How badly did I want this? I realize it’s not about how bad you want something, it’s about what you are willing to sacrifice to get where you want to go. I sacrificed the most precious element in life. Time. How much time? Almost all of it. People say hard work pays off. Well what exactly is the pay off? Success? Money? The payoff is doing what you actually love, that’s when you will work your hardest. My goals have always been to make a difference, to change the way things are usually done and to give back to the people who care about being different. Kith has been the outlet that I imagined when building the shops 2.5 years ago, a breath of fresh air the market needed. 2 years later I feel like I learned more in this period of time than all my prior years on this planet combined. So what have been some of the obstacles along the way? Well.. I honestly feel like this business has become a series of challenges that I need to overcome. I find myself asking the same question almost every day, what do they think they’ll never see from me? What can I create that will make them remember the brand? Even with some success, the back to wall mentality is what will continue to push the envelope and keep things interesting. Nothing has come easy. Production for the in house brand has been extremely frustrating, especially with the local manufacturing. Scheduling, logistics, warehousing, billing, and managing employees are just a few of the daily nightmares a small business deals with on a daily basis. People think running this business is easy. Many people see the collaborative projects and think it’s just that easy to release a project not knowing how many decisions and man hours were involved to make releases possible. This shit is hard.
Team. Putting together the current Kith team was by far the toughest task thus far. Even though they don’t blog enough, some of you might already know them. Without the team Kith wouldn’t exist. I honestly feel lucky to have such talented individuals who are better than me in many ways. Seeing the team evolve into what it is today makes me extremely proud and I feel that might be my greatest accomplishment to date.