Unlabel

Selling You Without Selling Out

Marc Ecko

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781451685312
• eBook ISBN: 9781451685336
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Fashion Design
• Index: Business

From one of the most provocative entrepreneurs of our time, Marc Ecko reveals his formula for building an authentic brand or business in a compelling how-to guide that’s perfect to “educate the next generation of dreamers” (Kirkus Reviews).

As instructive as it is innovative, Unlabel empowers you to channel your creativity, find the courage to defy convention, and summon the confidence to act and compete in any environment.

This visual blueprint teaches you how to grow both creatively and commercially by testing your personal brand against the principles of the Authenticity Formula.

Marc Ecko shares the bruising mistakes and remarkable triumphs that reveal the truth behind his success, growing from a misfit kid airbrushing T-shirts in his parents’ garage to the bold creator of two hugely successful branded platforms—Ecko Unltd. and Complex Media. As Ecko explains, it’s not enough to simply merge your inner artist with business savvy, you must understand the anatomy of a brand, starting with its authentic spine.

With Unlabel, you will discover your own voice by overcoming fear, take action and deliver on your promises, understand why failure is essential, learn how your product or service makes people feel, and recognize if your nostalgia for the past is hampering your ability to envision your future.

Unlabel provides a bold and honest approach to building an authentic personal brand, and a roadmap for growing a bootstrap start-up into a sustainable business.

This book breaks down the anatomy of a personal brand as demonstrated by the Authenticity Formula:

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Authenticity¹ is equal to your unique voice,² multiplied by truthfulness,³ plus your capacity for change,⁴ multiplied by range of emotional impact,⁵ raised to the power of imagination.⁶

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CHAPTER 1

AWE

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I am a brand, but I am not a label. My brand is Marc Eckō. You too are a brand. Whether you know it or not. Whether you like it or not. A brand is not skin-deep. Labels are skin-deep, but a brand—a true, authentic brand—is made of blood and bones, skin and organs. A brand has a heartbeat.

The anatomy of a brand, in turn, is defined by its authenticity. And just like a doctor can’t describe the wonders of the human body in a pithy one-line description, a brand’s authenticity can’t be clearly defined in a Twitteresque 140 characters.

Hard work is required to understand, grow, and nurture the anatomy of a brand. You can’t do it on the surface. You can’t slap on a “Brand Band-Aid.” You have to dig deep and poke around with a scalpel.

To understand the anatomy of the human body, doctors use tools. They use stethoscopes, exams, and a mountain of knowledge that dates back to Henry Grey and Hippocrates. I, too, have a tool. It’s a formula. To understand the anatomy of a brand, I created a formula that explains the nervous system, the heartbeat, the spine, and the core of a brand’s authenticity. It’s not straightforward. It’s not a tidy 1, 2, 3.

This is a book that explores the anatomy of a brand. And it uses this formula—the Authenticity Formula—to explain the cross sections of that anatomy. Each chapter peels back a layer and dissects a variable of the formula. And just as doctors use a body as an example for their students, it just so happens, coincidentally, that I have an example that we can use for our anatomy lesson: me.

My brand started in my parents’ garage in Lakewood, New Jersey, where I spray-painted T-shirts and sold them for $10 a pop. I grew that brand to the tune of a billion-dollar retail business. I’ve built skate brands, hip-hop brands, magazine and video game brands. I’ve built brands that people literally tattoo on their bodies, which is “branding” in the truest sense. But the most important brand that I built was me, the personal brand that’s from my guts to the skin.

My philosophy is simple: unlabel.

Not “un” as in the nihilist or negative sense of the prefix, but in the “refuse” sense of the meaning. Refuse to be labeled.

Fight their labels.

Ignore their labels.

Peel off their labels.

Create your label.

Unlabel.

This takes work. In the same way that you do push-ups to exercise your body, you need to challenge yourself to shake free of the herd, find your own unique voice, and create your personal authentic brand.

Find your swoosh, your Apple, your Rhino.

You’re labeled in hundreds of ways by thousands of people. But how much of this have you consciously controlled? How much have you consciously created? How much of what’s known about you is authentic to you, and how much is merely the perception of others?

When you unlabel, you can be an artist without being a starving artist. You can sell without selling out. To do this, you need to create an authentic personal brand that transcends the gatekeepers (the critics, the haters) who want to put a label on you and gets right to the goalkeepers (the ones who vote, the folks with the shopping carts). The goalkeepers are the only judges who matter.

How people see you, feel you, understand you, and make assumptions about you when you are not in the room are pieces of your personal brand, and this is true whether you’re the president of the United States, a priest, or a plumber. Whatever your product or service, you are essentially selling you. Deal with it.

THIS BOOK IS the story of how I unlabeled myself, defying classifications so that I could grow both creatively and commercially. It’s a personal story, a business story, and a prescriptive course for anyone who wants to grow a brand.

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I’m a brand, but I’m also a creator. I’m both an artist and an instigator.

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Brand. Create. Not mutually exclusive.

Brands are often thought of negatively as the domain of advertising, but a personal brand can be a powerful tool. In times of success, it keeps you grounded. In times of crisis, it keeps you confident. In heightened moments of critical decision making, it hones your improvisational skills. But it doesn’t come easy. It takes real effort, imagination, and follow-through to create your authentic personal brand.

I’m a brand, but I’m also a creator. Are these ideas even compatible? People think of the word creator as something almost divine, while brand is almost vulgar. Brand is all Don Draper; creator is all Michelangelo. Creators do work that is noble and proud—spiritual, ethereal, and impossibly pure. There’s an inherent tension between these two concepts.

Unlabel is about resolving that tension. This requires a fundamental change in your assumptions. You must move from the mind-set of “I am a consumer and I want X” to “I am a producer and I create Y.” Create can be anything; you don’t have to be an artist or musician or inventor. Maybe you create code or create ads; or if you’re a dental hygienist, you create clean teeth.

When you unlabel and create an authentic personal brand, you will broadcast yourself differently to the world. You will think of yourself more actively, not passively. You won’t just use the social network, you’ll become the social network. When you have a rock-solid sense of your own authentic personal brand, everything else—the graffiti you’re tagging, the mix tape you’re hawking, the company you’re launching, the next $1 billion platform you’re stewarding—will flow externally from the inside out; from your guts to the skin.

People can take your job. No one can take away the brand you’ve created and your ability to create again. Let them smash what you’ve been saving, let them burn what you’ve built—when you can create, the power is yours, not theirs. What happens when your job is yanked away? What happens when your career becomes obsolete? What happens when you shit the bed—hard?

To me, these aren’t just rhetorical questions. I’ve had to answer them. I nearly lost all control of my company, I struggled with crushing debt, I even thought I might lose my house. I was a media darling and then a media target.

But it was okay. I was okay. You’ll be okay. Because if you do it right, your brand is still there selling for you, and when you know you can create, your brand will help you recover, get a new job, make new sheets. Your brand is your bedrock. It’s there when your start-up cracks $200 million in revenue, but it’s also there to help you deal with a nasty boss, swallow dire news about the economy, and it’s even there if you face bankruptcy.

When you UNLABEL and create an authentic personal brand, you will broadcast yourself differently to the world. You will think of yourself more actively, not passively. You won’t just use the social network, you’ll become the social network.

Building a brand is like creating your own personal religion. You need to be willing to fight for it, defend it, die for it. It inv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: Awe
• Chapter 2: Fear
• Chapter 3: Action
• Chapter 4: Self
• Chapter 5: What You Say
• Chapter 6: What You Do
• Chapter 7: Capacity for Change
• Chapter 8: Emotional Impact
• Chapter 9: Loyalty to Nostalgia
• Chapter 10: Vision for the Future
• Artists & Instigators Manifesto
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Copyright