ajchen.com

We’ve had ROY in the shop now for just a few months, but the response has been phenomenal. The story of a single man putting together each jean himself in a warehouse full of vintage machines has resonated with more customers than we expected… even people who aren’t really into jeans are fascinated by the story and have ended up going home with a pair.  There are plenty of unique features to the jean design, but my favorite part might actually be the pocket flasher. Not many know that Roy is actually a very talented illustrator – he drew the entire design himself.

A few years ago, Johan, Jeff and I started a project called NHTVSN. It was a two-part company that consisted of a graphic tshirt line and an online video ‘zine. The idea was to use the videos as an avenue to gain publicity for the tshirt line; when we had started, very few online publications like this existed. We also wanted to use NHTVSN as a springboard to give some of our creative friends a bigger audience. Jeff had gone to school for filmmaking and was excited to apply his skills in a new and creative way. Although these were all great ambitions, our primary goal was for NHTVSN to become an easy moneymaker. At the time of its launch, the streetwear market was exploding: boutiques were opening in both big cities and small towns seemingly every week, stores couldn’t seem to buy enough product to supply their customers, and the economy was stronger than ever. Because we wanted to protect 3sixteen’s brand integrity, we felt compelled to start a diffusion line that would still be graphically executed at a level we were happy with, but would also allow us to work with bigger accounts that we didn’t want to give 3sixteen to.

The first season did pretty well – we sold the tees to some of our existing 3sixteen retailers and also opened up some bigger chain stores with the line. It wasn’t a huge release but showed a lot of promise. The videos were received with open arms; because Youtube had horrible encoding at the time, we chose to host them ourselves and resultingly brought the entire website to a grinding halt a day after launching it. 6 months later, we wanted to interview some people on the east coast for our second issue but Jeff wasn’t able to contribute due to scheduling conflicts. And that’s when we met Kellen Dengler.

Seemingly out of nowhere, we received an email from a recent film school graduate who was moving to NYC to pursue a career; he wanted to know if we had any 3sixteen internships available that might fit his skillset. We checked out his work and liked what we saw, so I met with him in person to chat further – it became clear that his talents would apply perfectly to our NHTVSN video series. We completed our second issue with Kellen filming and directing the series, and to this day, I’m really proud of the way everything turned out. Since then, Kellen has progressed onto some amazing things; I could sit here and list all the people he’s filmed with, but it’s probably easier to take a look at his portfolio.

We closed up shop with NHTVSN after our second season; we found that it demanded too much time and attention for us to be able to turn it into something profitable at the time.  The recession certainly had a major hand in its failure – a quick look at our retailer list will tell you that many of the accounts that bought NHTVSN are no longer in business.  Despite this, we couldn’t be more thankful for the friendship that we formed with Kellen through the process. He’s a very busy man but has always made time for us to work on additional projects for both 3sixteen and later, Self Edge.

Since refocusing fully on 3sixteen these past few years, I found myself missing the storytelling that we got to do through the NHTVSN project. After much brainstorming, we started work six months ago on a new initiative with Kellen entitled Singularities, and we’re finally nearing completion. The trailer is above, and we plan to launch the entire series of videos in early 2011. You can visit the dedicated website for more information on the project: 3sixteen.com/singularities

My friends from Tanner Goods stopped by NY for the weekend to sell their wares at the annual Pop Up Flea event. I stopped by their table to snap some photos of their offerings, some of which were brand new for the season. Keep an eye on their webstore, as I am guessing they should roll out to the general public soon. We also ate soup dumplings and chinese ice cream on Saturday night, but photos of leather goods are probably more interesting to look at.

Kiya is in Japan right now meeting with the brands that we work with at Self Edge, but he’s also visiting some of the factories and mills where our products are manufactured. Yesterday he got to see our newest run of 3sixteen+ denim being woven on a vintage shuttle loom in Okayama; he filmed this clip to show what it looks (and sounds) like.

A month ago, I posted about shooting the 3sixteen Fall 2010 lookbook with Vincent Tsang. We’ve since released the lookbook on the 3sixteen website; the image above is my favorite of the lot.