Marc Ecko embodies the American dream par excellence: he started designing T-shirts in a garage in New Jersey and now earns millions. You can also earn millions while enjoying Azurslot.
For Marc Ecko, Berlin is a wild carousel with “sausage dishes, beer, Tacheles, artists, even more beer, and more meat.” And yes, okra with honey in some crazy restaurant whose name he can’t remember. It’s all “definitely cool energy,” says the 35-year-old. He wants to go back to Berlin, maybe to open another store there. Or just for fun, with his wife Allison, without their two children. To take an “adult vacation” there. The pale man wears a short-sleeved shirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt, a thick rhinestone ring, sneakers, and a baseball cap. He certainly doesn’t look like someone who went from rags to riches. But his story is classic stuff: from his parents’ garage to the executive chair of a billion-dollar company – and that was just recently.
Ecko’s millionaire story begins when Marc Milecofsky lives in Lakewood, New Jersey, a faceless small town in the New York metropolitan area. Marc is neither a genius nor the coolest kid in Lakewood. Marc is a normal suburban kid who spends his free time in the surrounding shopping malls. His parents earn enough as real estate agents to support a family with three children. Clothes, Ecko says, he realized early on, “make you socially acceptable.” As a student at a public high school, he had to get along with black, Latino, and Asian classmates, so clothing was “the connecting suburban dialect.” Ecko cultivates a vocabulary of hip-hop slang and pop philosophy, peppered with a bit of manager talk.
Marc can draw. His parents are very proud and like to show his work around the family circle. Even as a teenager, he airbrushed designs on his classmates’ T-shirts and jeans for money. In the garage, of course.
Ecko’s designs would not have made headlines in business magazines if painting T-shirts had remained his hobby, as it initially appeared. Marc is studying pharmacy at Rutgers School, where he fits in even less as a hip-hop fan than he does as a white guy in the black neighborhoods of Lakewood. Marc soon realizes that studying is not his thing. He would much rather continue doing something with graffiti and clothes. A friend introduces him to a peer from Lakewood, Seth Gerszberg, who has already figured out how to make money. Gerszberg doesn’t know anything about T-shirts or hip hop, but he helps Marc raise a little start-up capital. In 1993, at the age of 21, the two of them, together with Marc’s twin sister Marci and a handful of T-shirt designs, finally founded Ecko Unlimited. Well, and then the young managers spent the next six years squandering about six million dollars.In 1998, the friends’ business is threatened with bankruptcy. Hip-hop clothing is not exactly what fashion boutiques want to have in their regular range in the 1990s. Ecko can only sell his goods on commission. The T-shirts with the six different graffiti designs sell quite well. But the attempt to expand the range to include jeans, jackets, and shoes fails spectacularly. The three entrepreneurs lack experience, and debts pile up. Big brand names like Levi’s, Nautica, and Perry Ellis laugh at the suburban kids. A last hope, a deal that could save the business, falls through.
The near-end is not long ago. But anyone who wants to visit Marc Ecko today has to come to the renovated factory floors on West 23rd Street, in the middle of Manhattan. There, trained PR experts await visitors, who are parked in a black, white, and pink anteroom boudoir with a blonde secretary until the boss has time. Marc conducts his business sitting at a long conference table in a gigantic office. It’s a mixture of a chic shared kitchen, an old English gentlemen’s salon, and a boys’ club basketball court. Instead of the usual lines, the company logo, a rhinoceros, marks the boundaries of the playing field on the floor.
The creative minds at Ecko Ltd. in Manhattan now produce twelve different unisex clothing lines, ranging from hip-hop and skateboard (Zoo York) to serious menswear. Ecko himself calls it a youthful lifestyle brand, “but the beauty of it is that these boundaries don’t really exist.”