The Scoop with Blondey McCoy

At Thames MMXX, we’re constantly super stimulated and surfing on a wave of news and scoops, as you call them. But I’d like to speak mainly about our two new skateboards, which were designed in collaboration with my friend and hero, Mark Gonzales, the legendary professional skateboarder. The skateboards are called American Racer 1 and American Racer 2.

He sent me these drawings on a piece of paper, and they also had these notes on them. We did high-resolution scans of the drawings and developed these custom shapes with our board factory, BBS Manufacturing, in Tijuana, Mexico. The drawings are kind of rudimentary, and the scans are faithful to his hand. We retained the texture of the pastels and raised some of the ink for the black lines.

How do you go about figuring out who to collaborate with? Is that something you do to begin with?

We’re not huge collaborators, to be honest. People might assume that we would be because we’re rooted in skateboarding and are, by default, a streetwear brand. But we’re just very focused on keeping up with ourselves. We don’t get around to a lot of our own ideas. We want to be known for what we do and to be an institution in our own right.

When we do work on a collaboration, I prefer to do it with people over brands. I like when it creates something more than the sum of its parts, and neither party could produce on their own. Too often, I see two great brands working together, and they just make a T-shirt with two logos on it.

I also particularly like to work on skateboards because you’re slightly hampered by the aspect ratio, but otherwise they make great canvases for print art, and they look fantastic both on a wall, or you can skate them and really bash them up. We made skateboards with [artists] Gilbert & George, the Pet Shop Boys, [painter] Brian Clarke, the Francis Bacon estate… people you wouldn’t necessarily see on a board and certainly not on clothing.

You started Thames MMXX ages ago, in 2012, when you were basically a baby.

I was a baby for a little while before I became an old man.

And you just opened your first store — congratulations! Considering how young you were when you started, it’s incredible you are still in business. Why do you think that is?

A lot of good fortune, I suppose. I also picked a good name. I don’t stand by a lot of decisions I made when I was 14, but this was a good one.

Another reason that feels really acute to me, especially over the last three weeks of operating the shop, is that I’ve had the good fortune of growing up with a lot of our customers. I started by selling T-shirts and hoodies directly or advertising them to men around my age, and we’ve grown up together. It’s just wonderful that we have people who have been following us, coming into our shop on Brewer Street and buying their first suit, or a tie, for the first time in their lives, and they are doing it with us.

I like how personal your notes on the Thames MMXX website are.

And the notes have nothing to do with clothing. I’m hesitant or slightly uncomfortable being referred to as a designer. Of course, I love design, skateboards, jewelry, sunglasses, and all the rest on a superficial level. And I want to make the things I want but don’t exist. But more deeply than that, what matters to me is actually speaking to people.

Clothes are very handy in that way. That desire for human interaction is a common denominator across my clothes, my skateboarding, my video series, the newsletters… what you want to do as a creative person is reach people. How you do that is just mechanics.

You’re not comfortable being called a designer. Are you comfortable being called a businessman?

You just reminded me of my Instagram bio, which says “synonym for Salesman @THAMESMMXX”. It’s been a huge, long epiphany for me over the past seven years that actually they are one and the same. There is creativity in business just as much, if not more than, there is in designing the clothes. There are so many steps between having an idea, a good one or bad one, making it the right way, getting it to the right people for the right price, taking the right pictures or videos… There are so many layers to this business we call fashion, and so much room for creativity in every one. And certainly a lot of what keeps me motivated is not the numbers but the growth. It is about growth and about reaching new people. I don’t know if I would call myself a businessman any more than I’d call myself a designer. I’m something in between. I’m certainly not a martyr.

We all need to pay the bills.

But also, this business is my art. Thames is literally my GCSE art project that just carried on. Like many kids, I was interested in art, but the art that I was interested in and influenced by was on skateboards, T-shirts, and stickers — things that are ultimately products. So I made that kind of art and those products, and without thinking, I launched a business. Thames is my word for enthusiasm.

It’s a bit like when people ask me about why I started skating. I can barely remember. Partly because it was such a long time ago, partly because so little mattered to me before skating. I don’t remember calling the brand Thames.

My best way of retroactively making sense of it is that as I went to school at Westminster, which is on one side of the river [Thames]. I chose that school because of its proximity to [the skate park at] Southbank, which is on the other side. I never really went to that school and was asked to leave because I was always on the other side of the river. But I suppose I was always on one of two riverbanks.

I’m really glad that I did choose that name because it’s great. It looks good on everything except perhaps a perfume; maybe a glass of liquid with the word Thames on it isn’t so appealing. But it looks great on jewelry, on skateboards, sunglasses — it even looks great on screen. The MMXX is the numerals for 2020, which is around the time I bought it back and relaunched it.

If someone came to you and said I want to start a brand, what would you advise them?

That the world already has enough of the same. If it already exists, don’t bother doing it. There’s a lot of pressure these days, and it goes beyond clothing — to launch things constantly, everywhere, at the same time. It’s an invented pressure. One thing I realized fairly recently is that it’s OK to produce styles that are not necessarily the most exciting to design, but that one will wear every day. Easy is not always a naughty word. Our striped short-sleeve shirt, for instance — it’s easy for us to make, but it’s also worth having.

There is something between being a martyr and being a sellout, and if you can operate in that space, then maybe you’ll have a business that’s healthy enough to allow you to experiment.

This reminds me of Maria Cornejo, a beloved designer, who last year pivoted her business strategy to making mostly bestselling styles.

It’s pretty much how we do jewelry now, and it’s not just because the price of gold and subsequently the price of silver have risen. We feel like we’ve done great things that will outlive us all. We cut no corners when it comes to the production of it.

Having a shop changed my approach too, because I realized that real-life shopping and shopping online are two completely different things. Fifty different pairs of socks is overwhelming on a website, but if you go to a nice counter like ours and see 50 pairs laid out nicely, it can be tantalizing. It gives you the feeling like you’re in a sweet shop. The same goes for the little shields that you need for tires and all these hero items of Thames, which we have taken the time to develop.

It’s not boring to me. It looks like the brand knows what it is, and there’s a sustainability to this method. However exciting or successful it may be, if you just do nothing but new things every week, you can’t be an institution, which we’re trying to be.

On the subject of newness, the menswear season just started. Do you follow the catwalks at all?

In all honesty, I am very absorbed in our own little world. I trust, because of the way we consume things now, news and other products will find their way into my line of vision, whether I like it or not. And when I see things I like, I’ll further expand. But at this time, I’m very much preoccupied with our own company, especially this shop, which is now just over three weeks in. I’m enacting those afterthoughts and optimizations that you only realize are needed once people are actually in the room. ‘How about we try this over here?’ or ‘could do with a light there.’ That’s my priority right now.

You can catch up with last week’s Scoop with The Serpentine’s Bettina Korek here.

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