For a short time, we were "Ecko Unlimited by Mark Echo." That made sense to me but not to anyone else. In 1996, I changed my name legally to Ecko. [It is also the surname of his wife, Allison, who was his college sweetheart, and their three children.]
While I was in pursuit of a logo, I went to visit my folks. My dad had a wooden rhino in his "blue room," the garage that he converted into a den and bar, with blue shag carpet and wood paneling floor to ceiling. It occurred to me that that is such a great animal. I began thinking of Ralph Lauren [with its polo pony logo] and Lacoste [with its crocodile]. I decided I would use the rhino. When I told my buyers, they had such contempt for that idea. Buyers thought they knew what my brand was. It's why you always have to start with your end audience. And you can't design by committee, even when you're sales driven. They said, "We don't want Timberland; we don't want rugged; we just want graffiti." But I think good design makes you scratch your head. We put out 25 T-shirts. One was a rhino. That one sold out. Our street campaign then went on to use the rhino.
I'm in the midst of trying to find another logo for another division. 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.
In 1997, Ecko Enterprises was on the brink of collapse, staggering beneath $6.5 million in debt with sales of $16 million. 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 called Alan Finkelman, whose family owns Scope Imports [a clothing wholesaler] in Houston. 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 was intrigued by what we really are, which is a marketing company. 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." We had to cover the whole nut, the debt plus a buck. 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? We couldn't afford to go to the 1997 MAGIC show [for the menswear industry] in Las Vegas, but we had already paid for the booth. So we printed 25,000 bumper stickers, "Where's Ecko?" and sent out a street team with them. 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. They cost on the cheap $150,000, and you can spend more than a million on 15 minutes. 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 2006, Ecko rented a 747 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." Then he posted it on YouTube. 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. It was post-9/11. Talk about a loaded object.
It cost $1 million to make, but it had a hard-news element we didn't expect. It became a part of the culture of the brand. I can't outdo Nike; I can't outfashion Ralph; I can't outsex Calvin. I'd much rather have a brand point of view that may make you scratch your head but is brand defining.
The next year, Ecko spent $752,467 to buy at auction the ball that Barry Bonds hit for his record-breaking 756th home run. 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 was prepared to pay whatever it cost. 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. And we needed to put a face on the mistakes, with Bonds and Mark McGwire and José Canseco. 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.T. Barnum. You had that moment to bid on it. How could you not engage?
