Let me tell you the story about how I went from getting a $10-a-day job on Venice Beach to having my own fashion company and putting clothes on rock stars for the front of Rolling Stone magazine. How bad can it be, right?
You know now about my Hollywood years, the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, the bands, the gigs, all that. Well, when I think about that phase for a minute, as much fun as those times were, a lot of that was kind of dependent on other people’s generosity. I was living off the goodwill and kind-heartedness of friends. I hadn’t actually achieved anything personal to me, made my own mark or actually become able to stand on my own two feet. I was relying on other people’s help, other people’s sofas, other people giving me lifts. After a while, that became a little awkward. I was overstaying my welcome on this guy’s floor and goodwill only goes so far before even the most patient of friends start getting a bit resentful.
Equally, the novelty was starting to wear thin for me, too. It was the same story over and over: go out at night, hit the rock ’n’ roll joints and hook up with girls, then hang out in the day, always pretty skint … yes, have a good time, all well and good, but then that kind of got a little bit tiring, a little bit burnt out, a little bit like, Fuck, what am I doing? I was running out of money, I didn’t actually have a proper job, I was even starting to think, Am I going to have to go back to England again?
So, eventually, I changed scene and moved in with a friend in Century City, outside of Hollywood. He worked nights, so we’d hang out together in the day. During this time, I met this chick in Venice called Linda, and I started hanging out with her. She was kind of a little bit in the hippy scene, a bit spiritual, a bit Zen, and we got on well. Venice was a lot more bohemian back then; although it’s a bit more commercialized today, Venice’s history is full of beatniks and hippies and counterculture, it has been genuinely hip since the fifties and sixties. So I immediately felt right at home there with the hippy/Grateful Dead/gypsy/vagabond vibe. At the boardwalk down by the beach, on the one side it was all artists selling whatever they’d personally made – paintings, ceramics, whatever – and on the other side it was basically cheap T-shirts and sunglasses, socks, baseball caps and a little bit of clothing. A very similar vibe to London’s Camden Market. Venice Beach was also the second-biggest tourist destination in LA behind Disneyland, so there were always plenty of tourists.
One day I was walking down the boardwalk with Linda when this English guy, who was selling second-hand clothing out of a stall, basically overheard me talking. I’m looking all rock ’n’ roll, you know, tight pants, spiky hair, so I guess I stood out from the crowd, even down there. He said, ‘Are you English?’ and we started chatting. Turns out he was selling seconds from the Gap, boxer shorts and T-shirts and stuff like that, and, long story short, he offered me a weekend job. ‘I’ll pay you $10 a day. I basically need you to hawk and bring people into the booth and help sell shit.’
So that was my first ‘proper’ job in America, ten bucks a day, albeit only weekends at first. It was all ‘Step right up, get your seconds from the Gap, buy one for ten, two for fifteen’, that sort of thing … I took to that fairly naturally, and I can see that the confidence to do the sales pitch probably came from my grandad, who, as you know, was a market trader for ever. I believe that’s where my instinct to sell and chat to people and enjoy that experience came from. Plus my mum’s ability to do a hard day’s work in any type of environment. That market trader, entrepreneurial spirit from way back in Sheffield was helping me out on the sunny boardwalk of Venice Beach.
I would cycle to the boardwalk on Saturday and Sunday to work long hours and always took pride in my work. I had no interest in the clothes I was selling, but it was paying me money. I was never afraid of hard work. There was a woman I met around the boardwalk who needed her house painting, so I ended up doing that as well, but I found that quite depressing. I was working very hard but not earning much from this woman, who wasn’t very pleasant to work for. At the time, I wrote a postcard to Mum and said: ‘I’ve been working on the same house for almost four months virtually on my own every day, which is often quite lonely and depressing …’ Fortunately, I enjoyed my job selling this English guy’s jeans at the weekends and I was getting close with Linda, to the point where I then moved in with her in Venice.
The pivotal part of the story at this point was not selling the ‘crap from the Gap’, it was seeing a guy on the next-door pitch to me who was selling second-hand clothing that just seemed way cooler. He was from New Mexico and was selling a little bit of everything but mostly Levi’s, jean jackets, Western shirts, thrift-store stock. That gave me an idea: Why not buy my own stuff and try selling it down here? How bad can it be, right? Another postcard I sent to my mum at the time said: ‘I would really like to start selling second-hand Levi’s down the beach, which I think could be quite profitable at ten-to-twelve dollars a pair … although working down the beach means exposure to the sun, which is not good for my schoolboy complexion.’
With Linda being a bit of a hippy and me being a bit of a rocker-hippy, we liked to go to thrift stores and yard sales anyway, so during the week I’d go with Linda to the Salvation Army, places like that, trying to find cool stuff to sell ourselves. Venice Beach is super-packed on the weekend, but during the week the vending stalls or pitches, which were basically just plots in a car park, were mostly empty. You’d make 10 per cent of the money during the week that you did on the weekends, so I rented a stall for $10 a day and just had a clothing rack with a couple of pairs of Levi’s on it, some old hippy paisley dresses, a couple of floral shirts – just a few items that we’d bought from thrift stores. Levi’s had always been in demand. Levi’s 501s were hugely popular in the early eighties in England when I was back in Sheffield. That popularity was a global phenomenon, and quite a cult had developed around certain types of Levi’s – there were guys on the boardwalk that only sold Levi’s and they’d grade them A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 depending on whether they were ripped up or not, were they 501s or were they zip fly, or were they Big Es or Redlines? It was all very specific, and there were collectors who knew all about these details. The prices basically went from, let’s say, ten bucks to thirty bucks depending on how desirable they were.
Like I said, Venice Beach was very popular, so there might have been a hundred thousand people walking up and down each day at weekends, not just buying fake Ray-Bans but also buying these $10, $15, $30 Levi’s. So I knew there was a market. However, there were also a lot of stalls selling a lot of clothes. So we had to offer something different … which is exactly what we did.
How?
We started putting patches on them.
On our first day, we made one hundred and fifty bucks.
Light-bulb moment.
I was like, Fuck! This is better than working for the other guy for ten bucks a day! Pretty quickly, my mind was racing. Suddenly, there seemed to be a thousand ideas and opportunities, and before long it wasn’t just Levi’s that we were customizing. For example, I bought a bedspread which was covered in jets and rocket ships and graphics like that. What I didn’t realize was that it was a Peter Max bedspread, this renowned artist from the sixties who has painted for presidents and is widely regarded as an icon of pop art. Among other styles, he was famous for doing these sort of psychedelic collages, very trippy, incredibly bold and striking. I bought this bedspread at a Salvation Army for like three bucks, cut it up and made patches for all these jeans. Remember, as a kid, I’d been into all those heavy-metal bands and I was always putting patches on my jeans and jackets, so this all felt very natural to me. Except this time around it was much more about Americana, inspired by my love of Evel Knievel, the Dukes of Hazzard, Captain America, the red, white and blue.
We also started buying old dashiki shirts with all these beautiful patterns, as well as vintage paisley cowboy shirts and dresses. The clothes we were making also tapped into a classic west-coast rocker look, so there were velvet pants, that southern look, Lynyrd Skynyrd, floppy hats and so on. This fitted in well with the whole atmosphere of Venice Beach, which at that time was still very much on the whole a Grateful Dead/Black Crowes vibe, mixed in with a splash of the Janis Joplin/Haight-Ashbury hippy shit.
Before we could blink, we were sewing constantly, selling tons of clothes and working very long hours. We were buying all these thrift-store items, putting patches on them and selling them on … and they were proving to be very popular. I was buying Levi’s for fifty cents, a dollar, dollar-fifty, sometimes two dollars, at either yard sales or Salvation Army thrift stores. We’d do the rounds on the weekends, Mondays and Tuesdays, rarely spending more than twenty, thirty bucks, then go back to Linda’s flat in Venice and start cutting them up and sewing patches on to jeans that we would then sell for twenty-five bucks a pair. We were doing all this ourselves. Linda had a sewing machine, and we could probably do a batch in an hour that would cost us no more than five bucks in total, plus our time.
It all happened so quickly that there was a lot of trial and error. We were throwing around ideas and changing price points all the time. You know, ‘We could’ve sold those for $25; let’s put some more patches on and see how they sell.’ We’d find the Levi’s somewhere else cheaper, or maybe get a bulk discount, try a different style – some ideas worked, others didn’t.
All of a sudden, on some days we were completely out of stock. At the time, I wrote another letter home to Mum, saying:
Finally found the motivation to put pen to paper, life for me is busy and rewarding and quite stimulating although sometimes working at home can become a little bit intense, especially when the whole house is covered in fabric and pins and stuff … Hoping to start selling the jeans and select items of clothing to expensive vintage clothing shops soon.
Another postcard to my parents revealed just how quickly it was escalating: ‘Well, kids, almost a week and a half has passed since I last wrote that card and the jeans business … is almost to the point where we are now selling them quicker than we can make them.’
That’s when I first started to realize that if you work hard, stay motivated, are creative and have your own individual sense of style, you can achieve whatever you want to do.
Something was happening …
In quite a short time frame, the boardwalk stall was making good money and we were super-busy, selling a lot of jeans. When we weren’t selling on the boardwalk, we’d put them in a duffel bag and go down Melrose and start selling to actual stores. There was no making an appointment to see the buyer, no formalities; we’d just walk right in with our bag of clothing and they’d pick what they liked. We might have been selling them for between twenty and thirty bucks on the boardwalk, so we’d wholesale them for like ten to fifteen bucks to these stores. That proved pretty popular, too, so the business was growing organically, and quickly. Within six months, we went from $150 on that first day to doing $500 during the week. We started renting a booth for the whole week, and that cost us somewhere in the region of a thousand bucks for the month, but on the weekends we were doing a grand a day, sometimes two grand a day. All cash.
One day, someone asked us if we could make a ‘Cat in the Hat’-style hat. Truth be told, I didn’t really know what they meant, because I hadn’t read any of the Dr. Seuss books. But I got the book and thought to myself, That looks pretty easy … so we started making a pattern influenced by that request. At the time, there was a vogue for lining these big floppy hats with cheap black satin, but I just thought that was a bit simple. I figured if we could line it with something cool inside, then it would be reversible, which in turn would double its appeal.
Along the boardwalk there were also these people selling Guatemalan tams and caps, and one day I bought a floppy velvet renaissance hat, kinda like a court-jester style, and I started wearing that on the boardwalk. I bought one of those Guatemalan ones, too, for ten bucks, but then took it apart piece by piece and made a bigger, exaggerated version. I essentially just added like an inch to each panel, oversized the look. Then we started making these little hats that were reversible, but instead of doing them in the Guatemalan fabrics, we’d do them in velvets, kinda like an Alice in Wonderland vibe. Before you know it, we had a range of these big exaggerated floppy hats, as many as twenty-five different styles. Pretty quickly, that sort of became our niche. One of the hat tags from that range said: ‘The exaggerated, whimsical shape is our distinctive trademark … to enjoy this hat at its best, wear it at all times and don’t leave home without it.’ We advertised the reversible hats as flexible enough ‘to switch depending on which side of town you are on’. Aside from the patched jeans, we were selling these reversible hats for $12.50, top hats were $20, hooded jackets were $75 and velvet trousers were $50.
Our timing was fortunate because around 1988 and 1989 the rave scene hit. Back in the UK, bands such as the Happy Mondays and the Inspiral Carpets were at the forefront of rave culture, which centred around the so-called ‘Madchester’ scene. Rave was not a mainstream genre in the USA, but on the underground, certainly where I was, it was huge. There were all these fashion and merchandise companies that would do loud soap-box-style graphic print T-shirts with slogans saying, ‘Rave On’ or ‘On Drugs’ or ‘E’, and it became this whole big crossover scene that was sort of on the tail end of Burning Man/Grateful Dead/counterculture mashed up with skate/surf – this huge Californian cultural melting pot. They had superstar DJs that would fly in from London to perform at these underground rave warehouse clubs with big elaborate flyers being handed out. You were talking about thousands of people turning up. They were all wearing baggy jeans, overalls, patchwork and, yes, big floppy hats. That scene brought us a substantial volume of sales, so we were appreciative of the timing there, but no one gifted us that success; we had to work hard and act fast to keep up with the demand.
By 1989, we had so many styles and ideas that we needed to produce a catalogue. In that first catalogue, there were about a dozen hats – floppy ones, renaissance, court jesters with three pipes, a Lewis Carroll Mad Hatter short top hat and also a little renaissance cloche. The super-popular ‘Cat in the Hat’ style came in two sizes, a 12-inch one and a towering 24-inch option which we advertised as having ‘enough fabric to cover the Earth … to enjoy this garment at its best, chill … and shape well before wearing’. They were all full-on whimsical pieces that sort of covered three bases: the Grateful Dead vibe, the southern rock scene and then also rave culture, all at the same time.
About a year into doing all this, we found out about a trade show in New York which could potentially open up our range to a massive new market, effectively nationwide. This was a considerable step up, but I just felt it was worth the risk. You know me by now … Go with your gut instinct, Magnus.
Linda had a friend who lived in Queens, so we stayed with him and took the train into the Javits Center for this NYC trade fair. Well, long story short, it turned out we were the big hit of the show and believe it or not we took $100,000 worth of orders, including one from the Disneyland theme parks, who bought 144 each of twelve styles. Another postcard at the time told my mum that, ‘We are very busy, our trip to New York was great. We took in $70,000 of orders with just the hats. Now we need more sewers.’
We were on to something, but it was still essentially just Linda and me sewing like crazy. As my postcard home had pointed out, the problem was that we were expanding at a faster rate than we could physically cope with. If Disney were ordering 144 dozen hats and the jeans were being sold into certain stores a hundred pairs at a time, then something had to change. The bottom line now was that we couldn’t make the gear fast enough to meet orders, so we started to look for a sewing contractor. However, when circumstances in the wider world took a very serious turn, demand for our clothes was about to ratchet up another notch.
Sometimes events in the outside world occur that you have no control over, that you can’t plan for but that have repercussions in your own small world. In terms of my story, what happened was that in August 1990 the Gulf War broke out. This was an horrific conflict and naturally it was all over the news. Inevitably, like many conflicts over the years, it led to a surge in patriotism. How did this affect Linda and me? Well, at that time we had three core styles of jeans that were selling: chintzy floral/paisley patterns; the more hard-core, velvet psychedelic stuff; and then these red, white and blue, Stars & Stripes-inspired styles. I’d often be Downtown sourcing printed flag fabric on rolls, Stars & Stripes-style cloth, and we’d designed a number of styles inspired by those colours and styles, such as an Uncle Sam Stars & Stripes hat. Much of the styling and colour palettes were obviously personally inspired by legends from my childhood such as Evel Knievel.
Well, when the war broke out, suddenly people couldn’t get enough of this stuff. Whether it was good fortune or not, the reality was that we had these styles already designed and available – we were ahead of the curve. And in business – I have seen this several times – being ahead of the curve is absolutely crucial.
We soon found a sewing contractor and that obviously eased the pressure on the manufacturing side, although conversely it also introduced a greater cost into the business. A typical week might see us buying some grade C Levi’s for, let’s say, five bucks. Then we were paying someone $5 to put the patches on them and $5 for someone else to sew them. In our apartment in Venice, there’d be a hundred pairs of jeans lined up in different sizes. Then we’d go wash them at the local Laundromat, come back to the apartment and stack them – I guess you could say we were working in our own little sweatshop! Seriously, though, we set up a bench table in the living room, we’d get the fabrics out on there and start cutting and sewing at night, modifying this, trying that, very creative, very enjoyable and, as it turns out, very popular.
We still had the stall on the boardwalk, but we had to employ two people to run that because it was more productive for Linda and me to be out and about sourcing garments and creating new styles than selling the stuff down there. We were still wholesaling to cool stores, and by now we had spread out from LA, too. For example, remember the Royal Oak area of Detroit that I’d enjoyed visiting so much when I was a disillusioned camp counsellor only a few years previously? Well, there was a really cool store there called Incognito that started buying our stuff.
Another great customer was NaNa, which was basically the main distributor of Dr. Martens in the whole of the US. They wholesaled and also had retail stores, and in their stores they carried the patched jeans, the floppy hats, quite a varied inventory of our stock. Within what seemed no time at all, we had over a hundred stores selling our stock.
We were seen as a breath of fresh air, because no one else was doing what we were. For the next couple of years, we kind of had the rule of the roost, we were the stars of the show. Both Linda and I put in some massive hours, neither of us were ever shy of hard work and, besides, this was all so exciting, so creative and very rewarding. I was pretty motivated, to say the least.
Financially, it was also very rewarding. We are talking thousands of dollars in some weeks. In a three-year period, I had gone from sofa-surfing, occasionally stealing a little bit of change and roughing it while watching the pennies, to all of a sudden making quite a lot of cash. We called that first company Venetian Paradise, because we were in Venice and at times that’s what it felt like … I don’t want to call it ‘rags to riches’, because in a sense that’s for someone else to say but, truth be told, it kind of was.
Inevitably, we had to move production out of the apartment. We rented a big garage costing us two hundred bucks a month, which had no phone and no bathroom, so you’d have to go round the corner to use the bathroom. We had four people working for us from that garage, UPS was always coming at the end of the day to pick up these big orders as we shipped stuff out, people were mailing us cheques, stores were phoning up because they’d sold out (again), and we were dropping a few orders off ourselves. We were working hard and learning as we went along. Just because business was booming didn’t mean we weren’t always looking to keep costs in hand, too. For example, around the corner was a pet-supply place and we used to go there and get their surplus boxes to reuse and recycle, instead of paying for new ones. We never went above our means, so to speak. We were actually beginning to pay a bit of tax, and Venetian Paradise was really flying.
Back then, it was easier to get a social security number and open a bank account, plus I was paying tax and employing people. I kind of felt like, Fuck, how bad can it be? What is the worst-case scenario? I could get deported … okay, I will have to face that if it happens. That sense of energetic abandonment meant I took more risks than I would have done in England. I want to say I was reckless, but to be fair there was always a very strong sense of purpose. I wasn’t just throwing random ideas around or taking loads of time off. I was super-motivated.
If it seems like quite a leap from bumming around the Hollywood scene to suddenly having this clothing business taking off, well, on the one hand I can agree with that. However, to me, there is a logic, a pattern, a common thread. Let me back up. Remember me telling you about doing all that running as a kid at the Hallamshire Harriers, from about nine years old to around thirteen? Well, I was super-motivated when I had that little bit of success. Maybe success isn’t actually the right word – I think it’s more that I am motivated when I find something that I like to do. Back at that young age, it was a simple dynamic – I really liked running, I became pretty good at it and I enjoyed the challenge. I’ve always liked challenges.
When I arrived in Los Angeles and was sofa-surfing and hanging out with all the rockers, I was having a great time socially, but I wasn’t achieving anything or being challenged. Yes, those were good times in a lot of ways, and I don’t regret them at all. However, there was no challenge in it for me. So when the clothing thing took off pretty quick, that represented a personal accomplishment. Finally, I was doing something that was successful and fulfilling and creative. This all happened purely organically and out of the blue; suddenly I had success and a job that needed creativity and drive. Fortunately, I teamed up with Linda and we got on great, we were very creative together. Suddenly, I could see a future in America, because I couldn’t have sustained that somewhat nomadic, non-structured, temporary lifestyle I had been leading in Hollywood. That can only last for so long.
A huge part of the satisfaction I was getting from the clothing business was that I had made my own identity. I had become ‘the crazy English hat guy on the boardwalk’ in Venice and people would literally come down specifically to see me. Most days I’d wear a top hat that was eighteen inches tall and patched-up hippy jeans. I was modelling my own product. We even had a flyer that said, ‘Look for the big hat!’, and I would sign off my postcards and letters home with a little cartoon of a dude in a big hat, too. We started to get a little bit of press – a couple of magazines did pieces on us because everyone writes about Venice Beach. One magazine called us ‘one of the hottest hat companies in the country’. The writer John Youngs said that, ‘Venetian Paradise hats are slowly but surely working their way into the fabric of American and global culture.’ In February 1991, there was an interview in USA Today and I even ended up in one of those Californian tourist books. Most importantly, I was doing something I enjoyed and it really was a success. The money was great, but it was more about standing on my own two feet and doing something a little bit different.
As always, I’d been writing back to my mum and earlier on, when I’d been struggling for money and work, she wanted me to come back to Sheffield, you know, ‘Maybe it’s not meant to be, Magnus …’ that type of stuff. Just being a caring, concerned mum. However, throughout this whole period I was super-determined and motivated, so I’d just kept sticking it out … and now it had turned around. I knew I wasn’t in the position I wanted to be yet, but I had ideas, dreams and very definite thoughts on how to get there.