A blog post from Thursday features photos of model and disc jockey Anna Dang skateboarding in front of the Hundreds' warehouse.
"Young brands like this use social media to do a much better job of speaking to the customer than older, more traditional companies," said Eli Portnoy, a Los Angeles brand strategist and marketing expert. "Their blog creates a forum for exchange, which is what younger people want out of their brands nowadays."
When the Hundreds started in 2003, most street-wear brands with decades on the scene didn't have websites or blogs.
"People thought I was just corny and it was pretty nerdy to have a blog you wrote on every day," Kim said.
But as the Internet became a cultural force and blogging's popularity grew, Kim and Shenassafar seemed less and less like the odd men out. Other brands started to take notice, said Dominick DeLuca, a former VJ for MTV's "Headbangers Ball," who owns Brooklyn Projects.
"I never even heard the word 'blog' when those guys started talking to me about it," DeLuca said. "Now I blog. Everybody has a blog. You can't have a successful street-wear brand without having a blog anymore. It just doesn't make sense not to."
Propelled partly by the success of its blog, the Hundreds' sales have been growing rapidly. The company made $4.8 million in sales in 2008, up from $1.8 million in 2007 and $900,000 in 2006, Shenassafar said.
Like other street-wear brands, the company's lines feature T-shirts with bold graphics, layered pieces, strong colors on baseball caps and shoes, hooded sweat shirts and dark denims. The Hundreds products are meant to reflect a Los Angeles sensibility rooted in the 1980s and '90s, when its founders were growing up.
In the Hundreds stores, one on Rosewood Avenue and the other on Post Street in San Francisco, bright red and yellow T-shirts, green shoes and purple caps are displayed against black wooden shelves and flooring.
The Los Angeles store is small and narrow, with an art installation of a hill topped with trees and a blue sky by Los Angeles artist Tofer tucked along a wall.
The year-old San Francisco store is almost three times larger and painted black, with shelves set into Batcave-like rock walls and pillars embedded with fake stacked skulls.
Other street-wear brands have grown quite large: Irvine-based Stussy Inc., which started in 1984, has 15 stores in eight countries. Supreme started in 1994 and has seven stores: one in L.A., one in New York and five in Japan.
