 hadn't been. And banks were collapsing all around us.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So it wasn't so much that Complex was in trouble, but we were, and we were the only funder. So, you know, they were just breaking even”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a women's wear division. I was having a lot of growth. The mousetrap, if you will, of our infrastructure was becoming quite serious, what was once a company underwater. Now we had very sophisticated lines of credit with big banks. So I started acquiring businesses. I acquired New York. It was just a part of us looking forward. Okay, what is the picture? What are we building for here?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, I did. I didn't know how to run a magazine I start to hire consultants, someone, a newsstand consultant, help me structure the arg. You need to hire a publisher, an editor-in-chief. And we were sunsetting a showroom that I still had. I wanted to move to a bigger showroom in Manhattan, but I had a two. So I was opening two showrooms and we converted one to complex. And we just went for it.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right because the marketplace is showing us this that 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had this thing like 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 were looking at a 12 to 15 million dollar marketing budget of paid media that I was using for paid media. And I found it very frustrating as I started 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the core competency was fleece hoodies. 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 of awareness was out punching. You know, there was more demand. 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. put our heads down. Marcy became a world-class operator. I became a much more focused merchant, right, in understanding how to build an align that was not as ad hoc getting really good at color separations on the t-shirts, like crushing it on new innovations and 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 inks, 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 were a big difference.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we got fined till it took a couple years to settle with the city of Vegas, but full proper 11 by 17, full page paper glossy stickers that were impossible to take off.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 booth construction, the union, all that stuff. So we just put a sign in the middle of an empty booth where it's echo.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And magic trade show, we could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars there creating the spectacle, couldn't afford to do that.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the exact terms were 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 slapped. 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 the 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 called Where's Echo?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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... 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?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when they not so subtly alluded to the fact that like 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not especially after the 11th hour, the deal, they call me in to see me one on one. And 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. I knew that I was sort of the galvanizing force, but my partners, my road dogs was my sister and my partner Seth. Those are my brother. Yeah.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Levi's try 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 yet, pretty close to this whole thing imploding. But I think you thought maybe a way out is just selling the brand to Levi's or Nautica or Perry also a couple of other brands. And you went to some of these brands and offered it to them, right? Echo.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we knew that we could win a case, but we didn't have the funding option to go forward. Our lawyer pulls us aside one day in court. And he's like, guys, we can 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. And so that's what we did”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 went and 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. And then obviously that they locked it up, locked us out. I don't remember the exact, you know, when they make the movie one day, it'll be very dramatic”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 LA. Right? Okay. And you and Marcy, your sister and Seth decides 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”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 said, no, that's a mistake. That's not true. That's not enough evidence. So then they countersued 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's pretty much it. This was peak. Remember, like magazines were forces of nature. I mean, there was no YouTube. There was no other, I couldn't get on TV. Print magazines, if you were in the pages of Thrasher magazine or the pagers of The Source and PC Gamer Spin. Shit costs money, and they're selling full retail. And yeah, maybe I can negotiate with them and get crazy terms. I get a 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 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? And 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. Probably will like let me do So, and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And I'm like, oh, well, Tommy Hillfiger does it, and Ralph does it, and Ralph was, you know, it's not Ralph, it's not Polo Ralph Liftshits. It's Polo Ralph Loren. Ralph Loren, right, right.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was probably like, don't quote me, but it's probably about $8 million worth of stuff Million dollars just our cost, not like the value in the market.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly what was going on. When I say pump the brakes, halt the production, there was stuff in the pipeline. En route about to ship in the midst of peak manufacturing. They're about to punch an embroidery and you can't undo that embroidery. Once it's punched, you can't undo it.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, business is going like this. I have this new production deal with this agency partner. I've got goods with ECHO embroidered on them, advertising campaigns that are getting a ton of hype, ECHO on them, funding that. If I don't ship my goods to pay all the debt of their advertising, this is how I got underwater.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entirely financing it, but I'm financing the operation of the sales cost The marketing cost of 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 the facts. Edward C. Hyman. Echo Design Group ECHO cease and desist What does 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 Seim? Who is he? Oh, he's dead. This is a company 75 years old. They have the trademark on this brand. You need to change the name of the brand.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For legal reasons, because it ended up in a real shit show. So Barris says, yes, I can make them. There's a brand called SMP It was a hot snowboarding brand. Like, I wanted to make that level of product. So he says, All right, we make a deal. You do the fulfillment in 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, there's your landed price. You can't mark that up deal. Sign the deal.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Yes, so here's how I get to the agency partner, and it's all my doing, my Frankensteining. I want to make snowboard jackets, okay? And I want to make out aware. I want to go after Polo. I want to go after Tommy. I have the drawings. I could see it. I visualizing it. But I'm going to preserve this t-shirt business, preserve that foundational essence, but I need to get into the making. So I walk up at one of those Javich 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. 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 Barris, okay? Something”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were importing. I had really bad agency production deals. We were making in Taiwan, we were making in China, we were making in 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. We didn't fully understand that. And we tried it a couple times and got burnt really bad. We would build something and I'd say to you, okay, it's going to come winter delivery too, 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 makers. So the importing, getting enough even to fit in a container, we didn't have enough critical mass so that the efficiencies in shipping.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we were the big problem was that we were, we didn't have the leverage on the manufacturing side. So the manufacturing infrastructure was not refined yet”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT