by Zac Dubasik
In streetwear, time passes at roughly the same pace as dog years. With great regularity, even relatively successful brands are here today, gone tomorrow. The fact that The Hundreds have been relevant in the scene since 2003 is virtually unparallelled.
One thing that’s set The Hundreds apart though is their insistence on not being merely a streetwear brand, but a media company. Sure, they have four flagship stores, but it’s their blog, which has been updated nearly every single day since their inception, they take the most pride in.
The sneaker community played an integral part in its creation. They even went as far as launching their own footwear line a few years back. While the brand’s runners say that the line made money, it ultimately was a much different beast than apparel, and was eventually was shuttered upon the realization that they’d let the big footwear brands do what they do best.
Not coincidentally, it was when their footwear line ended that opportunities to collaborate on footwear projects began to roll in. Black Friday will mark the first of these collaborations, when their Reebok Pump collaboration hits The Hundreds retail locations. The shoe will retail for $149.99, and also be available internationally at Reebok Certified Network Retailers.
We had a chance to catch up The Hundreds founders, Ben and Bobby Hundreds, at Cleveland’s Xhibition boutique earlier this week. Find out more about this upcoming collaboration and their thoughts on sneaker culture below.
Could you talk about just how integrated sneakers and streetwear are, and how integral the sneaker community has been to you guys getting started, and your ongoing success?
Bobby: For us, it’s funny, because it’s the first thing that brought us together – we bonded over sneakers. We both grew up differently, but I think sneaker culture entered both of our lives, and kind of captured our imaginations. We can attribute a lot of the formulation, but also the initial success of The Hundreds, because of sneakers. We just gained a lot of traction in the sneakerhead community through Niketalk, and then from there, it just kind of exploded.
Did you ever design product specific sneaker releases in mind?
Ben: Not really, no. We definitely don’t do it now, and back then we didn’t really do it. What we did do a lot of though is, Bob and I like black already as it is, so we made a lot of black and white shirts, and black, white and red shirts, so that would easily just go with Jordans – because every Jordan is black, white and red. So, it just made sense. But, let’s say for example, Grapes were coming out – we wouldn’t make a white, turquoise and purple shirt.
You’ve talked about how a good collaboration is one that happens naturally. How did your upcoming collaboration with Reebok come about?
Bobby: It’s been a dream of ours to work with Reebok, and especially a Reebok Pump. It was such an iconic shoe for us growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We had the opportunity to work with Reebok, so we asked if we could work on a Pump. And when it came to which Reebok Pump, my personal favorite Pump when I was growing up was this AXT. It wasn’t the basketball Pump that everyone else was wearing. It felt a little bit sleeker, because it was a lower profile, and the design of it 
stood out. I remember seeing it for the first time on my friend, and just really wanting them because the color combo was really cool. It was kind of like the San Jose Sharks-ish. So we wanted to work with that shoe; it hadn’t been done a lot. And when we asked if we could work on it, they said yes. We worked with the same color pallet, but just inverted all of the colors, to make it our own. We tried to keep it true to the original. And it is really a dream come true that we got to manipulate the ball on the tongue, and to turn it into a bomb. To us, it’s just crazy. It’s like if we could turn the Apple icon into a bomb on the back of a phone or something. [laughs] It’s that big of a piece of Americana to us, that we got to mess with.
Was that an idea you brought to them? Was there any pushback?
Ben: They were pretty interested! They said, “Wow, that’s a great idea, we’ve never had someone come to us with that.” And at first, they were like, “We don’t know if we can do it, let us see.” And they came back, months later, and were like, “Here you go, do you like it?” And they nailed it.
You guys decided to get into footwear yourselves for a while. Could you talk about what your initial goals with that were, and what became of it?
Bobby: Our eyes are always bigger than our stomachs. When we started this company, we didn’t want to just create a T-shirt company. We wanted to create an overall apparel company. And we were like, as long as we’re making apparel, we should be literally head-to-toe, and do our own footwear program as well. And we felt like there was this void in the marketplace where maybe a consumer didn’t want to buy from the big three, or maybe they were tired of the stuff that was out there and they wanted something new and different, and independent. So, we had those intentions going in to create a footwear brand, and we had a fun time doing it while it lasted.
Do you think that the fact there are so few relevant footwear brands is either a positive or negative to a streetwear brand like yourself?
Ben: I don’t think so. There are five or six sneaker brands that sneakerheads wear, and it is kind of what it is. I don’t think it’s bad at all. I think that those guys just make the best footwear. Bob said it earlier. The cream always rises to the top, and Nike is the best. Vans is the best. Reebok is the best. adidas is the best. ASICS. New Balance. Those guys really make the best shoes. And of course, everyone is going to want the best, no matter what. And I think that’s what attracts sneakerheads to those brands.
Nostalgia is something that’s played a part in your brand, and it obviously plays a big part in the sneaker community as well. But it seems like the timeframe of how soon you can be nostalgic for something keeps getting shorter and shorter.
Bobby: I think that’s just the hyper-accelerated nature of what the Internet has done. But I totally agree. I think people used to wait a lot longer to reissue stuff – especially in the sneaker world. Like Jordans, you wouldn’t get every three-to-five years, like they do now. I think some of that’s the Internet, and some of it is also just because people are capitalizing and figuring out how to optimize the nostalgia market and nostalgia economy, and being like, ‘Oh, people really have a thirst for this, we’ll just keep doing it faster and more and more, because there’s more money in doing it that way, instead of waiting another 20 years to bring something out.’ Licensing is a giant monster now. All these licensing companies are making billions of dollars by going, ‘This cartoon, everyone is going to want it when we bring it back out in five years and ten years.’ No one used to think like that when we were growing up. Licensing is only about a 30 or 35-year-old thing.
