COSTA MESA, Calif. — After selling his third start-up company in 2004, action sportswear veteran Jeff Yokoyama was ready for a break from the apparel industry. But things didn’t quite work out that way.
A few months after Mossimo purchased his men’s streetwear brand Modern Amusement in 2004, Yokoyama began designing T-shirts with his daughter Coco, then 15, as a summer project to teach her about his work. That summertime diversion became Yokoyama’s next sportswear venture, Generic Youth.
The initial foray “was mainly to start something and see what it takes to build something,” said Yokoyama, 51, who had launched and sold seminal surf brands Maui & Sons and Pirate Surf and worked for industry giants such as Quiksilver.
The pair made 50 T-shirts in boys’ and girls’ sizes emblazoned with a silhouetted profile of a ponytailed Coco. She decided to call the collection Generic Youth, a riff off the idea that “all kids are alike in that they’re all different,” Yokoyama said.
The family project piqued the interest of Ryan Heuser, Yokoyama’s friend and president of Paul Frank Industries. They became partners in 2005, along with John Oswald, chief executive officer of Paul Frank and company founder Paul Frank Sunich, in order to manufacture and market Generic Youth. Retailers such as Fred Segal and American Rag Cie picked up the line. When Heuser and Oswald ousted Sunich in 2006, resulting in a legal battle, Yokoyama bought out his partners.
Yokoyama had soured on mass producing the brand for wholesale. “Once you start building product, you have to have boxes and warehouse space,” he said. “It’s this big operation. I’ve done that. I’m not interested in doing that anymore.”
In December, he shut the wholesale side of the business and took production in-house as he launched a 1,000-square-foot Generic Youth retail store in Costa Mesa that also houses a bare-bones cut-and-sew production operation. Each piece of apparel sold is now crafted there, made by a single sewer who Yokoyama lured from Paul Frank Industries.
“Our concept is to have a brand and sell to the market at wholesale, plus 10 percent,” he said. “We’re pushing value onto our [shoppers]…not the retailer, who is doubling the price.
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“The business plan is patterned off of what the Gap did back in 1969: They decided to build their own stores, and they figured out how to make clothes….Maybe I’m not so good at the selling clothes, sending stuff out and collecting money. Am I good at retailing? No, but I’m going to try it.”
Yokoyama said he hopes to open more stores but has no firm plans.
Prices for the dual-gender line, which has expanded since its inception into fleece, denim and woven tops for men and women, are on the lower end of the designer sportswear spectrum. Zip-up hoodies with printed textiles appliquéd or quilted onto the front retail for $45 to $85. T-shirts average $15 and skinny, hand-cut jeans retail for roughly $75.
Yokoyama has integrated handmade, near-folksy details into the collection. Swatches of worn-out Generic Youth T-shirts are sewn onto zip-up hoodies, and Coco’s silhouette is imperfectly screened over the back pockets of jeans. Zipper pulls on hoodies have silver house keys attached to them.
A sheet of industrial metal painted graffiti-style with Coco’s silhouette covers the facade of the store. Racks of tops and bottoms ring the chartreuse-colored industrial space. Wooden picnic-style tables support neat stacks of T-shirts and jeans. A vintage-looking chandelier lends a quirky, domestic vibe. “Kids send me ceramic pieces that I put out for display and drawings that I just pushpin into the walls,” Yokoyama said. “[The store] is filled with things that are close to them. Hopefully, I can evolve my product further with that same mentality — things that feel like home.”