Today we’d like to introduce you to Steven Mena.
Steven, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
So this all started back in September of 2013. I had just graduated high school and was working two jobs, getting ready to go to college. I saw somebody selling some wristbands on Twitter one day and honestly thought to myself how cool it was that you could create something and there was somebody out there willing to purchase it. I always had a small knack for projects, I liked streetwear myself, and I knew how to get creative on photoshop so I immediately knew I wanted to start a clothing brand. I found a free pdf file online about this book on how to start a clothing brand, it was about 150 pages or so if I remember correctly, and I remember staying up all night to read this one book. I had never, and still have never, read an entire book in one sitting till that day. I could paint you a picture of that night in my room, that’s how ingrained this is in my mind at this point. I read that book and if there was any doubt in my mind about starting a brand, it was gone after that. I hit up one of my best friends, Ivan, and let him know that I had this idea to start a brand. Like I said earlier, I always had a knack for projects like this so it wasn’t the first time I came to him with a sporadic and wild idea but it seemed fun and he knew I was serious. We sat in my room going over this long list of names, some of which are way too embarrassing to admit we even considered, and landed on MENACE. It was perfect. Short, simple, and it relayed our in-your-face attitude. I put together the money I had saved from the two jobs I worked that summer, a grand total of about $500, and started MENACE. Everything from creating a website, purchasing the blank t-shirts, and getting them screen-printed was covered with those initial $500. Shortly after the brand was launched, Ivan and I decided to no longer work together on the brand and I continued to push it forward on my own.
MENACE got to where it is today through hard work and dedication to put it plainly. There is no substitute for keeping your head down, staying focused, and just grinding it out and that’s what I did in the beginning. Driving around dropping off t-shirts, shipping orders in between classes, or my favorite memory – walking 3 miles from my dorm room to the nearest greyhound to get to Los Angeles with a box full blank t-shirts and orders that needed to be made that weekend and a backpack full of school books/papers – essentially, I had to give up a “normal” college experience in the pursuit of growth for my brand. So to answer your question of how we got to where we are now and how we’re going to get to where I think we could be, that’s your answer: hard work.
In the beginning, yes I hustled my ass off on my own from my college dorm room/garage but now, at this stage, I have been fortunate enough to hire a team that helps take the many burdens that come with running a brand/business off of my shoulders, allowing me to focus exclusively on the growth of the brand and my work as a Creative Director/Designer. None of our growth in this new chapter of MENACE’s life would be possible without my team: Nick, David, and Mateo.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I would say it’s a mix of both, a smooth ride with periods of turbulence. Nothing worthwhile comes easy and nothing easy is worthwhile so yes, we’ve definitely had our trials and tribulations but we’ve pulled through and here we are almost seven years later. I think it is important not to doubt yourself or your vision. If you believe in what you are doing then other people will realize this and want to support you.
Some of the growing pains that come with running an online business is scaling and cutting costs along the way. So the trick is to find out how you can take things to the next level and continue to increase your margins because at the end of the day, you are running a business and you have to keep the lights on. As you grow in size, there are more things that need to be paid for but there are also more opportunities to scale. So in the clothing industry, it’s an economy of scale – if you produce more goods then the lower the cost per good. That was one of our toughest challenges because you don’t want to make too much product where you’re stuck with extra inventory once the initial selling hype has died down and you don’t want to make too little and not be able to capitalize on the demand. Finding that sweet spot took some trial and errors and some expensive mistakes but we think we have it down now.
Please tell us about MENACE.
MENACE is a streetwear brand, through and through. A “for us, by us” mentality. We are both consumers and creators of streetwear and we love to push the community forward through our product range, design, and marketing. The thing that I am honestly most proud of is our organic growth. We don’t pay people to wear our brand, we are not signed to a PR agency, and we rarely run traditional ads. This is why our community is so strong and loyal to us and why we receive the cosigns that we do. The celebrities and artists, who themselves are connoisseurs of streetwear, that post us and give us a shout-out do so because they are genuinely fans of the brand. That means a lot to us because we are usually fans of their work as well.
I think what sets us apart is that we didn’t play by these conventional rules of “streetwear” right out of the gate. The way it usually went was you produce some products (usually tees or hoodies) that speak to your brand image, have a homie come through to shoot it real quick, you drop the lookbook, then you release the product online. Then repeat the process for the next release. For us, every release is different and has been since the beginning. I wanted every collection to take on a different theme and this meant a different approach to every presentation, rollout, and design ethos. Yes, there are some underlying themes that are present in everything we do, but on the surface, we use different subject matter to convey our ideas. For example, in August we had a collection centered around mental health and the products reflected this. Our lookbook for that included a working website modeled after the old MySpace profile pages, complete with a pseudo-community of people where each profile was a different lookbook outfit. This was the theme behind our rollout because we felt that social media, which is a relatively new invention of ours, has played a tremendous role in the conversation of mental health as a whole. Then in October, we had a collection centered around our Beverly Hills Gun Range design. The lookbook for this collection was meant to portray those classic “bad guy and hostage” scenario targets that you would find at gun ranges and would be set up downrange for a customer to aim at. Along with this, we hosted a pop-up shop staged in a way that was meant to mimic an actual gun range. This pop-up shop came complete with a live firing range with BB guns that people could come in and shoot paper targets resembling our lookbook. The idea behind this was how can we completely immerse our customers into our world when we think of the Beverly Hills Gun Range in a fun and unique way that has never been done before… and then we said, “why don’t we just build it?”.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Perhaps it would be to have prioritized my brand in the beginning. I was going to school for the first three years of the brand so it was hard to focus 100% of my efforts on MENACE but once I graduated college and had no more limitations with my time, it was full steam ahead. I’ve been graduated for three years now and I’ve seen the most growth in MENACE during this period, so there was definitely a correlation to how fast my brand was expanding and how restricted my time was. There’s no way to know what effect it would have had on my life overall if I had focused everything on MENACE but it’s over and done with and I do not regret continuing with my schoolwork while running a business, it taught me things about myself.
I also had a period of time where I was experiencing this extremely rapid growth with the brand and reaping the fruits of my labor and while it was an extraordinary period in my life, I had to quickly learn the value of money management. I definitely made some financial mistakes early on whether it be investing in the wrong things for the brand that didn’t pan out, not investing enough, or not knowing when to pull the trigger and deploying resources to certain areas. Whatever the situation may be, what I would have done differently is simply assured that I was more prepared for this new responsibility in my life. In my personal life, I’ve always prioritized the right things and I thank my upbringing, specifically my parents, for that and have never allowed myself to live excessively; even more so now, when all I’m focused on is growing MENACE.
To elaborate on this point, when your business is growing you are obviously acquiring more resources and are able to deploy these resources into things that should ultimately benefit your brand/business. As an entrepreneur and leader of our business, we’re usually told to always go for the kill and keep your foot on the gas no matter what but I think when you remove the ego that comes with being an entrepreneur and allow yourself to keep it real with the person that requires this honesty the most, yourself, then you’re good to go because it means you haven’t been lost in the façade of it all. I’m thankful it didn’t take a major financial blow or scare to realize the importance of things such as money management and decision making but you see the stories day in and day out of people, artists, rappers – entrepreneurs in general – that go bankrupt or cease to exist at all and it is usually because of the mismanagement of money or one wrong decision. The idea that you ALWAYS have to be on go, go, go is a death sentence. It’s okay to accept a loss. It’s okay to admit that the product you put out was a dud. It’s okay to admit to yourself that you are not knowledgeable on a certain service, product, or field and that you don’t feel comfortable taking the leap just yet. The most important thing is assuring your brand or business remains healthy in the long run so it’s fine to take the L, retreat, gather yourself and come back stronger and smarter for the next one. This is not to say take it easy, it is just to say it’s important to understand the weight every decision holds for your brand/business.
I am being very candid in my last response here because I hope somebody reading this can take something from this short interview. I think most people would be quick to say “Nah I don’t regret anything at all” but I know deep down there’s something we all wish we could have done differently, and hopefully, someone reading this can get some foresight into certain paths that weren’t taken, but in hindsight, should have been.
Pricing:
- Price Range: $25 – $250
Contact Info:
- Website: menacelosangeles.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/menacelosangeles
- Facebook: facebook.com/menacelosangeles
- Twitter: twitter.com/menaceworldwide
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