When we started the Boys Club we weren't on the road. I just offered to fulfill web orders and wholesale orders and just sort of started working there because I needed employment and as we grew, we opened our own showroom and our offices in New York and I just started doing the sales and the press and PR stuff as the company grew.
Toby Feltwell: "Nigo and I met Pharrell. For some reason, there was a connection with someone who worked on the music side for Pharrell and he ended up using our studio.
We met awhile after that and had dinner. They already had plans to do Billionaire Boys Club. When Pharrell saw what Nigo was doing, he soon realized they were on the same page and that Nigo could be interested in helping out on the brand. Nigo said 'Well I will design it.
You need to send us some clothes. Nino and Pharrell had worked together for a couple ad campaigns at Zoo York. A lot of people were very confused at the beginning because the prices were expensive but that wasn't necessarily because we wanted to have it very expensive. I think it was important to have that motto—"wealth is of the heart and mind, not the pocket"—in place so it can help with the press when people asked him about it.
It was simple to explain it. Nigo is a sage, an unstoppable force that will always continue to inspire. He talked to a bunch of graphic designers about a logo.
With that you can almost visualize and tell what the brand will be about it. I kind of took the vision, alongside of Nigo, and we knew what he was looking for.
I pretty much described what they were looking for and it gave me no doubt. Pharrell was at some club at the time. So I ran down to the club and found him in the DJ booth and gave him the logo, and it was pretty much done. That was pretty much a days worth of work, from deciding that we wanted to help Pharrell alongside of his brand.
Pharrell lost it. He loved the artwork and before leaving Japan, either that next morning or the morning after they already had everything on paper, the full line design.
He started a brand with a partner who already had a successful brand that was already almost 10 years old. I think that really helped. Pharrell also already had a good relationship with the fashion world on his own.
So I think when the two combined, people were very accepting to the fact that he was launching his own clothing. It made sense. Everyone was really supportive. Pharrell is not scared to make a left turn. He's not scared to make a difference. He's very involved and very passionate.
I mean from the time we started our original business, it was all about making things he couldn't find. He wanted to do what it is in his head. When the design office was in Japan, we would go to Japan about four times out the year to see samples, make comments, and just really work with the designer production team to get the line where Pharrell and Nigo were comfortable with.
That was pretty much a day's worth of work, from deciding that we wanted to help Pharrell alongside of his brand. T-shirts and polos; then people started asking about it. It was a fairly small first season, the first collection. We sold it to a showroom, we got orders for it and then we set up an e-commerce site and as soon as we set it live, we got like a thousand orders. It was sort of like the goods showed up from Japan for all the wholesale orders and for our the webstore and it was a little overwhelming because you know we were working out of the basement store in Soho.
It was hundreds of boxes of goods and [when] we go on the website and we got a thousand orders or whatever and we didn't have any experience in what we were about to endeavor. It was a little overwhelming just the two of us.
We had a few people and some friends come help here and there. That night we saw logos for the brand…they were so excited that they couldn't even wait until the next day, they wanted to show it to us at the club.
Not because, we were going to launch the brand, but because I just wanted to see that. I wanted to present everybody with my world, because at that time, I was making Billionaire Boys Club stuff for myself. The quickest thing Nigo could make was sneakers and sweatshirts. As soon as Pharrell got it he started wearing them. Nigo came from Japan and went to Miami and brought like a bunch of T-shirts and sweatshirts so it was just perfect timing.
It was the first time anyone ever saw it on that level, when the video came out. Icecream was diamonds and money. Being that the short conversation with Pharrell and the description of what it meant to him, allowed them to create something within a few hours and they were so excited that they couldn't even wait until the next day, they wanted to show it to us at the club.
The logo was amazing. The building is incredible to have. The personal, the human faculty… That represents all these believers and supporters. Like the army is so much more important and unbelievable. The store is like the by-product of all that great support. We opened our first flagship in Tokyo maybe eight or nine years ago. The New York store makes six years in November. The one thing similar with all the stores is that all of them have this old-school ice cream parlor style for the Icecream floor but when you go to Billionaire Boys Club, it was like you were going to space.
All three stores had that in common, you felt like you were being transported. Especially for me, a kid from the inner city, it was a culture shock. On top of that, to be on a skateboard, it was huge.
Overseas skateboarding is huge. Nigo had Bathing Ape stores. I think it was always the goal to build a brand like that. Very simple. Like he is a kid at the end of the day.
He will always be a kid. We would have dogs on our crotch. Some of the sneakers had cigarettes and beepers on them. It was all the nutty shit that I think we were all collectively into, putting those ideas on the T-shirts and hoodies and pants. Carl Sagan was a huge influence on him, and Leonard Nimoy, who we ran into recently actually, had a TV show during the '70s called In Search Of , which Pharrell was obsessed with.
His first N. We basically developed a relationship and Leland reached out afterwards and said he really liked the brand and once we started using a lot of their graphics, and a lot of their photos, he wanted to take one up and he did. It was pretty crazy. I was at the launch. It was an amazing experience. Pharrell says the one thing he wouldn't do is actually go into space; it makes him nervous. He just appreciates the fact that Leland would take something of his to space. Pharrell has a close relationship with Anna Wintour and I think just her and Pharrell being friends kind of just lent us credibility.
There was also a little quote from Karl where he says how much he loves hip-hop and that he has an iPod with just hip-hop. I think things like that really made people think 'Oh shit, Pharrell is really doing it.
We were designing it in Japan with some legends in the game, we had Nigo and Sk8thing. You know Sk8thing did all the graphics and Nigo was sort of curating our fashion design and using his massive vintage archive as a reference point. Design inspiration, we had some very unique pieces like, what the fuck was that? Like sweatshirt poncho and strange prints on pants and all kinds of stuff.
We would take our prints and make a full suit out of them. We were just starting. His brand of fame stands in so many different areas, from music to fashion, people just want to be down with him. Really, it was just a matter of him doing it.
There really no defining moment. It was just doing it. Pharrell rode for us, from taking us places we probably would have never normally gone to award shows to walking us on red carpets, the whole nine. We got a really good feel of what he did for music people, what he did for fashion people, what he was doing for us kids.
As a skateboarder, that guy loans himself and accessibility and financial backing. Bam gave me Terry Kennedy. And Rob Dyderk was always supportive.
I had the support of all the homies. If anything ever did their research, they will see TK in the Bam show. Because…I had their support. I wanted it to be authentic. I had those two friendships and I liked the idea of skating for Icecream.
It was a good run. People thought he was just some rapper trying to line his pockets off of skateboarders. He didn't want big name people, he wanted kids that represented what the idealism was, which was kids like us that grew up skating. Really, Icecream was more skateboard inspired. The only way to be successful at it was to get together this skate team. It was called the Board Flip 1 and the Board Flip 2, that was the name of the shoe.
Everyone rode for each other really hard. The other side of it was, we would have Pharrell hang out with us at skate parks. It really was [a family]. Just showing that kind of human side to what it was because I think that in the beginning, that message was very convoluted.
Team Ice Cream Vol. In America he had this burgeoning movement with brands like The Hundreds, Crooks and Castles, and all these kids. Ultimately it's like, Pharrell wins. That took some time for people to open their eyes up and really understand. We put such a legitimate plan together going into it and we stuck to it as closely as possible. Loic Villepontoux: "[The skateboard world] is definitely a difficult area to get into. Jay Z gave Pharrell the name Skateboard P—he never named himself.
Skateboarding as a culture allowed him to look at everything growing up. Because I was black but I hung with white boys and skated. So they were like 'Wow! This is realistic! Me and [Pharrell] always sit back and talk about this. He hung out with oddballs in school, he was into skateboarding. All it was was him embracing. Him and Terry had a good relationship and a love for skateboarding. I think that's where that whole program developed out of. It was a flamboyant lifestyle at that time, we travel with Pharrell and stuff ya know.
We created this rock star image for skateboarding and for minorities. When we started, we had a deal in place with Reebok to manufacture the Icecream sneaker and the apparel for Billionaire Boys Club. This was different for Reebok because the apparel was manufactured in Japan. They weren't very comfortable with the way we set this up and so we took the apparel away from them and just worked on the sneakers. But once we started getting all of the art for the sneakers, Nigo always thought it was a waste just to have sneakers for Icecream.
So we started making apparel for Icecream. Nigo and I had our reservations. They were better on some things than others. Footwear was much easier for them [than] apparel because they were coming from a totally different tradition. Eventually, they said they would rather not make [apparel] and it ended up coming back in our direction. I don't think they took the skate stuff that serious because it was the era of the S Dot Carter and G-Unit.
Lil Wayne had a shoe, Lupe Fiasco had a shoe and Pharrell had a whole line and they were winning so hard. When that relationship came to an expiration, you could tell there was a shift in the company. The team would have grown instead of having to reboot and start small again. I fought really hard for them to build a core sales team and they just wouldn't listen. It was like no matter how much Pharrell yelled at people, they just didn't listen.
We were doing so well with it and it was picking up. Reebok and Pharrell, I don't know the details but whatever it was, there was a misunderstanding and they both didn't wanna go further together.
So that whole time, Pharrell was trying to figure out what other joint venture to do to help carry the brand. He was asking me to ride it out and I rode it out for a couple months. Without having a shoe sponsor, I still rode it out with Pharrell because I respect his vision.
It started getting tough in a sense like all the weight just started to come on him. I feel like it gave us a cool mystique. I don't know what [Reebok was] planning to do in terms of distribution.
But I feel like the way things went gave us a big part of our cool and recipe of success. Reebok could've turned us into a version of Y-3 or something. The lawsuit was eventually dropped after the two parties came to an agreement.
And also what made sense for me. I felt like, the cool experiences that Reebok and us shared together were amazing. To climb is to appreciate every step. The cool experiences that Reebok and us shared together were amazing The other kids kept skating. They got picked up by other teams. Everyone just went their own direction. Terry already had some things that he needed to do, myself moving on—it was definitely a personal growth for everybody.
It was a very natural progression: the closing of the door in that first chapter. All Rights Reserved. Gain access to exclusive interviews with industry creatives, think pieces, trend forecasts, guides and more. We charge advertisers instead of our readers. If you enjoy our content, please add us to your adblocker's whitelist.
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