ECKO UNLTD and COMPLEX: Marc Ecko

Growing up in the ‘80s in New Jersey, Marc Ecko loved hip hop, graffiti art, and painting t-shirts for friends. His passion soon bloomed into a full-on business: ECKO UNLTD, a streetwear brand known for its iconic rhino logo. By the 1990’s, the brand had become a cultural force, but not without its share of bad deals, daunting debt, and a close brush with bankruptcy. Eager to keep innovating, Marc launched COMPLEX, a media company hyper-focused on “convergence” culture: hip hop, fashion, sports and pop culture. Within a decade, COMPLEX had weathered the financial crisis, and emerged profitable. After being bought–and sold–by Buzzfeed, it was purchased by a video shopping company for over $100 million, and ECKO UNLTD just celebrated its 30th anniversary. This episode was researched and produced by Katherine Sypher with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon and Kwesi Lee. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back

• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

  new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort Round Trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge, with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value. Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits

• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details.

• 5:11Guy Raz?

  Hey, really quick before we start the show, we have an announcement about a really exciting new thing we're launching: a newsletter. And like our show, the newsletter is designed to be interesting, informative, inspiring, and most importantly, fun. It's 100% free, and to sign up, just visit guyraz.com. That's G-U-Y-R-A-Z dot com.

• 5:37Guy Raz?

  Hey, just a quick heads up. There are a couple of bad words in this episode. Nothing that you haven't heard before, but just be mindful if you're listening to the show around kids, just so you know. And I hope you enjoy it.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  When I wrote a business plan, I wanted to be a lifestyle brand. And I write up this story of educating change to heal and overcome.

• 6:08Guy Raz?

  Educating change to heal and overcome, that's what Echo stood for.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:12Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's very earnest, right?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Well, I am painfully earnest. And there will be people listening to this totally vomiting on the earnestness. But fuck them, because that's real. That's what it was.

• 6:32Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:42Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Mark Echo's love of hip hop and graffiti gave him an iconic edge as a streetwear designer and helped turn his company Echo Unlimited into a major force in fashion.

• 7:01Guy Raz?

  In the United States alone, there are 26,000 fashion labels. Incredible. Most of us only know a handful of them, and usually just the big ones. So it's not a stretch to say that standing out as a fashion brand is hard, really hard. And for the most part, just a teeny fraction of these brands will last more than a decade. The unicorns are labels like Levi's and L.L. Bean. They've been around for more than 100 years. But even having an impact for a few years is a significant feat. And back in the 90s and early 2000s, Echo Unlimited managed to do just that.

• 7:45Guy Raz?

  The brand was started by a guy named Mark Echo, along with his partner Seth and his sister Marcy. At the time, and this is the early 1990s, streetwear was just starting to get traction in the US. Brands like Stussy, FUBU, and Supreme were even showing up in fashion magazines. Eventually, streetwear would kind of take over fashion. Even luxury brands like Prada and Gucci and Balenciaga are heavily influenced by streetwear designs. As for Mark Echo, he grew up in the 1980s obsessed with the rise of hip hop and also graffiti culture. By the time he was in college, he was airbrushing designs and fastening rhinestones

• 8:28Guy Raz?

  to denim jackets and then selling those jackets for hundreds of dollars. Eventually, he got his jackets into the hands of rappers and musicians, which led Mark to start the brand. Echo Unlimited and its iconic rhino logo started popping up everywhere, eventually hitting over $100 million in sales. Now, by the end of the early 2000s, the brand was in decline, but Mark was really smart about looking for opportunities that could capitalize on youth culture. And the most influential brand he eventually built was Complex, a media company that focused on things that mattered to a growing subset

• 9:09Guy Raz?

  of young consumers: sneakers, hip hop, fashion, sports, and pop culture. Mark Echo was actually born Mark Milikowski. He grew up in New Jersey in a town called Lakewood, along with his twin sister Marcy, who would eventually become his business partner. And even though Lakewood was a sleepy town near the Jersey Shore, Mark says it was a really interesting place to grow up.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  What I recall Lakewood for was just its intense diversity. Growing up there, you're a product of your environment. So you're in it. It wasn't like that I was conscientious of it. It just was. I went to public school. My neighbors, people that lived next door to me, across the street from me, was a very mixed race, very mixed multicultural experience.

• 10:01Guy Raz?

  So tell me about how you fell in love with hip hop. What do you remember listening to or hearing or it resonating with you?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  I remember being in probably fifth grade art class at Princeton Avenue School. And there was this awareness of this emerging cultural trend. I remember some kids that when the buses would be pulling up, there was like a group of kids that would be doing literally like backflips and breakdancing, you know, spinning on their back, like in the middle of the lunchroom. And I just was like, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen. But I also was seeing there was a big BMX culture that was happening at that time. Kids started to wear all of those kind of like neon acidic colored clothing that was

• 10:49Speaker 01

  starting to come up through skate and skate culture, dyno brand, GT vans, airwalk. So suddenly, I think that it's about the age for most kids growing up, that sort of pre-middle school, let's say from fifth to eighth grade where they start to badge, like a little chick like born new to the world. They see these signals of like who their cultural mother is or father, right? And it's a part of, I think, how we're hardwired to sort of culturally fit in. So I was drawn to that. And then instead of just drawing Spider-Man, you know, I would draw what we saw on album covers.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Or when I'd go into Queens and see graffiti on the subway cars, I knew that there was a movie called Wild Style because people were talking about it. And there was Beat Street and there were the Fat Boys. So you were just reacting to what was around you.

• 11:47Guy Raz?

  One, I guess one of the things that you kind of got into was learning graffiti art. I don't think you were actually going out and vandalizing buildings, or maybe you were. But I think you got into like using airbrush, airbrush tools and like kind of painting graffiti style. But you were trying to like hone your skill as a, as a graffiti artist, I guess.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  I think I looked at, I looked at it like, you know, there was the four elements, right? MCing, you know, DJing, breakdancing and graffiti. I still think that that's a fundamental part of the organizing system of hip hop. And here I was, a very artistic kid. You know, my dad got me Subway Art, which I think is like one of the bibles of.

• 12:32Guy Raz?

  This is a book, this is like a coffee table book.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:35Guy Raz?

  Basically graffiti art. I remember that book, yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Very important book, and I think it should, you know, everybody should own it to appreciate because it was a very, very catalytic culturally. So it was either tracing from that or tracing from a comic book. And then it was in the Black Beat magazines where I would see the airbrushing. And that started to come a little bit later, okay? So that fifth, sixth grade, that wasn't quite a thing yet. And come middle school, a guy who's one of my heroes and a friend now, I'm happy to say in life, is a guy named Fade, P-H-A-D-E, King Fade, from the Shirt Kings. And in the Jamaica, Queens Plaza Mall, he had a little stall there that he was airbrushing.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  But he was so Jason, obviously, to all those rappers coming up in Queens and on the boroughs. You'd see those images and it was like, wow, I think I found, that was the medium. Because it was like sort of an existential way to get to graffiti, through the sort of first cousin of graffiti, which is airbrushing.

• 13:36Guy Raz?

  You started to, I mean, make your own shirts, right? Inspired by some of these shirts that you saw.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:43Guy Raz?

  And I guess by the time you get to high school, you started to, people start asking you if you could make them for them. And that was like a big turn into a business.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yes. To the credit of my uncle, who was the product of vocational education. He was like a diesel engine, you know, mechanic. He encouraged my parents that, because my passion was so, you know, sort of manifest, to give this kid a shot. Went to the Sears outlet, bought the air compressor for whatever, 80 bucks, and started acquiring all the materials. Picked up my first copy of Airbrush Magazine, which serendipitously talk about like how the universe and how God kind of puts things in your path. But Airbrush Magazine was the only trade magazine for airbrushing.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  And where is it published? Lakewood, New Jersey.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  It's like, what are the odds of that? You know? So I said, Ma, can we go meet the publisher? So she's like, oh, I gotta take you to go. We'll go to the art supply store. We'll, we'll pick up some paint and we'll drive by the publisher location. Think it's going to be a building. We pull up, it's a residential house. And I literally go knock on the door. I asked for the publisher and there was a garage and he's in there unboxing new magazines just on racks, inventory in the magazines. So I was like, can I work for you? Can I sweep here? You know?

• 15:16Guy Raz?

  And?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  I did.

• 15:17Guy Raz?

  You did?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And he gave me free issues.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  Wow. And you start making T-shirts for people in high school and selling them. And were you making pretty good cash?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, better than bar mitzvah money.

• 15:31Guy Raz?

  You were selling T-shirts for like, what? 50 bucks or something or?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Well, it probably started at like, I mean, it was damn near first you do like, you just do some gratis and then you start selling them at 10, 15, or I would do bulk.

• 15:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  And then it's 50 and then people would ask for more elaborate things. And, you know, come junior year, I was getting really good at it. So this was from eighth grade through the time I started the business in 93, I was every year building that business and to the point where I was making thousands of dollars a week.

• 16:07Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  When I was really, when I would allocate time.

• 16:10Guy Raz?

  And, and these were like custom T-shirts like?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Custom T-shirts, custom denim jackets.

• 16:15Guy Raz?

  People's names or people like?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Very elaborate, very, very elaborate. Like, I remember someone brought me a cover of like Thanos. This one of this very elaborate cover.

• 16:29Guy Raz?

  This is a comic book, yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  A comic book, like an Avengers comic book.

• 16:32Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And it's like Thanos with the glove. You know, this is before we think of like MCU. And I think that's when I was like, oh shit, like I'm good at this. I think I charged like $500 for that jacket.

• 16:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  It was very elaborate, though. It took. At least six, six days. And then I would hand paint it and then I would hand embellish it. I'd go to the Michael's or Joann's Arts and Crafts and I'd even go into Manhattan occasionally. I'd go to the, in the garment district, go to the areas where they sell rhinestones. I'd buy high-quality rhinestones. I'd hand laminate them on, sew them on, whatever, and just create these really elaborate, custom bespoke things.

• 17:16Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  And then my, my father was into photography. And so I was, the, the great blessing and gift he gave me was the, in some of the most valuable time in my life, was the time in the, the six by eight-foot closet that had been converted to a laundry room and a darkroom, watching him process film, printing photos, and being exposed to ideas like composition and burning and masking and, you know, all of these sort of ideas that I ended up eventually seeing when I got into Photoshop, you know, years later.

• 17:58Guy Raz?

  He had a hobby, a side hobby.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  He did?

• 18:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I know that your dad studied to be a pharmacist and then eventually became a real estate agent, and I think your mom was also a real estate agent.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Same, that's right.

• 18:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You went to college, you went to Rutgers, and you decided to study pharmacy, to become a pharmacist. Was that, was that, like, were your parents encouraging you to do that? Like, hey, this is a steady job and?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  My dad never once suggested it. In fact, the opposite. He hated it. All he did was talk shit about standing on his feet and, and he was so happy to get out of pharmacy. But if we rewind to that period, you could graduate from pharmacy school and at that period, at that time in history, if you were, if you worked for Big Pharma, let's say, and if I, and I had a sense of marketing, I wanted to be maybe on the marketing side of Big Pharma, you could make, like, at that time and graduating in 1990, sixty-five to eighty-five thousand dollars, like, right out of school, right out of school.

• 19:00Guy Raz?

  Big money.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  That's big money.

• 19:01Guy Raz?

  Huge money. I mean, I graduated in 97. My first job was thirty thousand bucks a year. I was like, wow, this is insane.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Right. Right. So. I only applied to one school, Rutgers College of Pharmacy. I applied early, got accepted and didn't look back. Only applied to one school.

• 19:19Guy Raz?

  So you get there and you're studying to be, to be a pharmacist, but you keep this kind of side hustle going.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  It's my whole identity. Yeah. And that's when suddenly I started to realize and I could self-articulate that something unusual happened for me in Lakewood. Because suddenly here I was in a new environment. And suddenly I was engaging in a social milieu with kids that weren't all from Lakewood. In fact, Lakewood was the anomaly. And suddenly it was like the white kids were like, why are you trying to be black? Uh, and then the black kids are like, why are you trying to be black? You know, uh, it was not the same vibe that I got at, uh, in Lakewood.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And my identity was wrapped up in building Echo Airbrushing, E C H O, airbrushing at that time. And I would do parties. I did a party called the Hip Hop Bazaar. Called up Ralph McDaniel's, you know, Video Music Box, try to get them to come and like, record live from the event.

• 20:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that was a, that was a TV show in New York, right?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It was like a public access hip hop TV show. That's like, okay, now you're starting to build the media infrastructure around this phenomenon. Okay. Now BT is emerging. Now there's Yo MTV Raps, uh, now come, come 92, 93, right? So that's, that was my thing. And, and I was doing gallery exhibitions.

• 20:49Guy Raz?

  Of, of your shirts?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Of my shirts and my art. I also painted on like, you know, murals and stuff.

• 20:55Guy Raz?

  Tell me, cause you were already calling it, it was called Echo.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Airbrushing.

• 20:59Guy Raz?

  And it was E C H O, like Echo, like an echo.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:03Guy Raz?

  What, where did that name come from?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's the backstory to the twindom, right? Uh, they being the fraternal twin. My mother had no idea. She was carrying twins. She went to the O B G Y N months before we were due and was complaining of, uh, this sort of kicking both the bottom of her abdomen and then like under her breast. And she didn't understand. She's like, is my baby doing a split? Is he punching? No, no, no, no, no, it's just an echo in the fluid. You're fine. And she was like, but I'm so big, I'm retaining so much fluid. My mother was massive.

• 21:35Guy Raz?

  They did not know there were twins in there. They just said, oh, there's an echo in the, in the fluid.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  In the fluid. The doctor did not know until I was born. They delivered Marcy and they said, there's another one. And my dad almost fainted.

• 21:50Guy Raz?

  That's wild. So it came from there, like that word echo that was just part of family lore?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. And my mom was a nickname. It was a nickname. It was like me. And so here you are, rewind back to those fifth, sixth grade years. I'm reading subway art. People named Don D, right? Seen, T Kid, Is the Wiz.

• 22:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  My favorite rapper, KRS-One, knowledge reigns supreme over nearly everyone. BDP, I'm like, Echo, educating change to heal and overcome.

• 22:29Guy Raz?

  Educating change to heal and overcome, Echo. I love that.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  And I was doing really well. So when I did the, the thing at Rutgers and I did my own solo exhibition. And then I did, I, I went on a, like a binge promoting the, the hip hop bazaar. And I just started hitting everyone, like Spike Lee is coming to the school to promote Malcolm X. He's still raising money for the Malcolm X film and he's coming up short and he's going around to colleges, doing, you know, grassroots marketing.

• 22:57Guy Raz?

  He went to Rutgers and to talk about it?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Rutgers to talk about it. I would like hit him with a swag.

• 23:03Guy Raz?

  You, oh, you just go, you go right up to him and just hand him stuff?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I did that to rest in peace, Chris Lighty, to try to get to, you know, Q-Tip and Tribe. I did it for Chuck D. I did it for KRS-One.

• 23:17Guy Raz?

  You were hoping to do what? Just to, to connect with them for what purpose?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  I was looking for like, I was so delusional. I was looking for an investor. It's a little bit of this kind of trust the universe approach to things and a little bit of this sort of my reality that the most effective means of marketing are these sort of nodes of trust, you know, between people. And I couldn't say that then, but I understand that now, that establishing that distributed network of heat and trust and understanding of what you do is the most powerful fundamental thing you need to do in building a network of communication.

• 24:01Guy Raz?

  And none of these guys were interested in investing in giving you cash?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  They just didn't know what to do with me.

• 24:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  And they themselves were trying to figure out how to raise money for their own thing.

• 24:10Guy Raz?

  And by the way, how much cash did you think you needed to raise?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  I had no idea.

• 24:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah, but you knew that you couldn't do what you were doing as a one man shop. You had to find a way, because I'm assuming you would go to New York, you would buy a bunch of just plain t-shirts, plain jeans jackets, right? Is that right?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I did. My business was the client brought me the blank, so I had no hard costs. Like, all my costs were material and labor.

• 24:34Guy Raz?

  Oh, the client would say, I want you to take this jacket.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  They would buy an Armani jacket, or a Levi's jacket, or be some Champion sweatshirt. And when they would ask me, you know, what, I said, no, no, you bring the blank. If you don't know what to get, order this one.

• 24:50Guy Raz?

  And on the strength of that alone, you were pulling in two, three thousand bucks a week?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're purely paying me for the art. It was for the application of the art.

• 25:00Guy Raz?

  Wow. So I guess somewhere around this point, you changed the name of your business from Echo Airbrushing to Echo Unlimited, which is still a version of what the name is today. And so can you tell me, like, in your mind at that time, this is, I guess, around 1992, what did you think this business could be?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  So we knew that there was a visual aesthetic identity emerging within the culture of this sort of tribal communication amongst each other, how we ID with one another. We start seeing this, this brand getting a lot of attention called Stussy. There's this brand getting a lot of attention called Cross Colors. This brand getting a lot of attention called Tommy Hilfiger. We started to see these sort of people daring, kind of stepping out to build their version of consumer product businesses. So here I am doing one at a time. And so I'm like, well, what if I could screen print these things, you know, instead of doing them one at a time?

• 26:04Guy Raz?

  Because you were hand making each one?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was impossible to scale, you know, it was impossible to scale that.

• 26:10Guy Raz?

  Right, right. And you still needed to, I mean, you felt like, I guess you felt like you needed to find somebody who had the, you know, the know-how, right? And most importantly, the cash to help you turn this into a real business. So tell me about how you met your partner Seth Gersberg. I think, I think you met him in like, like 1992?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yes, 92, yeah. I meet him first like a year before. Pulls up to my house, I'm painting, I'm doing one of these like really, you know, crazy pieces. I'm looking at this guy, he pulls up in a shiny candy apple red Mustang, right? With chrome wheels. I'm like, what the hell is some of my aides driving around with this car like for an old man? Number one, I appreciate that car today. But at that time, I was like, you know, who is this dude? He's wearing dirty ass denim shorts, dusty Timberland boots, like with dirt going, grime up his legs. He's coming from a landscaping gig because he's got a

• 27:13Speaker 01

  landscaping company. And so he starts telling me what he does. He's like, I have a landscaping company, but I also do, I buy and sell architectural artifacts. I just got back from Vienna.

• 27:23Guy Raz?

  Wait, sorry, like, are you talking about like antiques? Like, like ancient antiques?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, no, not ancient. I'm saying he would go to parts of the world where they were doing redevelopment or new construction sites. And he was in the pawn business, basically. And but, but expensive architectural things like stone columns, marble statues, giant slabs of limestone urns, nothing that were like-

• 27:53Guy Raz?

  Not like from ancient Rome or Greece, but just-

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Nothing, no, no, no. But like, you know, at that time through Europe and there were some countries that were so under development and he just hustled. He paid a kid to go to school for him, to take classes under him as an alias. He wasn't even showing up to school and he'd be flying around the country, going to where demolition sites, buying things that were being demolished, reselling them.

• 28:19Guy Raz?

  Okay. And he was, and he said to you, yeah, let's go into business. I'll give you money.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  He's like, this is good. If you want to do something, let me know.

• 28:25Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Let me know. What do you need? What do you need? What's your ask? I didn't have an ask.

• 28:28Guy Raz?

  But you did not, I think, initially feel like this was, this is the right fit.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  It all sounded like a lie to me and I didn't believe it.

• 28:35Guy Raz?

  But you're like in your early twenties and you need the cash.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I was probably nine, I think I was 19 when I met him and I blew him off.

• 28:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  He spooked me. He spooked me. And it was, it's what intimidated me was how good he was. You know, that he was, was very sophisticated, understanding of business at a very young age, clearly had-

• 29:01Guy Raz?

  Confident.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Confident, one year older, but felt like 15 years older. Culturally, we were kind of disconnected. I was like very much Mr. Hip Hop and this guy comes, you know, pulling up, listening to like Bruce Springsteen. I'm like, who is this guy? But there I was relentlessly trying to pitch all these hopeless leads of, you know, and none of them were to stick.

• 29:25Guy Raz?

  It's going nowhere.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Going nowhere. So I finally reached out to him and he's like, okay, look, let's do this. You know, 50 50, we'll do it. What do you need? Five grand?

• 29:35Guy Raz?

  He gave you $5,000 in cash?

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Yes, no contract.

• 29:39Guy Raz?

  And he knew that the business you wanted to do was to mass to-

• 29:41Speaker 01

  I wanted to make more T-shirts. I needed inventory.

• 29:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah, right. So you said, all right, great, we'll do this. Handshake and you're in business.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 29:52Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Mark comes up with an iconic new mascot, but discovers that the very name of his brand, Echo, E-C-H-O, is going to have to change. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 30:13Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together. The agents bring speed and scale,

• 30:58Guy Raz?

  and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro Annual Plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on. NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly

• 31:43Guy Raz?

  when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together. And that shift is Already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures,

• 32:28Guy Raz?

  get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, because the pace of change has never been faster than it is right now. New business models, new currencies, and new expectations for speed, reliability, and scale. Stripe builds financial infrastructure that helps businesses start, grow, and operate globally. From payments and billing to fraud protection and cross-border payouts, Stripe is built to support the new pace of commerce.

• 33:13Guy Raz?

  They're trusted by the companies building at the frontier, from 86% of the Forbes AI 50 to global leaders like Salesforce and OpenAI. In fact, more than 1.6% of global GDP flows through Stripe, with Stripe's users processing a combined $1.9 trillion last year. So if you're already thinking about what's next for your business, see what's possible at stripe.com.

• 33:49Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1993, and Mark has officially launched Echo Unlimited with $5,000 in cash from his new partner, Seth Gersberg. And there's also a third partner in the mix, Mark's twin sister, Marcy.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to Seth's credit...

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Which he deserves a lot of credit for. As the business started to take off, I renegotiated the deal and I was like 33, 33, 33.

• 34:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah, so your sister had a third, he had a third, you had a third, okay. So he was gonna bring in the money because he had some experience and he was just a year or two older than you.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:29Guy Raz?

  And so, okay, now you had some money to start making t-shirts and you had some, I mean, you had already worked for the previous couple of years, building relationships in the hip hop community. How did, what was the first step in like, starting a business? Like, did you guys get an office, the three of you? Were you, did you stay in Lakewood, New Jersey? Did you move up to New York? What, tell me about the first things you did, once you were like, alright, we got a business.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  I went and I wrote a business plan.

• 34:58Guy Raz?

  Okay, what was in there?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  I wanted to be a lifestyle brand and I write up this story of educating, change, heal and overcome.

• 35:07Guy Raz?

  Educating, change, to heal and overcome, that's what Echo stood for. It's very, I mean, I mean, it's very earnest. I'm not criticizing it, I'm not mocking you, it's very earnest, right?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Well, I'm painfully earnest and there will be people listening to this totally vomiting on the earnestness, but fuck them, because that's real, that's what it was.

• 35:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  And I think it's a part of my superpower and a part of my weakness is that earnestness, you know?

• 35:33Guy Raz?

  And not really worried what people thought of you. You didn't care if people were like...

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Oh, I worried about it, but I didn't, I didn't know how to process it. It was more of a betrayal of like, my very dear and near friend group wanted to dissociate with me. They thought I was like, corny, or delusional, or obsessed over the work and you only want to talk about this thing and there's no oxygen to talk about. And they weren't wrong, in terms of where my focus was, right? In terms of my, in our sort of socialization, I would share, I was, I wanted their advice, I would ask for their advice. What do they think? If they want to help, they want to come with me on the road and always was a no.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  So, and, and so I was making friends with people that were more like me, that were entrepreneurial. And then they started to help me.

• 36:27Guy Raz?

  I mean, you had this plan for a lifestyle brand, but initially to bring in money, you had to sell products. You had to sell the things that you made, which were shirts and jackets. And so, tell me what you, what the first thing you did. Did you buy a bunch of shirts and start to mass screenprint them?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  It was a little bit more technical than that. I wanted to bring the elaborate aesthetic, which was if you look at those like old concert t-shirts and rock concert t-shirts, like, you know, some of these t-shirts today, those, the ones that are early references are worth thousands of dollars. But that was an aesthetic that was not being captured by the streetwear market. It was not being deployed because of the technical constraints, because the barrier to enter was to make the color separations was very expensive.

• 37:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  So I did this, this, I was doing these very elaborate pieces of art that I was showing. And at the time, I had, the art that I wanted to get produced, looked more like these multi-color, eight to 10 color screenprints on black. Most of what you saw in the streetwear market was printed on white. And here, I was looking at my works getting increasingly elaborate, increasingly, you know, high resolution. I would need, and you couldn't produce it.

• 37:50Guy Raz?

  They had to be simple. They had to be simpler designs, essentially.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  They had to be more elaborate designs than what the market was doing.

• 37:57Guy Raz?

  Oh, more elaborate, okay. So you, you knew that you had to basically create these elaborate designs because that was what, that would stand out. But I think up until this point, you weren't really selling your stuff in shops. It was like, person to person, right? You had to get your shirts into stores. So how did you?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:18Guy Raz?

  Tell me how you started to do that. You would take, you would get them printed, and then you would go walk from store to store in New York City?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, uh, we bought the first six styles on spec.

• 38:31Guy Raz?

  When you say styles, the cuts of the shirts?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I bought blanks that were available. And I had six pieces of art that I'd identified.

• 38:39Guy Raz?

  And these are just like Champion t-shirts or like Hanes t-shirts?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, whatever they were, Anvil or whatever at the time. And there were, you know, no labels in the neck that said Echo Unlimited. They were just sort of very Maverick.

• 38:52Guy Raz?

  You would go to these boutiques and presumably these are boutiques that are selling this kind of stuff.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:57Guy Raz?

  And you would walk in and say, hey, can I talk to the owner, the manager or something like that?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  It was a mix of things. We did exactly that where we would go hustle door to door. You know, we'd go to Patricia Fields on Broadway. We'd go to the extra large store, you know, go to Dr. J's. We had no idea that there was a buyer. Oh, no, you have to speak to this buyer. Some of the smaller mom and pops were like, yeah, I could talk to you. The manager was the buyer. And we would just try to put them on wheels. We would sell it on consignment.

• 39:28Guy Raz?

  Why consignment? They wouldn't, I guess you had no choice. They wouldn't just give you cash.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Well, because some of the stores that we really wanted to get into that were really hot stores at the time. It wasn't that we wanted to sell it on consignment. It was because they would say no. And after a month of back and forth, them saying, we really like your stuff, but we'll only take it on consignment. We had to pick a path.

• 39:49Guy Raz?

  And does consignment mean that you actually get paid? I mean, of course.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Of course you don't. Yeah.

• 39:54Guy Raz?

  You don't get paid? They take it and what did they say? They say it didn't sell or like what?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  You know, some of them would pay really slow, slower than you could afford. And you would convert them into a viable account. And some were just basically lecherous and just were basically taking advantage of all the young entrepreneurs hustling. I wasn't the only one not getting paid. Let's be clear.

• 40:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  And I knew, and it did start to sell, especially in Manhattan. And we eventually then did a trade shows, right? So we started to learn about, oh, you should go to a trade show. You should go to the Javits Center. They have a trade show and here's Action Sport Retailer in San Diego.

• 40:35Guy Raz?

  And so, so, okay, you're doing consignment and I'm imagining that in year one, you know, even if these things, these t-shirts are selling, you guys aren't like rolling in cash.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  No. No, but it was real. Like, we were, we were getting feedback, like calls, like over the weekend, you have more stock. Like, that t-shirt's blowing out for us. Some of my, some of the styles started blowing out.

• 40:59Guy Raz?

  And people just discovered them in the shops. They'd walk in and be like, whoa, what's that?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was also the emergence, you know, time and place. Let's put ourselves in, back into space and time. In the, in that vector of space and time, this was this emergent thing. And who are my near peers now? It's Fat Farm, it's 555 Soul, it's Echo Unlimited, it's PNB. Supreme's just coming up.

• 41:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But West Coast streetwear, like, like Stussy, for example, I think more influenced by surf and skate culture.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:31Guy Raz?

  And you guys more influenced by, literally by hip-hop culture.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  I was like explicitly hip-hop and graffiti in my art. It was like my black book.

• 41:39Guy Raz?

  But there was a Venn diagram where those two met.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 41:44Guy Raz?

  Well, one of the things that I think you did around this time, in the first year or so, was to introduce the Rhino, which became the symbol, kind of the symbol of the Echo brand.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:55Guy Raz?

  How did that come about?

• 41:57Speaker 01

  It's about three years in, all of the brand was just trafficking under my art and under the Echo Unlimited wordmark. And I'm at a trade show in Vegas, and we're starting to really kind of hit a stride with international buyers. And I want to expand beyond t-shirts, right? I don't want to only do t-shirts. And if I don't evolve a logo mark, that's a non-verbal, non-written logo mark, it's going to be very hard to ID the product. So I walk the main hall, and I walk by like a big timberland tree, and I walk by a big Lacoste alligator, and I walk by polo. And I'm just like, all these guys have a thing

• 42:42Speaker 01

  in common. They have like a mascot. And they're able to brand their garment in a way where they don't have to slap type on it. Okay?

• 42:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  And I knew that if I was going to get into cut and sew, which was my ambition.

• 42:54Guy Raz?

  And cut and sew is like, just for people who don't know the industry, it means?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Imported, more technical, constructed outerwear, denim, woven shirts, beyond just printables. What's the business of printables, right? Where you take a blank, constructed garment, and you embellish it with a print or... A transfer of some type.

• 43:18Guy Raz?

  And you had to go beyond that. If you want to go beyond that, you had to have a nonverbal label. It didn't, something that just because saw it, like they see the crocodile and you're like, that's Lacoste.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause I was like, I got it. It's the rhino. You know, you could call me Ernest. But I do believe that God puts things in your path, that you, if you ignore them, you could say that they are just trivial things. But outside the garage of where I airbrushed for years, my dad had a collection of sand driftwood rhinoceros statues, like little wooden, they were like janky little five dollar.

• 43:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  And as a kid growing up, I used to play with them with my Star Wars action figures. And I always admired the form and the shape and just the, the sort of ruggedness of the, the rhino. So I kinda had a hunch, like could be, it needed to be a rugged animal. I was like, is it gonna be a Great Dane? Maybe it's a pit bull. It was not a long calculated thing. I didn't have a big narrative. Like this is it. I want to try this. I need to have an animal.

• 44:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Right? And so I show the buyers the line and they're like, what the hell is this? They're like, we already get that from Timberland or we get that from the North Face with those, that weird mountain. We don't need that from you. Okay. This looks like an outdoor brand. This looks like a hunting brand. I'm like, exactly. You know, that's what I'm trying to, like, that's the, that's my aesthetic, you know, like I was, you know, Tim boots and cargo pants. And this was the aesthetic.

• 44:58Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  It took on a bunch of meaning, obviously, like, you know, the herbivore, fierce, but gentle pack animal survivor. Only goes forward. Like I learned these things anecdotally. They become a part of the sale of why. But they weren't, they weren't there from day one.

• 45:19Guy Raz?

  And the rhino would just be, would be a shirt with the rhino on it? Or it would be, the rhino would be a small little part of the shirt or what?

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Well, I started to produce cut and sew. And then I tested one capsule that was like all rhino and it was just Echo Unlimited discreetly in stencil font, very kind of military hunting look. The buyers were very resistant and then we placed it and it blew out in sales. And once it penetrated the market, the buyers that accepted that stuff actually had good performance with it.

• 45:49Guy Raz?

  I think by, let's say by year three, like when you introduced the Rhino.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:55Guy Raz?

  Do you, so this is like 96, 95, right? Maybe something like that. Was it just the three of you or at this point, you know?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  No, we started building a team. We graduated from the office in my apartment and we graduated to South River, New Jersey, to our first office that became a hub for us.

• 46:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I want to sort of dive into the, to the overall business because I know, I mean, you're doing, by 1995, you're doing like, let's say 15, 20 million dollars in revenue and sales, which doesn't mean you're profitable necessarily, but.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  No, we were horribly unprofitable.

• 46:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So this is the thing, like from what I gather, like from the outside, you look, you're looking really hot, like a hot brand. Everyone's talking about you. You're making money hand over fist, but actually internally you were in trouble. The company was, was.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  It was a shit show.

• 46:48Guy Raz?

  You were like bleeding cash, right?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  I mean, we were, the, the big problem is that we were, we didn't have the leverage on the, on the manufacturing side. So the manufacturing infrastructure was not refined yet.

• 47:01Guy Raz?

  You were making it all in China?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  We were importing, I had really bad agency production deals. We were making in Taiwan, we're making in China, we were making in a bunch of places. And when we started to do the cut and sew thing, it was like, it's a different kind of game. So we didn't fully understand that.

• 47:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Um, and we tried it a couple of times and got burnt really bad. Even like, we would build something and I'd say to you, okay, it's going to come winter delivery too. Top of the new year and we would ship it in like spring, like heavy garments. Because we were late. We had no leverage with the makers. So the importing, getting enough even to fit in a container. We didn't have enough critical mass so that efficiencies and shipping.

• 47:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  So those things led us to a conclusion that we need a partner in manufacturing. So we find an agency partner, which is a really bad deal. Really bad deal that almost went nuclear.

• 48:02Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you find an agency partner and this actually makes things worse?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Right. Yes. So here's how I get to the agency partner and it's all my doing, my Frankensteining. I want to make snowboard jackets. Okay?

• 48:16Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  And I want to make outerwear. I want to go after Polo. I want to go after Tommy. I have the drawings. I could see it. I'm visualizing it. But I'm going to preserve this t-shirt business, preserve that foundational essence, but I need to get into this, into the making. So I walk up at one of those Javits Center trade shows. I walk as a consumer.

• 48:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  I start walking it now, not as competitors, but I start looking at who's making what. And I just start asking them, "Do you do private label? Can you make me? How did you make this? Would you make it with my label? Right? If I pay you." One guy I just happened to meet, we'll call him Boris, okay? Or something, for legal reasons. Because it was, it ended up in a real shit show. So Boris says, "Yes, I can make them." There's a brand called SMP and it was a hot snowboarding brand. Like I wanted to make that level of product.

• 49:11Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  So he says, "All right, we make a deal.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  You do the fulfillment and the warehousing, Boris, and the making. You fund the making and we'll split 50/50 on the revenue. I'll pick up the marketing costs and we'll go season by season and we'll commit to like a three-year deal, right? But you can't mark up..." The freight onboard pricing, the FOB pricing, right? That's the, that's the price before it leaves the, the country of origin. Then there's your landed price. You can't mark that up. Deal. Sign the deal.

• 49:48Guy Raz?

  Okay, and you're going to split it 50 50?

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yes. That's my, that's my recollection. This is not a court of law. It might've been 51 49. I don't know.

• 49:58Guy Raz?

  He's financing it, entirely financing it?

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Entirely financing it, but I'm financing the operation of the sales cost, the marketing cost and the advertising. Okay, so the first season we do it, everything works. Okay, it all works. This is going good. Second season we do it, there's a speed bump. Oh my gosh, we get a fax. Edward C. Hyman, Echo Design Group, E C H O, cease and desist.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Cease and desist, what does that mean? I'm Echo. My mother gave me that name. Here comes the earnestness, right? Here's the superpower and the weakness. I'm Echo. What do you mean Edward C. Hyman? Who is he? Oh, he's dead. This is a company 75 years old. They have the trademark on this brand. You need to change the name of the brand.

• 50:44Guy Raz?

  They were called Echo Design Group? And this is like three years into your business and they say you cannot use that name anymore?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Right. Business is going like this. I have this new production deal with this agency partner.

• 50:57Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  So I've got goods with E C H O embroidered on them. Advertising campaigns that are getting a ton of hype. E C H O on, I'm funding that. If I don't ship my goods to pay all the debt of advertising, this is how I got underwater.

• 51:15Guy Raz?

  The name Echo you could not use anymore. You had already made clothing with E C H O in it. First of all, did you have to recall that stuff?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  That's exactly what was going on. When I say pump the brakes. halt the production. There was stuff in pipeline.

• 51:33Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  En route, about to ship in the midst of peak manufacturing. They're about to punch an embroidery and you can't undo that embroidery. Once it's punched, you can't undo it.

• 51:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah, but you had to stop that before it happened.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  We had to stop it.

• 51:48Guy Raz?

  And, and by the way, how much merchandise you're talking about? Two, five, 10 million dollars worth of stuff?

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Oh, it was probably like, uh, don't quote me, but it was probably about eight million dollars worth of stuff.

• 51:59Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Eight million dollars, just our cost, not like the value in the market.

• 52:03Guy Raz?

  And so, so you, you knew that you were not going to fight this. You were not going to fight this Echo Design Group.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Oh, I tried to fight it.

• 52:10Guy Raz?

  Okay, but?

• 52:11Speaker 01

  I lost the fight.

• 52:13Guy Raz?

  So just with the name, you decided to change it to E C K O. So it's still Echo. And also you changed, you legally changed your last name to E C K O.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that took about a year after that, but yes.

• 52:26Guy Raz?

  And that was because by having your name as the name of the brand, you can't, nobody could challenge a trademark because it's your last name.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  It was legal advice and it was also kind of funny and confusing because I was so stubborn that in my agreement with Echo Design Group, I'm like, I will change the trademark, but I am Mark E C H O. And for like three months I went around with, oh, Echo Unlimited, E C K O, but I'm E C H O. And it was confusing. And my sister was like, why are you doing that? I'm like, I don't know. It's so stupid. People are spelling the name wrong and they're still getting it wrong. Like why, what am I doing? And then my lawyer says, you know, Mark, it probably will, like, let me do an analysis and the discovery on what this could mean for the marks. If you legally change your name and if you intend to start marketing Mark, M A R C E C K O as a mark in itself.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Which we hadn't contemplated. I hadn't labeled, I hadn't put my name on things yet.

• 53:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  So, and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And I'm like, oh, well, Tommy Hilfiger does it and Ralph does it and Ralph was, you know, it's not Ralph, it's not Polo Ralph Lifshitz. It's Polo Ralph Lauren.

• 53:35Guy Raz?

  Ralph Lauren, right, right, right. Exactly. That's his, that's his last name. I changed it to Ralph Lauren. So, okay. So you've got, you changed the name. Meantime, you've got this brewing challenge with, actually I want to go back to this challenge with the partner in just a moment, but I want to ask you. Overall, from what I understand, I mean, you're still a, you know, a relatively small company. But from what I understand, you guys were spending money like crazy. What were you spending money on?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Like advertising, advertising.

• 54:03Guy Raz?

  Like, but crazy, like you were spending more than you had.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 54:07Guy Raz?

  Where was, okay, advertising, you were buying splashy ads and like in magazines. It was expensive. What else were you spending on?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  That's pretty much it. This was peak, you remember, like magazines were forces of nature. I mean, there was no YouTube.

• 54:24Guy Raz?

  No.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  There was no, there was no other, I couldn't get on TV. Print magazines, if you were in the pages of Thrasher Magazine or the pages of The Source and PC Gamer, Spin, it should cost money and they, they're selling full retail. And I, yeah, maybe I can negotiate with them and get crazy terms. I get 180 day terms to pay. And they liked us, they were rooting for us. And that's what we did, we got over our skis. And the calculus, we weren't spending too much. It was the, we were spending to plan, but the plan was to have shipped goods and then to have cash flow. So suddenly what would have been cash flow now was suddenly stuck in this, this legal quagmire.

• 55:07Guy Raz?

  Hmm. So you, so you basically, you basically decided to change the name. Meantime, there's this perfect storm happening because you also have this issue with your, this partner that you, you guys partnered up with, hoping that it would create better efficiencies, you'd be able to scale and, and have higher margins. But it turns out he was kind of skimming off the top.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Turns out Boris was marking up on the FOB prices, broke the deal, breached the deal, milking both ends.

• 55:38Guy Raz?

  So when you discovered this, right? When you found out about this? What did you do? I mean, because you had you had this partnership with this guy and you felt like, did you confront him and say, hey, what are you doing?

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Of course. And I got more evidence on about six styles or so that were price manipulated. So then we very aggressively sue for them breaching, using that those six price points as evidence. They then said, no, that's a mistake. That's not true. That's not enough evidence. So then they countersue because we're trying to get our inventory out and break the deal. And they're like, we're going to fight this out in court. And they knew they had us because we couldn't afford not to ship the goods. We needed to reconcile this shit show. I needed a completely new manufacturing infrastructure. Okay, I needed

• 56:37Speaker 01

  to learn everything that they were doing. I need to cut those guys out. And they were willing to go full nuclear.

• 56:46Guy Raz?

  So you guys enter into this battle with this guy. But from what I understand, and you wrote about this in your book, there's all this merchandise that was being stored at a warehouse, I think in LA.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:03Guy Raz?

  Right? Okay. And you and Marcy, your sister and

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Seth.

• 57:08Guy Raz?

  Seth, decide to basically take it back. You decide to kind of raid this place in the middle of the night and just grab all your merchandise, which

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Probably not the best form.

• 57:22Guy Raz?

  Not the best idea. But tell me, tell me what the circumstances that led you to do this and what you did.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Oh, it was just, it was, you know, righteousness versus effectiveness. We probably didn't consult our lawyers all the way. We felt

• 57:38Guy Raz?

  I'm sure you didn't consult them at all because they wouldn't have been like, yeah, this isn't a good idea to go to the warehouse and take your stuff.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think we were just young and stupid and thought we were robbed. And I was very hostile. Why? I just, you know, I just got my feelings hurt. I got punched in the nose with the ECHO to ECKO. So I was going full cowboy. So there was this sort of posture that we were taking. It was not by force. We went in and show up with like goons and guns. I mean, I showed up. And we showed up just saying like, okay, like, here's the paperwork. You guys are stealing. Give us our shit. And then obviously that they locked it up, locked us out.

• 58:19Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  I don't remember the exact, you know, when they make the movie one day, it'll be very dramatic.

• 58:24Guy Raz?

  So you didn't, you weren't, you weren't able to get your stuff?

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Hell, no.

• 58:30Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Echo Unlimited runs into so much debt that it has to withdraw from a big trade show. But then Mark figures out how to turn that absence into a major advantage. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Hey, Guy. My name is David and I'm an entrepreneur from Albuquerque, New Mexico. My favorite episode is the Lip Bar with Melissa Butler. From the curiosity that got her into lipstick to the way that she had her prototypes and her products overtaking her home, I believe she really represents the entrepreneur's journey. Thank you so much to you and your team for making this show. I listened to it while working on my own products and it makes me feel like I'm in a chapter of my own story that's similar to the ones on your show. It's very inspiring and thanks again.

• 59:24Guy Raz?

  If you want to share your favorite episode of How I Built This, record a short voice memo on your phone telling us your name, where you're from, what your favorite episode is and why, a lot like the voice memo you just heard, and email it to us at h i b t at i d dot wondery dot com and we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks in future episodes. And thanks so much. We love you guys. You're the best. And now, back to the show.

• 1:00:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 1997 and Mark has just attempted to raid the LA warehouse where a shady business partner has been keeping their merchandise. The two of them then wind up in court and each claims the other is in breach of contract.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  And we knew that we could win a case, but we didn't have the funding option to go forward. Our lawyer pulls us aside one day in court and he's like, guys, we could fight this, but this is going to be six months and you might not be here to tell the story because you guys are going to go broke unless you settle this in some way. And so that's what we did.

• 1:00:43Guy Raz?

  And so what did it take? How much money did you have to pay him to buy him out?

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  It wasn't even like that. It was just like a sell-off period and we're going to play nice and we're going to slowly migrate the goods and we've renegotiated the royalty terms or the rev share split or something like that. And then the period. And it was more like we played nice and we said, okay, let's just settle.

• 1:01:10Guy Raz?

  From what I understand, around this time, you thought maybe a way out of this, because you almost went bankrupt. I mean, this was going to, and you got pretty close to this whole thing imploding. But I think you thought maybe a way out is just selling the brand to like Levi's or Nautica or Perrier, so a couple of other brands. And you went to some of these brands and offered it to them, right? Echo?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't just us wanting to sell it. It was more the market signaling that there might be an opportunity. When we started talking to more grown adults and listening to the attorneys and exploring the options, we hired a banker. To learn, okay, well, what would it mean to perhaps have a partner to kind of come in and do the back of the house ops, kind of liberate me on the design and us as a team on the sales and marketing? So we put out a live wire and there was people circling, people started circling. We did this sort of banker exploration to see what the market would, could offer us in the event of a sale.

• 1:02:17Guy Raz?

  And you couldn't find anything that was, that looked good, basically, at the time?

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  We found things that looked good, just the terms were not fair.

• 1:02:25Guy Raz?

  What was the best offer you got, do you remember, in terms of dollar amount?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Oh, goodness.

• 1:02:31Guy Raz?

  Like, more than 30 million?

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:35Guy Raz?

  So why wouldn't you take it?

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Well, Levi's tried to cut my sister and my, and my partner Seth out. After, we were like the two yard line doing a deal. You have to understand, they were basically going to be purchasing it, it probably wasn't that much, it was, because you have to remember, I had so much debt at the time.

• 1:02:53Guy Raz?

  So they were basically going to purchase the debt and you guys would walk away with almost nothing?

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  We would, but we would walk away with something and some, and earn out and to be incented to stick around.

• 1:03:02Guy Raz?

  But that wasn't, that wasn't enticing to you?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Not especially after the 11th hour of the deal, they call me in to see me one on one, and, you know, I don't want to disparage the, you know, all the people that were a party to that deal are no longer there. But there was one gentleman who worked in their international business and one of their finance people pull me in, I thought that he wanted to just talk about whatever kind of little button up details with me, and I knew that I was sort of the galvanizing force, but I, my partners, my road dogs, was my sister and my partner Seth, it was my brother.

• 1:03:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  And when they not so subtly alluded to the fact that, like, we really don't need them for that long, maybe we'll just keep them on for like, a year, and we, we said peace out. And our friends at Nautica, we got to know the CEO at the time, he loved us, he thought we were great, and then as we get to the one yard line to do the deal, he's like, my board won't approve it, it's a mission creep for us, we can't afford to do this right now, you know, we just newly public, he got scared and pulled the deal.

• 1:04:15Guy Raz?

  Okay, so now you are, this is around 97, 98, you are in pretty bad financial situation. You've got a lot of debt, like tens of millions of dollars in debt, from what I understand. And you needed, you needed a creditor, you needed somebody to help bail you out. And I guess Seth had a connection to some guy named Alan Finkelmann. And Alan was a guy who said, sure, I will, I will give you a loan and, and help you pay your debt, but I need to own a portion of your business as collateral, something like that. What was the offer?

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the exact terms were, it was more like a debt deal and it was a very much an angel, good guy deal.

• 1:05:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  There was nothing about taking a piece of the marks. He was that generous. He had some protections in place. We knew that we got our hand slapped. We learned to be on better behavior in terms of our marketing planning and be more fiscally responsible and maybe not be as a cavalier with the advertising. And we said, if we just put our head down and focus, we could do this. And if we could use our weakness at the time, which was the being underwater financially as some sort of Tai Chi strength, maybe there's a way to sort of harness that reality of not being able to afford to be at a trade show, having to be low key and basically do this whole thing like we called Where's Echo?

• 1:05:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  And Magic Trade Show, we, you know, could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars there creating the spectacle, couldn't afford to do that. So we-

• 1:05:55Guy Raz?

  This is, this is in 97, you're talking about. You could not afford to go to this show, which is a really major show.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. At the time, it was like blowing up. And we paid, we paid for the booth to hold the space and we couldn't get the money back. But we didn't have money to produce the booth itself, to ship people, to build the, you know, the booth's construction, the union, all that stuff. So we just put a sign in the middle of an empty booth, Where's Echo?

• 1:06:23Guy Raz?

  Where's Echo? That's what it said?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, Where's Echo?

• 1:06:25Guy Raz?

  That was your camp, that was your-

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Campaign.

• 1:06:27Guy Raz?

  -strategy to say, let's just, and-

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  That was that. And what about outside the convention center? Oh, stickers everywhere, giant stickers. Stickers. And the stickers said, Where's Echo with the brand logo on it? Yeah, we got fined till, you know, it took a couple of years to settle with the city of Vegas. But full, proper, like 11 by 17, full page, like paper glossy stickers that were like impossible to take off. Did that actually gain attention for you? Oh, yeah, yeah, in some good ways and some bad. Yeah, yeah. Did it result in sales at the trade show? Huge sales, huge sales, not the trade show in our office. Because people said, people would, what? They were just like, wow, these guys are clever. They just were rooting for us.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  And we started to build the muscle of properly building production and manufacturing infrastructure. We put our heads down. Marcy became a world-class operator. I became a much more focused merchant, right? And understanding how to build an align that was not as ad hoc. Getting really good at color separations on the T-shirts, like crushing it on new innovations in screen printing. Pushing my screen printers to the limits to do things that no one was doing at the time. In terms of colors, high-density ink, gloss, all sorts of techniques that were very novel at the time.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  That have since become wildly mainstream. If you looked at the market, you wouldn't even, your eye wouldn't see it. But at the time were a big differentiator. And who, who were your customers? I mean, was it young men mainly? At the consumer level, yes, it was young men's. We managed to break into Macy's and it started, the business started to really, it started to become durable. They got the bugs out of the system and we grew up.

• 1:08:20Guy Raz?

  And what was your, what was the biggest seller? Was it t-shirts?

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  No, the core competency was fleece hoodies.

• 1:08:27Guy Raz?

  Fleece.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  And people started to associate that Rhino logo with all like the coolest events that we would sponsor and the advertising that we had took and took forever to pay for. It's still the composite brand awareness was out punching. You know, there was more demand, there's just pent up demand in the market. So in some odd way, all of the unintended consequences of shipping late or off cycle in some weird ways, just created more of a vacuum for demand.

• 1:09:02Guy Raz?

  I want to shift to this completely, not completely, but this other part of you, this other side of you that many people may know even better than Echo, which is complex because while you're, you're running Echo, you decide to pursue this idea of creating a print magazine.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:24Guy Raz?

  A streetwear hip hop print magazine.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:26Guy Raz?

  The idea was that, was that this would be, this would extend the brand, the Echo brand?

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Oh, there was, there was no doubt. Looking at what was, I don't know, our business was probably $150 million in, in business, right? Something like that, you know, it was north of 100 million. So we were looking at a 12 to $15 million marketing budget. Okay. Of paid media that I was using for paid media. And I found it very frustrating as I started to become like a darling amongst the publishers who would all were very gracious and at GQ and details. I said, hey, it's not enough just for the publishers to be nice. Like, why aren't these peer, near peer editors in chief, they're my same age or sometimes older than me?

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Or the stylists, why weren't they taking the, the brand into their shoots? Especially at the men's fashion magazines. And I found that offensive, you know? And I had this thing like from the, from the media side, they were like, you're too black for GQ and you're too black for the skateboard magazines, but you're too white for the Source magazine. And it was all that same narrative over and over. I just was like, Let's take three and a half million for a year, for the next couple of years, and let's incubate a magazine.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Right? Because the marketplace is showing us this, that they're not getting convergence culture. I had this thesis around convergence and that cool doesn't discriminate or live within these silos in the way that the media industry is, this sort of design constraints of the past. And I was looking at just the multicultural reality, looking inwardly at my company, looking at my staff, looking at my own family and saying, this is not where the puck is headed. Someone needs to answer that. Let's go for it. And to my partner's credit, Marcie and Seth, they bought into the vision.

• 1:11:34Guy Raz?

  And how are you going to, I mean, this is a magazine with an editorial team and writers and all this stuff. Like, what did you know about running a magazine?

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Well, some people are just that good, I guess. No kidding. No.

• 1:11:48Guy Raz?

  I mean, did you hire an editorial team? Did you hire a?

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Of course I did. I didn't know how to run a magazine.

• 1:11:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  I start to hire consultants, someone, a newsstand consultant, help me structure the org. You need to hire a publisher, an editor in chief. And we were sunsetting a showroom that I still had. I wanted to move to a bigger showroom in Manhattan, but I had two. So I was owning two showrooms and we converted one to Complex and we just went for it.

• 1:12:18Guy Raz?

  And so the idea was you would have your, essentially your own publication. You wanted this to be a culture lifestyle magazine around?

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  I wanted to earnestly build the most culturally relevant media platform for my generation.

• 1:12:31Guy Raz?

  And it would focus on things like sneakers and food and pop culture and music and sports, like all these things?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Convergence culture. That's what I would label it as.

• 1:12:41Guy Raz?

  Okay. And meantime, I guess around the time you founded Complex, you started working on Complex. You made a conscious decision that you wanted to build up you as a brand because I guess you felt or the feeling was that not enough people knew who Mark Echo was and that could be helpful for the Echo apparel side. Is that about right?

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it was a bunch of things that were happening. It was just the sort of professionalization and maturation of the business. We started to license Echo Unlimited successfully. I launched Echo Red, which was a women's wear division. I was having a lot of growth. The mousetrap, if you will, of our infrastructure was becoming quite serious. What was once a company underwater, now we had very sophisticated lines of credit with big banks. So I started acquiring businesses. I acquired Zoo York. It was just a part of us looking forward. Okay, what is the picture? What are we building for here?

• 1:13:49Guy Raz?

  I mean, as part of, so you had these, they had Complex, which is growing as a magazine, but within a few years, the print version of Complex was struggling. It was really hard because it's expensive to run that.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  It was really hard. Why? Because they were all online.

• 1:14:09Guy Raz?

  So why would you pay for the print if you could just get it for free online?

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:14Guy Raz?

  And I guess there were also challenges or issues with the Mark Echo Enterprise. There were, you guys had racked up some debt and then you're in the middle of a financial crisis. You had a lot of real estate, you know, because you had showrooms, you had stores.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we rolled out retail quite aggressively. So you had like those 2006 leases in 2008.

• 1:14:39Guy Raz?

  And I think at your peak, you had like 110 stores.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  That's right. So it wasn't so much that Complex was in trouble, but we were.

• 1:14:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  And we were the only funder. So, you know, they were just breaking even.

• 1:14:51Guy Raz?

  So even though the, and was the Mark Echo brand, I mean, even if it was the clothing we're selling, the clothes and the apparel was selling, you guys were over leveraged, right? Basically, you had too many stores, too much real estate. Is that about right?

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Totally over our skis.

• 1:15:08Guy Raz?

  How did that happen again? You were so experienced by that point. You were such a smart operator. You'd brought the business back to $100 million. How did you get to this point again in 2008?

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness. Um, you know, I guess not, not that smart of an operator. You know, the, the common killer in our industry is inventory.

• 1:15:31Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  And it's why we have, you know, the, there were macro things going on in the market. You were at the peak of the real estate industry, right? It was right, the industry, real estate was cratering right about, was about to. Amazon was this incredibly powerful but corrosive force in affecting the way consumer behavior was going to be, direct to consumer, online. And so, you know, partially macro, partially our own doing. Uh, my partner, Seth was a cowboy and to his credit, that kind of wild, aggressive, stretch planning, uh, which had proven so reliable for five years was now going to be

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  tested again in a way that hadn't been, and banks were collapsing all around us.

• 1:16:23Guy Raz?

  Hmm. This also, I'm assuming, really starts to strain your relationship with Seth. I know because there was a falling out.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Guy Raz?

  Uh, your sister Marcie had already left a couple of years earlier. She was bought out and I think she, she left on good terms, it's your sister.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:38Guy Raz?

  But, but you and Seth start to have more disagreements about the future of the business. Well, tell me about your, what was going on with your relationship as business partners?

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness, it was incredible. I could only, I've, you know, I've been very lucky in life to, to have a beautiful wife, my wife Allison, and in a long marriage and healthy family, thank God. But I think I experienced a divorce. It was effectively what you see within any sort of divorce where just two parties grow apart and there's divergent sort of, um, point of view on the path forward. And I was becoming increasingly conservative and wanting to lean more into re-energizing the brand and sort of doubling down on quality rather than quantity. And there was

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  And he was trying to feed the machine, this beast that we that we had built. And he would say to me, Mark, you know, we've been through this, you know, we've had ups and downs. This is not the first time. I'm telling you, you could push through it. And I just felt like, no, this time is different, mate. And we can't push through this and I don't want to because I feel like the it could be corrosive to the brands. We're just doing too much, you know, we're running a full retail business. We're running an outlet business. It was too much. We needed to focus. And Seth was like, no, this is cycles. We'll get through it. We could get through. And he was more gung ho. And I said, um, I don't, I don't agree.

• 1:18:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I'm curious because this is happening in the middle of of a financial crisis. And you guys had to resolve this in some way. And I'm going to kind of oversimplify what what happened. But but basically you decided that you would sell your stake in Mark Echo Unlimited to an outside partner called Iconix. And I guess they bought about 51% for $109 million. That was according to reports at the time. And then Seth would still get to keep a 49% stake. And you would essentially kind of leave the day to day. You wouldn't be involved in the day to day as much with the clothing company.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:55Guy Raz?

  But just to get back to this, I mean, $109 million for 51% for a 51% stake in the company in the middle of a financial crisis. I mean, that seems like a really great outcome. I mean, so was it? I mean, I mean, it seems like you guys did pretty, you know, you did OK. You did pretty well.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  We did do OK. I landed the plane with the wings on fire. I sold my equity interests to make room

• 1:19:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  for Iconix to buy my position. There was a payout for me and I would keep Complex.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  And I would get a royalty on the gross sales of the business for forever.

• 1:19:36Guy Raz?

  Got it. So from what I gather, initially, this was great. You walked away with, you know, a nice chunk of cash.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Oh, it wasn't great. I mean, as a maker, as that empathetic, maybe saccharinely earnest kid who loves design, it was like suddenly having phantom pains of the hand that was once attached to your body, gone. So that divorce came with a lot of trauma. And I was, my job was to now be that puppet, like that caricature, that mascot.

• 1:20:13Guy Raz?

  I see.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  And it was not my skills. And it wasn't also aligned to my real, authentic personality.

• 1:20:23Guy Raz?

  So, okay, so was this the first time in your life, this is around 2009, where you actually, I mean, you had a salary, you were able to, you were making money. But was this the first time in your life where you actually had significant money?

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:37Guy Raz?

  So wasn't that a win in a sense, like you mentioned, you had a young family?

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  No, this is, this is the wild thing. It was the point in my life where I had the worst, I think I had my first proper breakdown. I had so much PTSD of the world collapsing, the weight of landing that plane to get on the other side of that Iconix deal, which was not a pretty picture. And there were such hostility with those banks that were, it was like a love affair with those banks. I was in a CIT ad, for goodness sakes, you know, back in the heyday, when I had a, I still have a plaque around here for whatever, you know, $500 million line of credit that I had, whatever like absurd line of credit, which was, you know, you don't do business that way anymore.

• 1:21:25Guy Raz?

  And those same banks were now like breathing dead in your neck.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Hostile, like hostile, like you can't run Complex and Echo at the same time. Shut Complex down.

• 1:21:36Guy Raz?

  These are creditors, these are banks, these are creditors.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  These are creditors, yeah.

• 1:21:39Guy Raz?

  They were coming after you because it's a financial crisis.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  And they were upside down. And, and they were doing their jobs. It wasn't personal.

• 1:21:47Guy Raz?

  So you felt this PTSD from the process of unwinding this, even though financially you were successful and people from the outside are like, "Oh, my God, high five, Mark. Look, you sold it. You're good." But internally, you're like...

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  I felt like a loser.

• 1:22:02Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  I felt like a total loser and I was depressed. I started getting psychotherapy and tried to figure out my new vocation. And I went, I got addicted to working out and I was the most fit I ever was, too. It was a wild thing, really. It was like, here I was, like, more fit, more from an outside perception, more affirmation, but internally hollow. So those sort of, "Okay, you did good, kid. Here's your trophy," was never my measure. I'm that kid that was airbrushing t-shirts and sweatshirts. I want to make stuff. I'm a creator. I'm a maker. Do you understand?

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  I have to use my hands to make something. And suddenly, the sort of mousetrap of, "Okay, I ideate once every week," that cycle of, "I draw something and then you get the prototype in and then you're gluing and taping the prototype." And the manipulatives of that sort of autodidactic learning the craft of the trade, which I was becoming good at, was gone.

• 1:23:14Guy Raz?

  How about your relationship with Seth? What happened to it?

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Oh, it was very icy and we've since totally reconciled our relationship and I love him very dearly.

• 1:23:25Guy Raz?

  How long did it take before you guys...

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Oh, years.

• 1:23:27Guy Raz?

  Years. So it was years of not speaking?

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  It took a solid, I'd say, five, six years.

• 1:23:34Guy Raz?

  So he stays on with Mark Echo?

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  He was the 49%.

• 1:23:38Guy Raz?

  Yes. And you focus all of your attention now to Complex Media, which was also having some financial challenges.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, well, the business was break even. But now we had a, and this I give all the credit to my, my good partner, excellent operator, Rich Antonello, who became the CEO of Complex. But I hired him and he was doing a great job. I mean, to his credit, you know, to land the plane with investment, with venture investment in the crisis years, which was crazy. If you think about it, you think it was crazy to sell the company, as I did, which was also a blessing. You're right, I should be grateful that it landed in the way that it did. And in my heart, I'm grateful, right? But it didn't come without some brokenness, right?

• 1:24:26Guy Raz?

  Okay, let's talk about Complex because I know now you're out of the Mark Echo Enterprises and Complex is your main work. Did you, I mean, you say that you were kind of, you were sort of depressed at this time when you left Mark Echo, but did it also, did you throw all of your energy into Complex?

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  I started to, and then Rich knew my professional woes. I'm, the way I'm talking to you is how I've talked to him in earnest. And I'd explain the things that were bothering me creatively, professionally. And he was like, let's, let's like, get involved in the operation, dude. Come be like, come manifest the brand. So I started operating back into Complex.

• 1:25:08Guy Raz?

  You really kind of shift, you shift towards video, digital video. And, and one of the, I think, turning points was this first we feast, this like, Complex really becomes known for, it's sort of like, at the time, I mean, Vice was starting, you know, was really kind of coming into its own and Complex-

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  They were the darling.

• 1:25:25Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Guy Raz?

  And, but you guys were also making videos and content that was really starting to turn around. I mean, Complex started to become profitable or started to make money.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Started to make a lot of money and it started to become a business that also had a better multiple than apparel business. So it was an interesting thing. And then here I have different relationship with inventory, right? You know, it's like inventory is vapor, you know, it's what's on the hard drive, it's production costs. It's a much different business and I was thrown into the deep end and there I was on the road with big buyers and doing, you know, up fronts and running production and being like sort of the little, the sort of more maverick version of Vice and, and as ever committed to convergence culture as I ever was, you know, doing the one thing I knew I was good at.

• 1:26:22Guy Raz?

  You got acquired in 2016. You got out of that business at the right time because it's a tough business. And as we've seen with Vice and other Buzzfeed and Complex and others, but, but tell me about, I know that it was acquired by Verizon and Hearst. I mean, it turned out to be a prescient move because of course, the whole industry would, would go on to crater in some ways. And, you know, we know the story about Vice and, and BuzzFeed and, you know, Buzz, we've told that story on this show. I mean, there've been enormous challenges, even in the, in the print industry as well, Conde Nast and, you know.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. It's in another phase of reinvention right now.

• 1:27:08Guy Raz?

  But when, when they acquired it, you did stay on with Complex, right? You stayed for some, for some time.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  I stayed on, I, it's just like I stayed on at Echo, just in a much more sort of advisory, consulting. Yeah. Well, in, in the nature of, in the Echo business, I get a royalty. So my, my sort of feedback, it just, I don't have to be in it operationally in a deep way.

• 1:27:34Guy Raz?

  We're gonna sort of jump ahead to where we are now because of course, Complex and

• 1:27:41Guy Raz?

  Mark Echo, two brands that had a pretty significant impact on culture in the United States. You, when you, first of all, when you see, I know in the last year or so, you have actually collaborated with the Echo brand again.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:57Guy Raz?

  On some designs. When you go to the website for that brand today and you look at it, do you recognize it? Does it resemble the ethos and the spirit of what you, what you did create at the beginning? Or does it feel like, uh, this is not really totally my brand today?

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, that feeling of it's not totally your brand came before I sold the company.

• 1:28:21Guy Raz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Okay. When you start to develop, when you develop IP at that level of international distribution, this sort of hyper-localization starts to happen that starts to, uh, where you really create some dissonance as a, as like the sort of chief creative officer or the, or the creative director. Because, uh, there are certain functional things, be it, um, climate, be it color palette, fabrication, fit, that start to Frankenstein the business in a way that it's very hard to, uh, explain to a layperson. So, when I would travel the world and see my brand on people's backs, it had this sort

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  of, uh, multiple personality thing that was going on anyways, that was emerging, you know? Things were happening, pockets that weren't all the way tuned to my Bluetooth, right? It wasn't like my creative Bluetooth.

• 1:29:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  But to, to answer the question, when I see the brand today, is it, uh, is it the portrait of what I would make it if I was fully steering it? No. But that is the nature of this business. I think you could say, you know, for me, it was the 30 year anniversary and the fact that some of my old peers and colleagues that worked for me were still there. Call me nostalgic, call me earnest. I wanted to work with them again. It just felt good and it was like no strings attached and it was like, do what you want.

• 1:29:58Guy Raz?

  Mark, when you think about where, you know, what you've created and the ups and downs of it, but also the amazing success that you've had, you know, as an entrepreneur and failures too, as we've outlined, which is part of the journey. But how much of where you got to now do you attribute to timing and luck? And how much do you think has to do with the work and the grind that you put in and just the sheer effort?

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  I think that the luck is an incredibly real thing. The first bout of luck was being a twin and having a twin sister. So if you took that out of the equation, I probably would not be speaking to you right now. I've been lucky in marriage. I've been lucky in having my partner Seth, even though we had a professional divorce and we eventually totally reconciled and I love him. I learned things that was going to the university, the super smart, you know? I've been lucky to grow up in Lakewood and have the diversity that was around me. So yeah, luck is a big part of it.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  But it was also, I believe, talent and skill and a relentless belief in yourself, which at times probably is, sounds irritating to the listener because there's probably moments that are somewhat cringe-worthy, like this guy sounds like an arrogant prick, or he's not listening, or he's, sounds so earnest. There is a little bit of this sort of mania that you need. And I think the thing that I attribute most of it to, and this is a completely, it's not this podcast, but maybe a different one, is God. There have been moments where the grace of God

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  has given me the opportunity and I do not discount that. And I know that, you know, it's a different conversation, but I do think that's an important part of the calculus.

• 1:31:59Guy Raz?

  That's Mark Echo, co-founder of Echo Unlimited and Complex Networks. Last year, to celebrate Echo Unlimited's 30th anniversary, Mark came back briefly to design a limited edition collection with some of his most iconic designs. He said he thought of it as a love letter to 1993.

• 1:32:23Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. And don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter at guyraz.com. It's full of insights and ideas from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs. This episode was researched and produced by Catherine Seifer with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with audio engineering help from Gilly Moon and Kwesi Lee. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Alex Chung, John Isabella, Elaine Coats, Kerry Thompson, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.