He has more street-cred than you can shake a skateboard at – meet the creative force behind the global clothing company Marc Ecko Enterprises

WHEN THE ECKO clothing line was originally launched in America in 1993, it was aimed at cool young skater kids – similar to its founder. But such has been the roaring success of the label that suit-wearing businesspeople are eyeing the brand to try and emulate its corporate achievement of becoming a billion-dollar brand. So how come I am meeting Marc Ecko, who is listed by New York magazine as one of the “most influential people in fashion” right now and crowns him “the top dog in hip-hop fashion”, at the rhino enclosure at Chester Zoo?

“These amazing animals are being killed for a drug the size of an aspirin,” says Ecko, shaking his head in bewilderment at the illegal trade in rhino horn for medicinal use. He is here to officially open the enclosure, and it’s clear that his passion for the animal extends above and beyond the famous rhino logo he uses for labelling his apparel and lifestyle products.

Born Marc Milecofsky in New Jersey in 1972, Ecko started his T-shirt design business from his bedroom in his parents’ home when he was 20. He made just six T-shirts to begin with – now it’s a $1.5 billion empire. Not that Ecko likes the word empire: “It’s just a business. It’s what I do for a living,” he says.

empire: “It’s just a business. It’s what I do for a living,” he says. Nonetheless, since its creation, the group of companies that now comprises Marc Ecko Enterprises has grown into a global fashion and lifestyle behemoth and includes clothing, trainers, accessories and media and entertainment. More than 5,000 department and speciality stores in the US, and more than 45 countries internationally carry the Ecko brand. The entrepreneur now has offices in Munich, Stockholm, Paris and Milan with eight stores in Germany, one in Austria, five in Ukraine and four in Russia. With UK sales totalling £10 million, he’s now looking to expand his business here this year and there are plans to open a new Paris store this autumn.

Given the scale of the expansion, it’s no surprise to find that skater kids are no longer the only ones to be drawn to the Ecko label. Nowadays, even mass-market celebrities, such as Katie Price, Peter Andre and singer Alesha Dixon, adorn themselves in Ecko clothes. It’s clear that its hip-hop subculture roots have been subsumed by a mainstream market.

The now iconic rhino logo which adorns his watches, T-shirts and skateboards came about by accident. As Ecko recalls: “My parents had these driftwood sculptures when I was growing up. I used to play Star Wars with my neighbour who had Hans Solo and I needed a ‘ton-ton’ figure, which I didn’t have. I realised that a wooden sculpture of a rhino made a great ton-ton.” Thus began Ecko’s love of the rhino that translated itself into the drawings he went on to do as a teenager. So when it came to branding his company he thought a rhino perfectly summed it up: “A big, clumsy animal, but a very nimble runner – kind of like our company. A little awkward but it can definitely move.”

However, the direction it was moving in, especially in the early days, was debatable. Ecko states bluntly: “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. We almost went bankrupt a few times. It was a baptism by fire. Everything you can imagine went wrong, from not running the warehouse the right way to borrowing money that I couldn’t pay back.” His business partners were his twin sister, Marci, who now heads up the Ecko Zoo York offshoot line of skatewear and Seth Gerzberg, formerly a drama student, who is now Ecko Enterprises’ CEO.

Says Ecko: “We were serial entrepreneurs but we saw an emerging market. Every time we got a stroke right the return investment would be great. Say you [a stockist] would order a shipment for October which we wouldn’t ship until February, but even if you got it late it would always sell.” It was these early falters, believes Ecko, which made the company stronger. “In order to learn to walk you have to fall. I believed in this vision and it was enough to bring me through. The line between success and failure is so important. To be an entrepreneur you have to have a tolerance for failure.”

The success story started from Ecko’s childhood passion for art and illustration. “I grew up in 1980s in New Jersey during that convergent time in pop culture when you had MTV and video gaming and hip-hop. That was a time that really framed my perspective.”

He continues: “Today a young person can go to Threadless.com and print a T-shirt for $14.99. The idea of getting something like Photoshop was an abstraction when I was at high school so I was advised against pursuing my love for art seriously, even though I was really industrious.”

He’s not kidding. “My friends were working at local supermarkets or cafés but I made much more, around $400 a week from T-shirt sales,” he says. Nonetheless, he went to college to study pharmacy, even though he “hated it”.

“At college all my time was spent painting and being creative and I started getting positive affirmation for my art. It became a great currency for me,” says the now multimillionaire street-style guru. So he dropped out. “I took the passion route,” he smiles. “The first academic advisor in my whole life who said something useful was the dean of my university. When I told him I was leaving he said, “Do what you love and love what you do, and if you do that everything else will come.”

It did come, thick and fast. Now, Ecko devotes a large chunk of his time and sizeable income to philanthropic enterprises, including worldwide educational projects and the International Rhino Federation: “I think rhinos are one of the earth’s great creatures and emblematic of a time when we weren’t here,” he says with passion. “To think of these guys not being around is sad, so whatever small thing I can do, I do.”

But, despite his success, Ecko doesn’t rest on his laurels. “I still work really long hours,” he says, albeit now with a young family to juggle. He and his wife Allison, whom he met at college, have three young children, Sage, five, Alexander, three, and Ella, who is nearly two. “I don’t feel like I’ve ‘arrived’,” he says. “I still feel a tremendous amount of hunger. I am good at being super-critical of myself. Because of that I stay sober and grounded in the business sense.

“I am less hands-on than I used to be. I have more than 800 employees around the world,” he continues. “I can’t author everything at that scale and I don’t think it’s healthy. But the greatest lessons I learned were from getting blood in my mouth. As a creative leader you can’t be so self-important as to think your own view is the only view. You have to allow your staff to learn on their terms. It’s going to come with some failure and you just have to manage that.”

His is a multinational company with a worldwide respected brand, but Ecko still maintains he doesn’t have a clear business philosophy. In fact, it’s typically unorthodox: “The only two things you need in business are a nice watch and a really decent mattress. I know people who don’t spend money on a good mattress. That amazes me. It’s the most essential luxury, I think.”

He is busy acquiring further home comforts for the future, too, with the restoration of a 200-year-old mansion in the New Jersey foothills: “The greatest trapping of success for me,” he says, “is that I can have a painting studio and I spend about 30% of my time reconnecting with that. I am really blessed and I pinch myself often. I am able to create with no real boundaries. How lucky am I?” You said it yourself, Mr Ecko.

The Marc Ecko website is www.eckounltd.com