The Struggling Hip Hop Fashion Industry

Ever heard of the housing bubble? Well, something similar is going on in hip hop’s fashion industry right now, where new clothing lines sprout up nearly every day. In fact, almost every rapper or singer you can think of has launched an apparel line at one time or another. Recently, Akon and T-Pain announced their own, since, you know, the market for garish top hats is endless. And it’s not just rappers; Stilts from For the Love of Ray J has a fashion brand coming out this summer.

But just as many are shutting down. Just recently Young Buck’s line, David Brown Clothing, disappeared after less than a year, and everyone from Master P to Biggie to DMX has killed off a clothing line at one point in their lives. (Complex runs down ten of them here.)

Why is everyone in a rush to start a wack-ass apparel line? Well, because they’ve heard the success stories of entrepreneurs like Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Russell Simmons, Diddy, and Nelly.

The problem is that even the lines that seem to be succeeding, often aren’t. Sure, Nelly’s Apple Bottoms jeans has done all right (he definitely owes T-Pain a drink for all that product placement, by the way, or at least a drank) but remember Vokal? That company was touted as huge moneymaker when in actuality it didn’t make shit. I wrote an expose on it a couple years ago.

Vokal shut down production in June 2004 as a result of a legal dispute with its licensee, New York-based ALM International Corporation. ALM had been responsible for manufacturing and distributing Vokal’s products.

By the end of 2004, Vokal was prepared to re-enter the market. That November [co-founder Yomi] Martin told the St. Louis Business Journal he expected $25 million in sales for Vokal over the next eighteen months. He gave the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the same numbers.

But those figures seem to be a product of wishful thinking rather than a realistic business projection. Since the beginning of 2005, Vokal hasn’t manufactured a single item for sale in the U.S. Its Web site hasn’t been updated for two years.

But you can’t blame Nelly and co. for overstating their bottom lines. After all, they learned from the best, Russell Simmons, who could be called hip hop’s grandfather of fabricated financial figures. Though he claimed Phat Farm grossed $350 million in 2003, it turns out the actual figure was not even $20 million.

That’s just how rap business is done, he explained in a 2004 civil deposition: “It is how you develop an image for companies. So, in other words, you give out false statements to mislead the public so they will then increase in their mind the value of your company.”

Had Young Buck’s PR people distributed such creative earnings reports, who knows? Maybe he’d still be in business right now. Then again, if we learned anything from the housing market debacle, it’s that bubbles always burst.