Bobby Hundreds Explains How The Hundreds Almost Never Happened

Almost 10 years in the game and counting.

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It’s never easy starting a business; you’re going to face many adversities, a lot of negative flack, and a few Debbie downers saying it’s impossible. As Bobby Hundreds explains, The Hundreds was one of those companies that might never have happened. Bobby recalls a nightmare screen printing experience to eventually buying out and owning its own screen printing business. Below are is an excerpt, visit The Hundreds website to read the whole post.

"We pulled ourselves together and somehow managed to peddle off a fraction of the t-shirts that were somewhat presentable.  With that money, we faced our next dilemma.  Time to find a new silkscreen printshop.

A friend of Ben’s referred us to a shop she had once used for a project, also deep in the Valley, in fact not too far from the Screenprinting Shop of Horrors that crushed our dreams just a month prior.  We walked into that office on a blind whim with a photocopied linesheet of our next season of offerings. We thought we were sitting on Streetwear gold, but the guys who ran this shop could barely suppress their snickers looking at these misguided 23-year-olds with big dreams and shallow pockets.  ”How many t-shirts are you guys trying to produce?” they entertained us, as the stale cigarette smoke hung in the air.  The sticky carpeted floors caked in soot and old paint, the abused pool table re-appropriated into a makeshift worktable, and the counter actually an old bar top, the “office” was built-out to mimic a dingy watering hole. “I dunno,” we responded, “maybe like a hundred shirts?”  That was about all we could afford to print, and furthermore, about as much as we thought we could sell.

They laughed. This time out loud.  ”Guys, do you know how many kids come in here trying to start a t-shirt line?  We don’t have the charity for that.  Do you know what ‘minimums’ are? We do million-t-shirt orders for the State of California. We don’t have the time to separate your artwork, burn the screens, and run the machines for 100 t-shirts. Go somewhere else.'"

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