"It's Going to Be Big"

Marc Ecko got into business by spray painting T-shirts, sweatshirts, and jackets, then driving them to shops and street fairs.

Fifteen years later, at age 36, he owns half of Marc Ecko Enterprises, a manufacturer of street-inspired apparel with a staff of 1,500 and reported global revenue of $1.5 billion. Ecko is the biggest company in the urbanwear category -- an achievement that is all the more notable when you consider that its main rivals (Phat Farm, Sean John, Rocawear) were started by black hip-hop royalty, and Ecko is run by two Jewish guys from New Jersey without built-in street cred.

Inc. spoke with Ecko in his raffishly lavish headquarters in the Chelsea district of Manhattan about his beginnings in Lakewood, New Jersey, an exurb of New York City, and his on-the-fly business education.

To grow up on a block with such diversity -- that was the pivot for everything. My very best friend in Lakewood -- it always sounds so corny, "My best friend was black" -- but it's true. The mainstreaming of black culture from hip-hop was happening. So the cool kids of all sorts were interested in hip-hop. I didn't identify with my ethnicity. I was a plain-vanilla guy who had a Jewish orientation -- at least, according to my family I did. To me, it meant you ate bagels and lox when you got together. In this ethnic background, I really gravitated toward hip-hop. Michael Jordan was a god.

I started doing T-shirts in eighth grade. I got a book of graffiti art in seventh grade, and that was the path into it. When I would draw graffiti, it would get the same approbation from my peers that I had got from my relatives when I copied comic book characters. I asked my parents for an air compressor and airbrush. By high school, I was wearing my own T-shirts. People would say, "Where did you get it?" I'd say, "I made it." They would say, "Can you make me one?" I was making more money than the drug dealers. Some weeks, I might have $600 or $700 cash. I did it all the way through high school. I became the guy who was known for that.

His high school guidance counselor convinced him he needed a profession. Being the son of a pharmacist, Ecko decided he would attend the School of Pharmacy at Rutgers University.

College showed me how unique Lakewood was. You show up at Hardenburgh Hall, and the white kids say, "Why are you so black?" And the black kids say, "Why are you so black?" The pharmacy students didn't want to listen to A Tribe Called Quest or R. Kelly. I was average at pharmacy school. I said, I could do this and pursue a career having to do with pharmacy and be quite average and definitely not happy.

At the end of my freshman year, I came up with an idea with my friend Cale Brock, who was a really good singer. Boys II Men was blowing up, and Michael Bivins [a singer who had been a producer on the first Boys II Men album] had created his own imprint on Motown Records. Boys II Men was doing a concert in New Jersey. I made a jacket and put a cassette tape by Cale in the pocket along with a little note for Biv saying that if he wanted more airbrushed stuff to call me. Then I dislocated my shoulder, so my older sister Shari went to the concert and went up to the stage and handed him the jacket. At 3 o'clock in the morning, the phone rang. It was Biv. He asked if we could come to see him before he left the next morning. I called up Cale, we borrowed my mom's car, and we drove down. Cale sang for him, and Biv signed him.

Knowing Biv gave me a lot of access. I was going to a lot of parties. It made my ambition greater. Seeing a young Puffy [Sean Combs] when he was doing A&R at Uptown Records and Q-Tip [of A Tribe Called Quest] and Rosie Perez and Spike Lee -- it made the pharmacy thing seem mundane. Everyone was a businessman. Everyone had a hustle. There had to be a market. It gave me a sense that my instincts were right.

Ecko left Rutgers in 1993, during his third year.

One of the first people I told was my twin sister, Marci. I said, "You're going to leave college, we're going to work together in this business, and it's going to be big." She said, "Why is it going to be big?" I had no business plan. It was just that I was going to a lot of parties.

I began writing a business plan, but it was very naive. It wouldn't make it up the elevator in this building. I remember referencing Ralph Lauren and Polo a lot. I would say, "People are buying Ralph Lauren for lack of something from their own generation." I got the business plan to Spike Lee and Mike Bivins. I thought if you were famous, you had a key and could turn anything on. It's not the case.

My friend Perry, the son of my art teacher Mrs. Landesberg, had a friend Seth from Teaneck, New Jersey, who had been living in Austria, working in real estate. They said he had some cash to invest in a business. I telephoned him. Seth comes to my house in this red Mustang convertible, in denim shorts cut really short. His fingernails were dirty up to his elbows, and he's got a yarmulke on. I thought, What a mess. What's going on here? When we started to talk, I found it somewhat intimidating that someone my age could be so direct in asking about the business and what I wanted to do. I was intimidated and blew him off. Realizing I didn't have any better options, I called him up six months later. He was so nice about it. He came over, and it turned out he did have $5,000 in cash, and he said, "How many T-shirts can you get printed for this?"

Seth Gerszberg is still Ecko's 50-50 partner.

We speak once or twice a day. I left the house at 6:10 this morning, and we touched base on the phone for 10 minutes. I can take a deal to the point where it's conceptually doable, and then he can go in and be more lawyerly about it. He's doing what a CEO should be doing; I'm doing what a chief creative officer should be doing. I probably count on his opinion as the most important. I brought in Marci a year later, when she graduated. She now runs Zoo York [a skateboarding-apparel company that was the first major acquisition by Marc Ecko Enterprises].

The company needed a name and a logo. Ecko's family name was Milecofsky; at home, he was known as Echo, because his mother's obstetrician had told her that, despite her sense that she was bearing twins, she was merely feeling "an echoin the fluids." He wanted to build the company around his nickname, but Echo was trademarked.