Interview: Amir at Beautiful/Decay Apparel

Posted on | April 21, 2009 | View Comments

Beautiful/Decay Apparel have been working with some of the best underground artists to create amazing T shirts since 2007. Now with expanding lines and growing recognition, we were lucky enough to catch up with Amir Fallah, Beautiful/Decay founder, while we were “on location” in Los Angeles the other week.

We talk T shirts, designs and the power of exclusive all after the drop…

FS: So how did you get to the point of thinking actually Beautiful/Decay should be doing apparel?!

AF: Well, we were doing the magazine and mailing out a lot of copies to these potential advertisers. [Beautiful/Decay magazine showcases new and estabished contemporary artists and is at http://beautifuldecay.com/] So we’d send them to Nike, Adidas, Puma, you know… And a lot of these companies were collaborating with these artists. And they were all, like, young, up-and-coming artists, no one’s ever heard of them, they were all below the radar. After a while I was like – wow they’ve got to be hearing it from us because no one is giving these artists press.

Right around that same time, a couple of the artists were coming to me and saying “So And So Company ripped me off”, or, you know, “I did this project with XYZ Company and they didn’t do a good job with the printing”, you know, these big corporates weren’t handling the artists well. And so a light bulb went off… maybe we should make some stuff other than the publication with the artists. Everybody that works here is an artist, a designer, a musician – so we know what our peers want, so why not create things that will create revenue for the company, but also have it as another way of extending the artist / magazine relationship.

So we started with just four T shirts. And those four shirts really really took off and within a couple of weeks, we had sold them all out, before they were even printed. We planned to print 300 units and we had pre-sold all that, and we had even more orders coming in. And so we were like – maybe there’s something to this T shirt thing!

And so every season we’ve just been kinda like adding a bit more and right now we’re doing hoodies, we’re going to start doing some crew necks. It’s been very gradual, but it’s become a really integral part of [the Beautiful/Decay] business. And it’s nice because we can kinda continue those relationships with these artists, we don’t just feature them once… you know, and then say “goodbye” and never talk to them… Now we’re working with them over and over again. It’s working out really well.

FS: So what are the artists saying about this stuff, what’s the vibe from them?!

AF: The vibe is pretty good, I mean, the way that we usually work with artists is that the shirts are really a true collaborative project. The artists don’t just send me a T shirt graphic and then we just print it. They go through hundreds of revisions because sometimes an artwork will be really good… it’ll be a beautiful painting or drawing or digital illustration, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good T shirt. And that also doesn’t mean we can print it, you know, that it’s capable of being printed, because there are some limitations.

So what we do as the creative directors is go and work with the artists, give them some barriers to work within. A lot of times we will take their artwork and will re-colour it a little bit, you know, we’ll work with them… there’ll be a back and forth dialogue. So not only can we have a cool graphic and a cool T shirt, but have something that’s actually sellable. Because, at the end of the day, if an artist spends all their time and they make a great T shirt, but no one’s willing to buy it, well then… it doesn’t do Beautiful/Decay and good, and also it hurts the artist too because they don’t earn any money from their shirt and they don’t get any exposure. So we really try to make every shirt as popular as possible, make sure that’s it’s going to sell, make sure that it’s going to do well in stores. Because at the end of the day we can hire that artist over and over again and you know, again it’s like a win win situation. So they’re really collaborative. They’re not just the one offs…

[Amir digs in a rack of shirts we’re standing next to and pulls out “Tennis Club” by Rob Thom]

AF: Like for instance this, this is one of the first shirts we did… by an artist named Rob Thom. He is not computer savvy at all, he just does paintings and drawings. So I really wanted to do a shirt with him, but I didn’t know exactly how to go about it because he’s a painter… So he gave me all these pencil drawings that he does. What I did was fed them through a fax machine and made them have this kinda grainy, you know, look to them. Then I went in and coloured certain aspects of his black and white drawings. So these are actually hundreds of drawings that he designed that I combined to make one shirt so it really was like a 50/50 collaboration. He did it half way, then he gave me the source materials and I made it into a shirt. And that process is very common for what we do.

FS: That’s great… So do artists now clamour, I mean, they must want to be in the magazine… Are you getting to the stage where they don’t care if they’re in the magazine or on a shirt?

AF: No it’s really a package deal because we don’t let anyone do a shirt without first being featured in the magazine. We really wanna keep the emphasis on the art world intact so what we usually do is we feature somebody in the magazine and once they’ve been featured, then we’ll invite them to do a shirt or a hat or some other product. So all these artists that have done shirts for us have been in the magazine in some form whether they’ve done a freelance illustration for us or have a big ten page feature, they’ve been in the magazine in some capacity. And then the other thing, other times we do a couple of shirts in house every season Like this “BD or Die” shirt. It’s a graphic that’s based off of a the old video game Skate or Die. It’s the same typeface and this is actually all the same artwork from the box cover. So sometimes we’ll do some stuff in house but 90% of it is done by the artists we feature in the mag.

FS: So what next for the shirts and everything, what’s the next step?!

AF: We’ve just been going through a lot of growing pains because when we started we had no experience with the apparel industry so we’ve just had to play a lot of catch up and  learn how the industry works. Last year we restructured the entire company, we had a couple of buy outs. I bought out a couple of my business partners, so now going into 2009 we’re really trying to fine tune this business so we can escalate its growth… So we’re on a very tight schedule now, we’re releasing apparel four times a year, for every season, where in the past we were releasing twice a year. We’re doing smaller shipments every season, but then we’re coming out more often. The goal of that is to always have product in store and have new product that we can always put out into the market and have people excited. This last winter we didn’t do hoodies we kinda took a break, but starting in Fall we’re going to do hoodies again and from that point we’re just going to keep growing it little by little. The goal is to, within a year, go into a full cut and sell line but we don’t wanna rush it, we really wanna make sure that we know how to do T shirts really well, we know how to do hoodies really well, crew necks really well and then we can expand.

FS: How important is niche for you right now – how important is this for your T shirts?

AF: We don’t really do a lot of exclusive runs of the apparel pretty much we print up as many as we have. But one of the projects that I’m working on right now is to start doing online exclusive apparel where once a month we release a shirt and maybe it’s only 250 units that are ever made and once it’s sold out it’s sold out you can’t ever get it again. We might introduce that because that is a popular thing with our readers.

So we are going to start doing that but there’s gotta be a balance when you do a project like that… It’s great, but the artists don’t make a lot of money because the units are really low and we don’t make a lot of money so there’s gotta be… even though there are a lot of people that say, oh it’s not about the money… and this and that – you know you have to be realistic… the better that Beautiful/Decay does the better that the artists we work with do so we do wanna make sure that we are a really healthy profitable company and so that we can really help the artists’ careers over the long term. Otherwise, if you just do shirts where you do 50 units and your entire line is like that you’re going to go bankrupt, unless you have a trust fund… which we don’t! There’s no way to sustain that. So we have to be realistic but we still want to do fun exciting projects.

Since we’re becoming more of our own line and the line’s growing, we want to take the focus back onto us and do our own in house limited items here and there. If we do one every month that’ll be twelve designs a year. So we might tie that in with an issue of the magazine where the first 200 copies of the magazine come with a limited T shirt or something… you know, we’re still working out the kinks but we’re doing to do some exciting stuff like that…

FS: That sounds really cool… And so what about the worldwide feel for the style? Would you say that the B/D style is a very LA style?

AF: No… it’s very global. I think this style comes more from the artists that we work with rather than a certain region. I mean we have artists I don’t even know where they live… This next season we have a Russian artist, we have a couple of Americans, we have a Brazilian, we have two artists from Japan, one from China, I mean, they’re all over the place.

FS: And how do you find them originally?

AF: I just find them on the internet, or by going to various art fairs, or art shows. I myself am an artist so I’m always interested in seeing what other people are doing so I’m constantly on the internet finding artists. If I see somebody from Russia who’s doing really interesting work I might not contact them right away to feature them. But I’ll bookmark their website or I’ll write down their name and then maybe a year and a half later I’ll revisit them… you know, when the timing’s right. That I do all the time. There have been artists that have been in the back of my mind for five years and then I’ll track them down and after a while do something with them, it’s very common.

FS: And if we were going to push you to pick a favourite… Is there anything that stands out, is there anything on the rack there, anything that you just remember?

AF: I think two of our original artists are still my favourite and they’re also the best selling shirts… An artist in Japan named Aya Kato who we were the first magazine to ever feature and we have a whole line with just her for apparel. She’s one of my favourites because her style is just so unique. You just don’t see her work anywhere else.

And then an artist from Paris, France named Skwak who also did one of our most popular shirts. So those two just because I’ve been working with them for so long, I mean, I’ve known both of them for five or six years. We’ve actually flown them to the states before for group art shows. So, we have a lot of history they’re kinda like family. So those two are my favourite.

FS: And it’s great that those are the most popular as well…

AF: Yeah – I mean they’re really good! They really deserve it. But yeah, two of our shirts from the first season, even to this day they’re still our most popular, they just keep selling.

FS: Maybe they’re just still sitting around on blog posts and people keep discovering them…

AF: Yeah I don’t know, I don’t know what it is… but yeah they do really well…

FS: But you’ll keep printing them as long as they keep selling?

AF: Yeah yeah, I mean that’s the thing, as long as people still want it, I mean, the whole point of putting stuff on T shirts is that it’s accessible, so why not? Like those two designs we come out with new colour ways for them but they’re just going strong. It’s been like two or three years and they just, people keep wanting it so… you know why not?!

—

So thanks to Amir for spending his time with us. Check out the Beautiful/Decay Apparel blog and sign up for the newsletter where you’ll hear about any possible online exclusives first.

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