"It's Going to Be Big"

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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?

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.

In 2001, Marc Ecko Enterprises acquired Zoo York. Ecko was grossing about $80 million at the time; Zoo York, from $2 million to $4 million.

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 2004, 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).

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