Considering today is The Hundreds’ 6th birthday, I wanted to show you a couple things. Like our first linesheet / catalog / brochure / whatever it is. This was our first season, Fall 2003. We didn’t really know what we were doing, so we printed these up to showcase our line of 5 t-shirts. 1-color prints, accompanied by The Hundreds’ ethos and purpose. You can see early JAGS on the cover there, and our umbrella company’s logo, Mixed Media Productions.
Fred Segal Street, Brooklyn Projects, and Grey One were the first ones to bite. We fast realized that buyers couldn’t have cared less about the brochure though, so that was the first and last time we ever poured $ into one of those.
Check this out. Our first season of t-shirts were all packaged in these vinyl bags. This was back before we had our own silkscreen print shop, so to stamp the logo and website, we ran the bootleg Speedball homemade kit. That’s maybe the first The Hundreds logo.. the Kirby dots played a sizable role with The Hundreds’ branding for the first couple years.
Most importantly, the website. Now this was perhaps that one thing that really set us apart from the influx of t-shirt brands at the time. That was one of those questions we were confronted with repeatedly from the get-go. “What makes you guys different from all these other t-shirt lines out here?”
Well, we never considered ourselves merely a t-shirt line for starters. As trite as it sounds today, we were labeling ourselves as a lifestyle project, which gave us the leeway to one day get our hands into building stores, making denim, shoes, magazines, music… And with every t-shirt you bought from us, you were not only participating and contributing to that lifestyle, but also buying a story, that was told through our website. Which goes back to why we were pushing our site so hard.. to really understand the product, you had to be engaged in our online project, and be versed in the background and culture as to where that t-shirt came from.
I know I know, seems pretty simple by 2009 standards, but 6 years ago, it was a pretty strange idea. Fortunately, an idea that just so happened to work.
by bobbyhundreds