Before he was Marc Ecko — the millionaire fashion designer who bought Barry Bonds’ record home run ball and popped an asterisk on it — he was Marc Milecofsky, a chubby kid from suburban Lakewood, N.J., with a love for hip hop and a talent for art. His new book “UNLABEL” brings you from his humble beginnings airbrushing T-shirts and girls’ fingernails to the height of his fame and through the ups and downs between. In this excerpt, he wins over his parents to get his first business on track.
When I was 12, during a Dig Dug binge at the 7-Eleven, I stumbled on the latest issue of Black Beat magazine. It had L.L. Cool J on the cover. But that was not what stopped me dead in my tracks. It was what he was wearing: a sweatshirt painted with an airbrushed photo of, well, L.L. Cool J as a B-boy version of himself. And the wildest part was that the article wasn’t about L.L. but about the artists who made the shirt: some guys called the Shirt Kings from Queens. My mind was blown.
It would serve as Exhibit A.
I practiced my spiel, looked in the mirror, honing my powers of persuasion. “This will be a good experience for me. This will pay for itself.” And that night at the family dinner table, before I took a bite of my dry-ass turkey, I just blurted it out: “Can I get an airbrush and air compressor?”
My mom half squinted at me. “A what?”
“It’ll pay for itself, because I’ll use it to paint T-shirts, and I’ll sell ’em for a profit.”
“How much does it cost?”
“I can make money.”
“How much?” my dad asked firmly.
RELATED: BUYER PUTS BONDS BALL'S FATE TO FANS
I couldn’t meet his eyes. “All in? Two hundred fifty max.”
“You know that would blow all your bar mitzvah money,” he said.
I knew that money was tight. My dad had quit his steady gig as a pharmacist to get a real estate license. My mom was also in real estate. Sales were up and down, and by that I mean down.
A couple of days later, my dad said to me, “That airbrush? How can your mother and I know you’re serious about this? Remember that saxophone?”
That stung. Yeah, I remembered it, and how much I dreaded playing, and how I ended up blowing it off.
“If you really want that airbrush, and if you’re serious about earning some money,” my dad said, “then prove it to me.”
The next day, armed with Exhibit A in the case to prove it, I placed the copy of Black Beat on the kitchen table. “Check out that sweatshirt,” I said, index finger squarely on L.L. Cool J. I proceeded to explain to him that those very airbrushed sweatshirts, like the one in the photo, were “desirable.”
“This is hip hop. I love hip hop. This is what we wear in hip hop. You can’t get this in Lakewood. After all, Shirt Kings are out at Kings Plaza in Jamaica, Queens. No one makes this in Lakewood. I could fill that gap. I can.”
This was a sort of verbal business case. It was crude, but it had one thing going for it: a believable thesis.
RELATED: MARC ECKO OFFERS 20% DISCOUNT FOR LIFE FOR SHOPPERS WHO GET LOGO TATTOO
In the class election, I had leveraged my artwork to win. My art had sexy legs in an otherwise mundane world. So I could then reason that if the kids liked my art enough to vote for me, they’d like my art enough to buy it on T-shirts. Or at least some of them would, right?
My parents were finally persuaded by my logic and an unlikely ally, my uncle Carl Asch. He was a blue-collar guy, a hands-on guy, crusty. He was a diesel engine mechanic professionally and the go-to fix-it guy for the family and extended family. Uncle Carl believed in learning by doing, and he thought that I’d learn more with this airbrush, sink or swim, than I would in any classroom that claimed it as a curriculum.
The next week, my parents cashed out my bar mitzvah money savings account and bought a Paasche VL-3W airbrush kit and the Sears Craftsman air compressor.
And in the next year, guess how many shirts I sold?
Zero.
I had no intention of going to market half-cocked. I recognized that I was still a toy.
First I needed to get good.
I set up shop in my parents’ garage. It wasn’t even a garage, really. And I had the use of only half of it. We lived in a brown bilevel on a cement slab. With Uncle Carl’s help, my dad had converted half the garage into a den.
It was called the “Blue Room,” and had a blue, black and white-speckled shag carpet and embossed, faux-wood, white-paneled walls. I’m 99% sure that I was conceived in the Blue Room. It had so much swag.
RELATED: THEY DID IT: THREE MEN GET MARC ECKO TATTOOS FOR CRUMMY 20% LIFETIME DISCOUNT
The Blue Room had a bar that Uncle Carl made, and the bar had this marble-patterned mirror behind it. Oddly, the bar itself featured a random nautical sailing theme. It was also home to my dad’s comic book collection, the Kodak Library of Creative Photography, the collection of Playboy mixed drink recipe books, and a collection of rhinos carved out of driftwood.
In 1980, the holiday season after “The Empire Strikes Back” came out, Darren got a vinyl Tauntaun action figure as a present. I didn’t. So I’d plopped my Han Solo on the back of one of the rhinos and bowled over Darren’s Tauntaun and Luke Hoth. Corny but true.
Uncle Carl helped me transform the nonblue room half of the garage into my studio-office-factory-temple. From scratch he built an industrial, oversized easel on which I would tack up any old fabric, T-shirts, and old sheets and pillowcases I could get my hands on and practice.
At first, it was very basic stuff. Mostly I painted my graf name, Echo, again and again with different hand styles and bubble letters. Soon the space started to look like the scene from all psychopath movies, the walls plastered with images.
I was laser-focused, though, and this was a new feeling. (I don’t know that anyone is laser-focused in life until he or she has a stake in the fate of the outcome.) This wasn’t like the quickly dropped interest in the saxophone. I wanted to get good, and I needed to pay my parents back; pride was on the line. I wasn’t mindful of creating an authentic brand at this point. I was more focused on whether or not this could be a vehicle to help me get to second base with the opposite sex. But painting quickly became a full-time job outside of school. I came home and hunkered in the garage for seven- to nine-hour stretches, no matter how hot or cold it was.
I probably spent a thousand hours in that garage before I sold a single T-shirt. (Maybe there’s something to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule. For the rest of my career, the time invested in this garage gave me a massive advantage.) I had a hunch that beach scenes would be popular on T-shirts, and there’s a certain technique that you use to airbrush a palm tree. To create a palm leaf, you start far from the surface, and then you bring the airbrush closer and closer so that the line diffuses from a fat, soft line to a tight, sharp pencil point. I would sit there like a Rain Man doing the same thing over and over, painting palm leaf after palm leaf.
My creative inspirations all oozed together in one primordial stew: Dondi, early hip hop like U.T.F.O. and Slick Rick and Airbrush Action Magazine, which had some amazing stuff from Mark Fredrickson and erotic illustrations by the likes of Hajime Sorayama and Olivia De Berardinis. And by “amazing stuff,” I mean what damn near qualified as porn.
By the time eighth grade rolled around, I was like a battle-hardened Daniel-san, waxing on, waxing off. I was getting good. Not yet a master, but I knew I had chops. And I knew I had tapped into a style that people wanted.
But would it sell?
No comments:
Post a Comment