When the founders of the L.A. clothing brand the Hundreds first met, they were unhappy law school students looking for a way out.
Six years after they started designing T-shirts to ease the boredom they felt in class, 29-year-old Bobby Kim and Ben Shenassafar are running a humming business, complete with a website, blog and their own mini-subculture out of a storefront in the Fairfax District and a warehouse near downtown.
With a second store in San Francisco and a growing buzz about their products, the pair are now confronting a classic small-business dilemma: They want to expand, and experts say they should. But they don't want to lose the hip edge that made them popular in the first place.
The Hundreds employs 30 people and sells logo T-shirts, shoes, shorts and accessories including mouse pads and wallets. The brand is a part of a fashion movement known as street wear, which typically consists of casual clothing aimed at quasi-underground subcultures such as skaters and hip-hop fans.
The company's strategy shows how word of mouth combined with a strong -- and edgy -- online presence can lead to success, especially when the target audience is young adults and teenagers.
Key to the viral nature of its marketing is the Hundreds' blog, at thehundreds.com, which Kim and Shenassafar started when the clothing line launched in 2003.
The idea, Kim said, was to create a way for young customers to feel connected to the company.
"We said, let's have it so the kids interact with us and they feel as much a part of it as we do," he said.
Updated daily by Kim, the website recently registered 1.8 million monthly page views, according to traffic-measuring site Quantcast.com.
The Hundreds shop is one of a cluster of street-wear stores to open around Fairfax Avenue, helping produce a small renaissance in the district's faded commercial area. Street-wear boutique Brooklyn Projects, near Melrose and Fairfax avenues, was the first to open in 2002.
In 2004, the New York brand Supreme arrived, followed by the Hundreds' first store in 2007. When John Earle wanted to open a West Coast store last year for his Boston brand Johnny Cupcakes, the Fairfax District was the first place he looked.
"We're making it a destination spot with these other brands popping up around there," Earle said.
On the blog, Kim writes about the bustling scene: visits to other street-wear stores, celebrities who stop by the shop, or his favorite place to get a burrito.
