It was 2014. Seoul. I was living in Gangnam. Gangnam Style was still playing on the radio, much akin to a national anthem.
My outdoor brand Art of Facts Korea was humming along, getting press in magazines like Go Out, with pop ups and events running on the regular with great turnouts, but the profits were slim, if any. I imported US heritage-inspired craft brands like Makr Carry, BestMade Co, Tanner Goods, Kapital, and even some candles and fragrances from Le Labo, all small scale distribution or gray market (smuggled and resold). Most customers could only afford small items like soap dishes and knickknacks, chochkies for decorating interiors or EDC gear for keychains. The bigger stuff drew attention, but most young Koreans don’t have the spending money for frivolous ornaments like a Bestmadeco axe in a city like Seoul that has no fireplaces.
If there was any cash to be found, I’d divert it to buying fabrics and trims for producing my softgoods line: stuffsacks and bags using dead stock military fabric, t-shirts embroidered by craftsmen, handwaxed aprons. The point was to reclaim “heritage” and revitalize interest in craft goods for the modern generation through local manufacturing. Make “Made in Korea” again. My love of cultural quotidian objects such as tools inspired the brand name - get it? Artifacts. A few weeks after I’d release our goods, a similar item would be mass produced by another brand with no connection to the outdoors or heritage. And it would be made in China. The craftsmen Id meet would go out of business, die of cancer, or both. Their children refused to carry the family trade, looking for a way out of their small town villages and a ticket to the big Kpop city of Seoul.
I came to realize my heritage-based business model was fatally flawed and would not work as originally intended. Either somehow find the craftspeople with the skills to make super high quality goods to my spec or just resell their goods at a higher price and take profits off the top. Or, make shitty quality trendy stuff like everything at A-land, Korea’s answer to Urban Outfitters (which used to be cool back in my day in the early 90s when they mostly sold Doc Martens, Dickies, and vintage.) That and my personal life reached a critical juncture when I was given an ultimatum: to either marry my girlfriend I had been dating for 3 years and move to the US (this was a package deal), or to stay and pursue my entrepreneurial endeavors, solo, penniless and heartbroken. With regard to my romantic career, in retrospect, hindsight is 20/20. I chose the former, but should have stuck to my guns with the latter.
Fast forward to three years later after having gotten married and moved with my wife back to NYC, I found myself divorced and riddled with way more debts than I had begun with from Art of Facts. But through it all, the relationships, the networking, the friendships formed were worth every moment of misery and sleepless nights worrying about whether my overdraft protection would cover the overdraft fees from a negative bank account balance.
Why? I had learned the ropes of the product development process, from concept to manufacture and distribution. I picked up on cues about the nuances of the apparel industry and others, since Korea was still a hotbed for designer brands. I had met with distributors and brand managers for the most widely recognized global apparel brands and household names, and had broken bread with the founders of some of them. I had culled talent, tested my mettle, and piled up favors from people I knew I could trust with my back. You just can’t beat hands-on experience and failure is your best teacher. I had learned the Facts of Life. The hard way. This was the Art of Facts. Now it was time to evolve, to adapt, to morph into a new form. “Life is Flux.” is my mantra, based on an inevitable truth. So I became the Art of Flux.
And most of all, I did it… my way….
