A couple of years ago, at a pop-up 3-on-3 basketball tournament to celebrate the release of The Hundreds X Bricks & Wood collaboration, Ben Hundreds pulled me aside and introduced me to a young kid he said was going to be next, someone who was blowing up and doing it the right way, someone he was mentoring. “This is Tobey from Crenshaw Skate Club,” Ben said.

Immediately, I noticed that talking to Tobey McIntosh didn’t feel like talking to a high schooler. He was poised, focused, and unafraid to ask questions. This kid was soaking up game from some of streetwear’s biggest power players and he was putting his newfound knowledge to use.

In just a few short years, Tobey has grown his community-focused skateboarding club into a full-fledged brand carried in shops like Union and Supreme and rocked religiously by Bieber. But that’s not who Tobey does it for. Crenshaw Skate Club is for the kids from Tobey’s neighborhood in the Crenshaw District, for the kids around Leimert Park. Tobey’s vision includes them. He wants to grow his brand and achieve success, but only if it means lifting up his community with him.

This fall, Tobey will embark on a new challenge as he begins his collegiate career, right as his brand blows up. Following celebrated collabs with Lacoste and Born X Raised recently, Crenshaw Skate Club is following it up with a The Hundreds collab, a milestone achievement for a kid who grew up a fan of the brand until one fateful sushi trip brought him into the fold.

I caught up with Tobey to talk about People Over Product, learning from mistakes, and how the hell he’s going to balance his mountain of homework with running a burgeoning brand.

DUKE LONDON: Hey Tobey, good to see you again. You just get out of school?
TOBEY MCINTOSH: Yeah, straight from school.

Damn, you’re really doing it. All I wanted to do after school let out was play video games and not work. I definitely wasn’t heading home to get interviewed. So, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
Thank you, man!

We’ve been fans of you at The Hundreds for a long time. When I started here, you were one of the first people Ben told me about, and he said “you have to follow this kid and keep an eye on what he’s building.” We did a smaller interview earlier this year, but I wanted to dive a little deeper now that we’re doing this collab. So, can you tell us about how you met Ben and got on his radar?
A few years back, I was getting sushi one day and I saw this guy wearing the Undefeated Air Maxes. I walked up and said, “Nice shoes, how did you get them?” So, we started talking about shoes. And I used to do this thing where I’d bring 50 stickers with me for the day, and I wouldn’t go home until I gave out all 50 of them. I gave him some stickers and told him a little bit about my brand. I still had no idea who he was. Then, I get a DM from Ben Hundreds telling me to come to the office. I couldn’t believe it. Like he owns The Hundreds. I was shocked. Then, I visited the office and was amazed. The warehouse was like two football fields, and for someone who had just started a brand in his bedroom, it was crazy to see how far it could go. The Hundreds was one of the first brands I loved so that was amazing to see.

When did you start Crenshaw Skate Club and what was the original idea behind it?
I started my brand in June of 2017, or at least that’s when the first shirts I made came out. Being from Crenshaw, my friends and I were always skating around Crenshaw. When I looked at skate magazines and videos, I never saw anyone that looked like me or my friends. I wanted to create something in the skate industry that could represent us. Another reason I wanted to start it was to help keep my friends from doing things that weren’t as positive and getting in trouble. I wanted them to do something positive with their time and avoid that lifestyle, so I started Crenshaw Skate Club. It gave them a reason to skate instead of doing whatever they were doing in the streets.

At first, was it just about you guys getting together and skating, or did you immediately want to attach product to the brand?
The first shirts I made weren’t even for sale, I just gave them away to the homies. And we just wore them when we were skating, it wasn’t really like a brand. It was just the uniform for the homies. They just said “CSC” on the front and “Crenshaw Skate Club” on the back, nothing crazy. A skate shop told me they were dope and asked if they could start carrying them, so I started selling them. I went and got more shirts made, and I had no idea about wholesale or anything like that so I just made up a number in my head. I made the Instagram and people started hitting me up about buying the shirts. That was weird for me. I had no website, just selling shirts through Instagram DMs and Paypal. Then it became crenshawskateclub.bigcartel.com, you know how it starts. Just taking pictures of my friends in the shirts and posting them. Super lowkey.

What was that first shop to stock the shirts?
Lotties Skateshop.

How did it feel seeing your brand in a store?
It was super cool, especially when they posted it. “Crenshaw Skate Club now available at Lotties Skateshop.” For me, the big thing was seeing people leave comments that it was dope. That made me feel good, I was like, “Damn I just started and people actually like it.” One of the best feelings in the world.

That was a very early instance of your brand being embraced by the community. And then, over the last year or two, Crenshaw Skate Club has been embraced by an increasingly larger community, both in skate and streetwear. From The Hundreds and people like Anwar to older legacy brands like Lacoste, what does it mean to you to have your brand co-signed by those who came before you?
It means a lot to me because even before I had a brand, I was into streetwear and I was buying lots of products from these companies that I’m working with now. I remember buying a Carrots hat in 2016 at ComplexCon. It’s crazy to me that I did a collab with Anwar just four or five years later. Full circle moment. And I would study these people and watch all of their interviews, and now they’re my peers, in a sense. It’s a surreal feeling.

And I’m assuming you get to learn a lot more from these people as they become personal mentors on your journey. What are some of your biggest takeaways so far from working with the people you looked up to as a kid?
Since I started my brand, people like Zac from FTP, Anwar, Kacey Lynch, and Sean Wotherspoon have been so helpful to me coming up. Whenever I need advice on anything, it’s cool to know I can call them and ask. They’ve already been through it before and they can give me insight. For example, when I first set up my website and wanted to start shipping, Zac taught me about ShipStation and how to process more orders. Just being around these people and watching how they work has been extremely valuable to me.

You’re about to head off to Stanford for your freshman year. How are you feeling?
Stanford has been my dream school ever since I was a kid, so it’s crazy. When I was like five, I would tell people, “I’m going to Stanford.” I had no idea what that meant or what I needed to do but I always knew that was where I wanted to be.

What did you have to do? How challenging was it to accomplish your dream?
It was a lot of hard work in school, taking the hardest classes, and going above and beyond. I had to get above a 4.0 GPA. I had a 4.8 my junior year. It’s been hard to maintain the past couple of years as the brand has done well, so I was just trying to balance doing great academically and working on growing the brand. Lots of hard work, lot of 3 AM nights. I’m the kind of person who is going to do whatever I have to when I really want something. So, when I got that letter, it validated all of my hard work over the last four years. I can’t even explain how I felt when I read “Congratulations.”

I just got chills. To accomplish something you dreamed of all your life is incredible. What parts of your skillset that helped you achieve success academically also translate to building your brand? And vice versa, what have you learned in business that you’ve been able to apply to school?
One thing I learned in school is you have to fail. I took Engineering classes and you have to make multiple prototypes if you want to make something. And when you fail, you take what you learned and build on that for the next prototype. That really translated into my business because when I would make designs and do drops that didn’t sell well, I took into account what didn’t work and learned from it. You can’t give up. You put that energy into the next one.

Do you know what you want to major in yet?
I’ll be majoring in Economics at Stanford.

I took a bunch of entrepreneurship and business classes in high school, and we’d have to write business plans for imaginary startups. Did you get to use Crenshaw Skate Club for any school projects or case studies?
One time, we had to do theoretical business plans and my teacher didn’t know I had a brand. So, I basically had the assignment done already, so I just wrote about Crenshaw Skate Club and detailed what I had been doing. He said, “This is a really great idea, you should do this.” Then, I told him it already exists and gave him my website, so that was cool.

You basically got free advertising when you had to present your project to the class.
Free publicity, easy A. It worked out.

Community is a huge cornerstone for your brand, as it is for The Hundreds. There’s been a huge renaissance in the Crenshaw District and Leimert Park the past couple of years, with all of these independent businesses popping off. From Crenshaw Skate Club and Harun Coffee to Neighbors Skateshop, everyone is coming together to support each other and lift each other’s businesses up together. What has that been like from the inside, and how are you helping one another grow?
We’re all in it together, and I remember when I would talk to Tré two years ago about this. He would say, “They’re not ready, we’re about to take over.” We would always talk about how it would be when people start to recognize what we were doing. To see it actually happening now is crazy. It’s real. None of us are in competition with each other, it’s all support. We post for each other, show up at events, we all come together as a collective. We all come from the same place so we all rise up.

You’ve done great at balancing schoolwork and your business so far, but how will you do it at college when school gets way more difficult and time-consuming?
That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now. [Laughs] I had to learn that being the boss doesn’t mean doing every task myself. I need to learn how to delegate and build the best team around me. I was doing every single thing for the brand and I realized that’s not the best way to grow, especially when I go away to school.

What’s that process been like, finding people you trust with your baby?
That’s the hardest part. I’ve been doing the delegating part early while I’m still home so I can see how it goes before I leave. I’m hoping to have that trust built up by the time I go to school. But I know it’ll be in good hands and that my team will do great work. I’m still going to be checking in and know everything that’s going on. But I look at a brand like The Hundreds, and I know Ben and Bobby aren’t doing everything. They trust their team to handle their baby with care.

It’s all out of love and respect for what they’ve built. Our entire team knows the framework and the importance of what they’ve laid out for us, and we just try to keep it going and growing. I can’t wait to see how you scale and build the Crenshaw Skate Club team. As your brand evolves, what more do you want to accomplish, both on a product level and in the community?
As far as the brand goes, I want to expand from T-shirts and make way more products. Boards, cut-and-sew pieces, accessories, and things like that. I’m working on that now, and it’s been cool because I’m learning a lot by working with factories and suppliers around the world. As far as what I want to do in my community, I want to do skate events for the kids and give out boards and shoes and all that. Unfortunately, it got tricky with Covid but hopefully, we can do more soon. I want to be there for these kids as a mentor. It can be very helpful for kids to see someone near their age doing something positive. That’s one of the main reasons I work so hard, I want that 13-year-old kid to see me and know he can do it, too. I don’t want to be the only kid doing this. I want kids from my neighborhood to see me and know it’s possible. I want to take everyone with me.