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

“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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Actually, had good performance with it.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Timberlin, or we get that from the North Face with 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 my aesthetic, you know, like I was. You know, Tim Boots and cargo pants, and this was the aesthetic It took on a bunch of meetings, 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I was like, I got it. It's the rhino. You know, you could call me Ernest, but I do believe that God puts things in your path that if you ignore them, you could say that they are just trivial things. But outside the garage of where I airbrush for years, my dad had a collection of sand driftwood rhinoceros statues, like little wooden, they were like janky little $5. And as a kid growing up, I used to play with them with my Star Wars action figures. I always admired the form and the shape and just 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 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 transfer of type.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, right? I don't want to only do t-shirts. And if I don't evolve a logo mark that's a nonverbal, 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 timberlin tree and I walk by a big Lacoste 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. And I knew that if I was going to get into cutting Which is my ambition.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it was also the emergence, you know, time and place. Let's put ourselves in 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 five soul. It's Echo Unlimited. It's PNB, Supreme is just coming up.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. No, but it was real. Like, we were getting feedback, like calls over the weekend. You have more stock. That t shirt's blowing out for us. Some of the styles started blowing out”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, some of them would pave really slow, slower than you could afford, and you would convert them into a viable account. And some were just basically lecherous and just were basically taken 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 a 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Jay's. 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, like the manager was the buyer. And we would just try to put them on wheels. We would sell it on consignment.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would go to these boutiques, and presumably these are boutiques that are selling this kind of stuff. And you would walk in and say, Hey, can I talk to the owner, the manager, or something like that?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I did this. I was doing these very elaborate pieces of art that I was showing. And at the time, I had the art that I wanted to get produced looked more like these multicolor 8 to 10 color screen prints on black. Most of what you saw in the streetwear market was printed on white. And here I was looking at my works getting increasing elaborate, increasingly high resolution. You couldn't produce it.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a little bit more technical than that. I wanted to bring the elaborate aesthetic, which was if you look at those like old concert t-shirts and rock concert t-shirts, like, you know, 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 streetwear 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I worried about it, but I didn't know how to process it. It was more of a portrayal of 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 in our 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? So I was making friends with people that were more like me that were entrepreneurial. And then they started to help me.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And I think it's a part of my superpower and a part of my weakness is that earnestness, you know?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to Seth's credit He deserves a lot of credit for As the business started to take off, I renegotiated the deal and I was like 33, 33, 33.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was probably ninth. I think I was 19 when I met him. And I blew him off He spooked me, he spooked me. And 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's like, this is good. If you want to do something, let me know Me know, what do you need? What do you need? What's your ask? I didn't have an ask.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 showing up to school and he'd be flying around the country going to where demolition sites buying things that were being demolished, reselling them.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not Achin. 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...”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, 92. Yeah. I meet him first like a year before. 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 aides driving around with this card for an old man? Number one, I appreciate that card today. But at that time, I was like, yo, who is this dude? He's wearing dirty ass denim shorts, dusty Timberlin boots like with dirt going, grime up his legs. 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Stucy. There's this brand getting a lot of attention called cross colors. This brand getting a lot of attention called Tommy Hillfigure. 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 so I'm like, well, what if I could screen print these things? You know, instead of doing them one at a time.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow. So I guess somewhere around this point, you change 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 in your mind at that time this is, I guess, around 1992, what did you think this business could be?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would buy an Armani jacket or a Levi's jacket or be some champion sweatshirt when they would ask me, you know, which I said, no, no, you bring the blank. If you don't know what to get, order this one.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, my business was the client brought me the blank, so I had no hard costs. Like all my costs were material and labor.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just didn't know what to do with me They themselves were trying to figure out how to raise money for their own things.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was looking for like I was so delusional. I was looking for an investor. It's a little bit of this kind of trusty 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so I did that to rest in peace, Chris Lighty, to try to get to QTIP and Tribe. I did it for Chuck D. I did it for Karis One.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 did, 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”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Dandy, right? Seen TKID is the whiz. My favorite rapper, KRS1, Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over nearly everyone. BDP, I'm like Echo, educating change to heal and overcome.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fluid. The doctor did not know until I was born. They delivered Marcy and they said, there's another one. And my dad almost fainted.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the bottom of her abdomen and then like under her breast and she didn't understand. She like, is 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 pertaining so much. My mother was massive.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 YOMTV raps now come 9293, right? So that was my thing. And I was doing gallery exhibitions.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. I got in Lakewood. And my identity was wrapped up in building echo airbrushing, E-CHO 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 record live from the ev”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is insane. Right. Right. So I only apply to one school, Rutgers College of Pharmacy. I applied early, got accepted, and didn't look back, only applied to one school.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same 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 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 worked for big pharma, let's say, and I had a sense of marketing, I wanted to be maybe on the marketing side of Big Pharma, you could make like at that time in graduating in 1990 65 to 85,000 like right out of school right out of school. That's big money.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then my father was into photography. And so I was the great blessing and gift he gave me 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 all of these sort of ideas that I ended up eventually seeing when I got into Photoshop years later”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comic book, like an Avengers comic book. And it's like Thanos with the glove, you know. This is before we think of like MCU. And I think that's when I was like, oh, like I'm good at this. I think I charge like $500 for that jacket. 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 Michaels or Joanne's Arts and Crafts and I'd even go into Manhattan occasionally. I'd go to the garment district, go to the areas where they sell 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it probably started at like, I mean, I was damn near first, you do like you just do some gratis and then you start selling them at 10 or 15 or I would do bulk. And then it's 50, and then people would ask for more elaborate things and 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we'll drive by the publisher location, think it's going to be a building. We pull up, it's a residential house. And I literally go knock on the door. I ask 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?”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, to the credit of my uncle, who was the product of vocational education. He 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 the 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 took 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. 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 turn into a business.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coffee table book on graff 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 Black Beat 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'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 on 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.”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I looked at 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...”
2024-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT