Bobby’s debut book This Is Not a T-Shirt is available now, as I’m sure you’ve heard if you follow The Hundreds on any one of our channels. We appreciate each and every one of you that bought a copy of the book and we loved seeing all of you that came out to our LA stop of the book tour on Tuesday night. Bobby’s book tour is in San Francisco tonight at Green Apple Books in the park. Come by at 7:30 PM to participate in a Q+A with Bobby and legendary SF designer Benny Gold, plus if you purchase a copy of This Is Not a T-Shirt at Green Apple, you’ll get a very limited edition t-shirt tonight for free and get your copy of the book signed by Bobby.
But the book tour hasn’t just been stopping at bookstores, as Bobby has been making the rounds at major media outlets across the country to spread the word about his memoir.
This week, Bobby did an interview with GQ writer Tyler Watamanuk about how This Is Not a T-Shirt is just as much a failure story as it is a success story.
Here is an excerpt from “Bobby Hundreds Wrote the Book on Streetwear—Literally”
GQ: You put a lot of very candid material in this book, especially when it comes to the business side of your brand, which isn’t something that designers talk about too often. What made you want to reveal those things about The Hundreds?
Bobby Kim: I never anticipated that our business would take such wild turns. When the first 10 years of your business is just going up and up, and everyone’s telling you, “You’re going to be a $100 million brand. You can be the next Supreme or Ralph Lauren,” you never imagine that it could ever turn wrong. Your ego is just so out of control. I had never experienced true failure. Every time I would mess up, it was easily correctable. There was just so much momentum around the brand. I didn’t appreciate it at that time until the business took a turn for the worse.
When that happened, it was very humbling, and it broke me in many ways. Then it also shaped the businessman I became, and it shaped The Hundreds into the brand we are now. By the end of that journey, I knew now was the time to share this because there’s so much literature out there in the entrepreneurial world, but it’s all aspirational, a lot of inspirational fluff. I wanted to provide relief to the average business story that’s being told right now.
Even in this era of oversharing on social media, talking about one’s failures can still feel pretty taboo.
Failure is so relevant; my failure is my success. People are like, “Oh, you wrote a book, it’s a success story.” And I’ve been saying, “No, it’s a really a failure story, which in my eyes is about success.” To me, it’s the same coin. It’s just two different sides of how you look at it. All those failures were great lessons. They made me work harder. They made me think more creatively.
Bobby also made an appearance on NPR’s Marketplace, speaking with Kai Ryssdal about writing his memoir and the ups and downs of building The Hundreds over more than a decade-and-a-half.
After bringing down the house at Barnes & Noble in The Grove, Bobby appeared on the Barnes & Noble Podcast to talk about “growing up in Southern California, loving punk and skate culture, his turn from law school to the streetwear that he loved.”
Listen here.
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