Marc Ecko

Chairman of the Board and Chief Creative Officer, Marc Ecko Enterprises

Fashion Icon Turned Business Mogol (with Heart)

It may not be the case that everything Marc Ecko touches turns to gold. But it sure does seem that way.

In the early 1990s, Ecko dropped out of Rutgers University, where he was studying pharmacology, to launch a clothing line with six T-shirt designs, employing his twin sister and a hometown friend. Fast-forward 15 years and Marc Ecko Enterprises includes not just a dozen lines of clothing and accessories but a magazine, a production company and a videogame that centers on a graffiti artist's fight against authorities who want to suppress freedom of expression.

All told, global sales came to more than $1.5 billion last year. That's not bad for a Jersey boy who started out airbrushing designs onto shirts and jackets for his school friends, and who almost folded his company when, after five years, it was $6.5 million in debt.

In all his endeavors, he says, "the common thing that has always been in my formula for success is finding the right balance between what makes me creatively content and selfishly happy and a practical business that others will be able to appreciate. It's finding that balance so that you're not just designing for an elite or selling out, but doing something a little more populist and accessible that still makes you and all the people around you happy."

Of course it helps to have antennae that are exceptionally attuned to the national zeitgeist. When Ecko was starting out, urban clothing was seen as something vaguely threatening that appealed mainly to rappers and gangsters. Ecko's genius was in realizing that the genre held crossover appeal for the suburbs, and that he could meld various subcultures – hip-hop, skateboarders, surfers and just plain middle-class kids – that until that time rarely mixed.

Indeed, despite his attraction to such urban art forms as graffiti, Ecko's insight into the market came from his quintessentially suburban background – his "cul-de-sac cred," as the New York Times called it.

Urban fashion "would not be the dominant and mainstream force it is today without suburban fans," the Times noted in a 2005 profile of Ecko. In defining his brand, the paper said, Ecko has shown a skill for navigating between ostensible opposites of "black and white, urban and suburban, heritage and novelty, new talent and established talent."

Also important, Ecko says, is that he came of age at a time of exceptional cultural and social ferment. Some might remember the 1980s as a decade of big hair, parachute pants and bad music, but Ecko sees it as a pivotal point in American cultural life.

"To reflect on it now from the vantage point of 2008, you realize that so many things happened in the '80's – the democratization of media culture, the boom of cable television, the narrative of street culture becoming accessible, the cities going into the suburbs, the war on drugs, Reaganomics, the first MTV megastars, surf wear and skate brands, the emergence of videogaming as the pastime of young males," Ecko says. "Hip-hop was the new rock and roll. We put down the basketball and picked up the remote control. There was a hyper-awareness among white people of the narrative of people of color."

All of these elements would come together in Ecko's clothing designs and his other businesses. "There's no one definitive voice for what's cool or what's next. It's a convergence of elements for you to perceive what's next or what's coming in line and what might tip."

Despite his success – and sometime notoriety (for instance in 2006, he released a video that seemed to show him "tagging" Air Force One with graffiti reading "Still Free"; the video was so realistic that the Pentagon had to issue multiple denials after the incident received serious news coverage) Ecko remains down-to-earth and serious. To help those less fortunate, he founded the Tikva Children's Home, an orphanage in Ukraine, as well as Sweat Equity Enterprises, a design and innovation laboratory that aims to redefine vocational education.

"I don't measure success in my life or at the end of the year by my sales figures," he continues. "The struggles in the early years – getting in debt, making business mistakes – gave me a great sense of groundedness," he says. "I'm doing what I can to try to get a little bit of insurgency going among my peers, get them to think about the larger issues."