Marc Ecko’s book ‘Unlabel’— A Review

What I learned from the fashion mogul’s memoir

Marc Ecko’s book, Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out, hit stores last Tuesday (October 1). I bought the Kindle version and thought I wouldn’t get around to reading it for at least a couple of weeks. Instead, I dove right in and knocked the 304-page book off in about 4 hours. Not bad.

If the average person knows who Marc Ecko is at all, it’s probably for being the guy who dropped $750k on the baseball Barry Bonds hit to break the home run record back in 2007. After an online poll to decide what he should do with the ball, he controversially marked it with an asterisk and donated it to the Hall of Fame.

But for people who pay attention to urban culture and its related industries— fashion, specifically— Marc Ecko was notably one of the biggest players in a scene once filled with a lot of big players. Back in the 90s, he launched Ecko Unltd. with a $5,000 investment from partner Seth Gerszberg, and eventually turned it into a billion dollar clothing brand. The company’s logo, a rhino, was everywhere.

Along the way Ecko Unltd. dabbled in ancillary creative projects like video games (Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure was released in 2006), media (Complex magazine was launched in 2002), and film (the rights to Getting Up were purchased by MTV in 2005; he talks of a Diddy-led movie project in the book).

But then, in 2008, in the midst of the recession— and with mass-market clothing being attacked at the gates by smaller, more tailored niche brands— the bubble popped on urban fashion. While it was always little more downtown chic than its competitors, Ecko Unltd., like almost every other company in America, thought the boom years were never going to end. They overextended themselves, got too big and sloppy, and weren’t quite prepared.

Consequently, Ecko Unltd. had to cancel their plans for their flagship store in Times Square (you remember that, right?) and drastically scale back. Advisers told them to declare bankruptcy. They weren’t having it. So in 2009, with their backs against the wall, they sold 51% of Ecko to Iconix Brand Group, and Marc stepped away from the day-to-day business. Iconix finally bought the rest of the company earlier this year.

Naturally, when you‘ve grown a company from your parents’ New Jersey garage to the size of Ecko Unltd., you’re going to know a thing or two about being an entrepreneur. In the book, Ecko says he isn’t fond of this word, and ultimately that’s what the book aspires to be about. Unlabel looks to answer the question of how you can grow your brand— whether it’s a creative thing, a company, whatever— without losing yourself in the process.

To that end, the engine driving Unlabel is something called the Authenticity Formula, a convoluted math problem that Ecko creates in the beginning of the book, and then tries to explain over the next 300 pages. Without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that Ecko himself knows the formula is a tad… ambitious.

As for the narrative itself, the story will be engaging to anyone who’s a fan of fashion, hip-hop and business. I’m 31-years-old, so I fondly remember the years around the turn of the millennium, taking the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan and then riding the R train to Soho to shop.

Back then, if you were into hip-hop, downtown Manhattan was one of primary places where you could really buy clothes that represented you. The Tommy Hilfigers, Guess and Nauticas of the world had already been overexposed— big American flag logos were everywhere— and small brands like Ecko, among others, stepped in to pick up the slack.

The problem was that as these smaller companies got more popular, urban wear became a market unto itself. A big market, in fact. And so it eventually became less about Ecko doing cool shit to spite Tommy Hilfiger, and more about catering to this existing market. What happens is, Ecko Unltd. matures from predominantly anti-establishment to the establishment in just a few short years. It’s a familiar story.

If there’s a downside to Unlabel, it’s really in the discussion of the tectonic cultural and creative shifts that lead to Ecko Unltd. having the problems that it did. Those issues didn’t just affect Ecko Unltd., but rather the broad spectrum of brands that played in that same space. They’re addressed, but only sparingly.

Ecko acknowledges a lot of the business issues—that he got too distracted, spent too much time on non-core competencies, that the company hired the wrong people, etc.— but again, he never really outright addresses something that is so obvious. That the entire urban wear industry was made drastically uncool, then fell the fuck apart.

Surely there had to be a reason why 50 Cent’s G-Unit Clothing— one of Ecko Unltd.’s smaller brands— was selling so well, and then suddenly it wasn’t. What happened there and why?

I think in some ways it would be more interesting if someone who made millions by playing in the hip-hop space really dove into how the mainstreaming of the culture— the tanning of America, or what have you— came back to bite many of its players in the ass.

I’m not saying Marc Ecko is the guy to do this, or that fashion in and of itself is even a definitive indicator of that concept, but I do think there’s something to be said for the over-exposed hip-hop wave everyone was riding on, and its precipitous crash.

At times in the book, you get the sense that Ecko is silently winking at us, acknowledging this. He points to his own mistakes as evidence. But at other times, he seems to hide behind the Authenticity Formula, using its malleable complexity to justify his actions. I get the sense that maybe Ecko hasn’t resolved everything within himself completely, and frankly, that’s alright.

Ultimately, Unlabel is an enjoyable book. Ecko won’t wow you with adjectives, but he does show a great knack for telling what ultimately is a truly compelling story. He’s confessional while still conversational, and pretty funny, too. There’s some interesting artwork and graphics included to hammer home certain points, a nice added touch. I think some of the tangential ‘how-to’ pieces might have done better if they came at the end of each chapter, not in the middle— they break up the flow a bit too much— but overall they add a lot of much-needed meat, and make the book vastly more than a tell-all.