An Oral History of Mishka NYC
Having followed the streetwear market for nearly 10 years, we've seen tons of brands come and go, yet there are a handful that have been able to persist throughout the years. Mishka NYC is one of the standout labels, having built their own niche through a series of releases, events and partnerships. We caught up with Mishka founders Mikhail Bortnik and Greg Rivera to discuss the 25 biggest milestones for the brand thus far. Read on to find out all about Mishka NYC.
2001/2002: Creation of the Bear Mop
Mikhail: I started doing the bearmop just as a doodle on a sticky pad while I was working elsewhere in the city around 2001 or 2002. Neckface started getting up for the first time, and he wasn’t really like anything most people had seen in the city at the time. It wasn’t your typical graffiti really. That’s what inspired me to start running around and putting the bearmop up in some places. Greg was into stickering a lot and we had that in common. One of the most prominent places I put it up was on Lafayette Street, and that one stayed there for I don’t know how many year. It kind of served as advertisement for the brand while we were getting started because it was right there and people were passing it. That’s the one we ended up vectorizing for our logo, but after a certain point, after we started getting in and out and doing the business, I wasn’t able to go out at night anymore and throw the bearmop up places.
2002/2003: Starting the brand/meeting Greg
Mikhail: I started the brand before meeting Greg. I was at a job that I didn’t like very much. I was really into streetwear at the time — I had been my whole life — and I was really into sneaker culture, so I decided to take all this money I got from a settlement, which wasn’t much, something like $20,000, to invest in a bunch of T-shirt designs with no knowledge of how to sell T-shirts. I asked Greg to come in and see if he wanted to do this after several months of getting nowhere with it. He was the only other person I knew who was kind of interested in it and wanted to do this sort of stuff.
Greg: Well, growing up in Florida, it is kind of devoid of street culture, so when I moved up here, I was really influenced by graffiti and street art. A friend of mine actually turned me on to streetwear, stores like Supreme, Alife, Stackhouse and SSUR. It was sort of new to me, but I could really relate to it. I got into punk when I was 15 and I saw a lot of the same DIY ethics, and I liked the idea of someone being an artist and being able to do their art by selling a T-shirt. It was kind of like being in a band, you know? It can be hard to sell music, but it isn’t as hard to sell a T-shirt. Mike grew up here and knew a lot more about streetwear, but we were into the same sort of things. Mishka started in 2003, but it really started when Mike and I came together. For example, I had this bootleg Freddy Krueger shirt, and I was like, “We should remake this shirt,” and Mike said, “No, but why don’t I take it, put an African medallion on it, and have it say ‘Choppin ‘n’ Poppin.’” I would have never come up with that, and Mike may never have found that bootleg Freddy Krueger shirt because he’s not necessarily scouring eBay like I was. So to me, that’s really what made Mishka what it is today. One of us would come up with an idea and the other would expound on it.
Mikhail: Yeah, I would basically force Greg to go out to Sway and meet people. [Laughs]
Greg: The first collection we did together really showed that we could bring together two worlds that we couldn’t have brought together on our own.
2004: Selling to Digital Gravel
Mikhail: I don’t know how many people remember Digital Grave, which is still around, but DG was the spot to find cool T-shirts. You would get a newsletter from them and it would be these awesome T-shirts that nobody else had, which you wouldn’t see anywhere else. You know, they were the online spot to find this cool new stuff that you had never heard about. I remember sending them an email when we had started up, and they finally got back to us around 2004 saying that they would be willing to take the brand and wanted to know if we could come by and drop the stuff off at their DUMBO office. Digital Gravel — for like, the first few years — basically kept the brand going, because that was where we were selling the bulk of our T-shirts. We would use the site as a barometer to sort of see how popular we were because we would check the site multiple times a day to see what was selling out. We weren’t selling them in large volumes, but for us, it was thankfully eating away at our inventory, and it gave us a cash flow to create more and continue on. They were real pioneers in what they were doing.
2005: Our First trip to Magic and Meeting SSUR
Mikhail: Well, for us to get to Magic we had to raise the money because we weren’t generating enough money from selling our line. [Laughs] We were really into vinyl toys at the time. It wasn’t the first Companion [from KAWS] — the one that nobody got — but it was the first major release of Companion that came out. They kind of sold out everywhere, and for some reason, the scene in New York wasn’t that big, so Greg and I just happened to know all the spots that had it. We bought them up for ourselves, but then we just amassed all these other ones. So we were like, “Let’s sell these because they’re going for x-amount of money on eBay, and we could fund our trip to Magic.” It’s funny because we ended up funding our first trip to Magic that way, but it’s also how we started our relationship with Kid Robot. They were starting up as a store, and they were the ones who ended up buying a lot of the Companion toys, and that’s how that relationship got started. We went to L.A. and stayed at Ben Hundreds’ house, and then we drove — all of us together — to Magic for our first show. That was also the first place we met Russ from SSUR. Everyone was in this area at Magic called “the campground.” Things that they couldn’t pigeonhole into the main market, they just kind of put them together in this “campground” area. So we were there, 10.Deep were there, The Hundreds, some brands that no longer exist, and some brands that had nothing to do with streetwear.
Greg: In addition to what Mike said, the tradeshow was a milestone for us because it was our first venture into creating a brand. I had no idea about the fashion world or trade shows. Mike said there’s this thing called Pool where you could sell your stuff, and we applied to Pool, but we weren’t accepted. It’s around this time that I started to become friends with Bobby from The Hundreds.
Mikhail: Yeah, we were all sorts of communicating with each other on this site called Super Future, which at the time was this message board fixated on streetwear and went from streetwear to selvege denim, and then onto, like, Dior Homme and Cloak.
Greg: But yeah, I was talking to Ben Hundreds and he said that there was this bigger show called Magic. They said they had done it once before and suggested we do it, too. So for us, it was our first time really seeing how this world works. It sort of defined us in terms of learning what had to be done to take this brand to the next level.
2005: SSUR Collaboration
Greg: The SSUR collaboration came out of meeting Russ at Magic. Basically, what happened was that Mike met Russ, and Russ was excited that there was another actual Russian streetwear brand owned by a Russian, so we did a collab pretty soon after that. That was huge for us beause that gave us a lot of respect. At the time, we were a new, up-and-coming brand. SSUR was and is one of the most respected New York streetwear brands. Doing a collab with SSUR was sort of like Russ giving us his blessing. It put us on and it was in the infancy of the Internet and the blog scene, so you could still do a collab like that and it would sort of send shockwaves through the whole scene.
Mikhail: He’s right. That’s when we started seeing all this interest from Japan. SSUR was really big in Japan, in part due to our collab with SSUR. We were getting these huge orders from Japan for us at the time, and that sort of sparked our interest in Japan.
Greg: One of the reasons we went to Japan was to meet with SSUR’s distributor.
2005: First Trip to Japan and Bidding War
Mikhail: There was this weird point in time when we started getting a lot of interest from Japan, and American streetwear has these roots in Japan where it’s almost like you start up in America and get popular in Japan, so there were about three interested parties who were competing to become our Japanese distributor. Prior to that, we were just selling to these guys who were Supreme resellers, I think. They were just buying our stuff and reselling it in Japan, and it was clearly growing in popularity. We got it in our head to say, “Forget it. Let’s spend all the money that we don’t have and go to Japan.” It was Greg, Eric and me at the time. I had been to Japan once before, and it was Greg’s first trip. The plan was that we were going to go out there and check out all these stores, and meet with all the different people who were interested in us.
Greg: Japan was our number one customer, so we spent all the money we had to go out there, but it gave us the clarity of what the scene in Japan was like. Our trip out there was also why we were and are one of the most established streetwear brands in Japan right now. It’s why we have a store. We went out there early on, really got on the street, and really tried to see how things worked out there.
2006: Big Black Album Cover Tee
Mikhail: All-over prints were popular. We had done a few, and I don’t know where I got the idea. I just thought it would be cool to do an all-over print shirt that kind of incorporated a Big Black album cover, which most people don’t know actually came from a Japanese comic book. It just looked, to me, like it had great composition for a T-shirt, and I thought, “Instead of making this green, how about we put a sort of halftone feminine image on the shirt. I remember sifting through a ton of images, and I had to go through magazines at the time, so I could get a decent sized image. We found one and did the shirt, but then we ran into a problem. Everyone refused to print it. For one, printing all-over prints was difficult at the time. No printers we were working with really had access to the necessary equipment, so we found a printer located in Sunset Park or something like that who was willing to do it. We did a green version and he did this cool discharged version on a black shirt. That was the first shirt that we pre-sold because we didn’t have enough money to do it at the time. It was an all-over print with two different screens on each side. It was an expensive shirt to do. We had to pre-sell it to be able to do it. The orders just flooded in for the shirt.
Greg: It was one of the first pieces that defined Mishka as bigger than a streetwear brand in the sense that we had found somebody discussing it on a Steve Albini message board.
Mikhail: Well, most of them didn’t like it, obviously. Most of these people didn’t realize that Steve Albini himself had taken the art from a Japanese comic book. I remember there were a lot of people being condescending because we included the part on the shirt that is only on the CD, but not the original 12-inch. I always thought that it was really funny because it was just something that they awkwardly added to the CD. It was this poor design choice that kind of made that album cover even more iconic, and it just seemed fitting to include it on the shirt. I remember that ruffled feathers. This was a Steve Albini message board, so I’m sure you can assume what the types of dudes who spend their time on a Steve Albini message board are like. It was popular, but in streetwear, nobody was doing Big Black flips. We also did a Nation of Ulyses flip. It didn’t really sell very well, but there was a market in our audience that clearly thought this was really cool and connected to it.
2006: Mad Decent Collab
Greg: This was cool because it established our relationship with Diplo and Mad Decent, which obviously continues to this day. I think that was the beginning of establishing us in this emerging electronic music scene. It was one of the first real collabs between a streetwear brand and an underground electronic music label. It had happened in the past, but it wasn’t happening all the time. People really freaked out about the whole idea. In a nutshell, it began our relationship with the underground electronic music scene.
2007: Screaming Skull
Mikhail: Nobody had a New Era hat. No brands our size had a New Era hat. Eventually, we were able to speak to somebody at New Era and they approved us doing a hat, and it was a big deal because that was kind of the first. It was a big deal getting Russ’s blessing, and now we’ve got the blessing of a multi-million, or multi-billion, dollar company to be like, “Yeah, we’ll make hats with you.”
Greg: SSUR had done a New Era hat with DC, which was probably the craziest New Era that had been done. I went to SSUR one day, and this guy Matty from New Era was there, and he was our first contact at New Era. So, again, this came partly from knowing SSUR, but with the Screaming Skull, we sort of took it to the next level. I don’t think anybody had really done an all-over print fitted yet. When they printed on the hat, they printed really heavy, so we called it bulletproof printing at the time. When it came out, people were really amped about it. It sold out immediately and then sold on eBay for like $300. It was the first time we had something sell out and then people started flipping it. It was one of our first hype pieces and showed that we could do more than graphic tees.
2007: Keep Watch
Mikhail: Really early on in our New Era relationship, we had only done Screaming Skull and this smaller hat with a Cyrillic hit and a print on it, and for whatever reason, I thought it would be really cool to see kids wearing ballcaps, but instead of a team logo, it would just be a big eye, a big bloodshot eye. That’s what it would be. That’s the logo. So this was right around when we had our first intern ever. It was Mike Jones, and he used to work out of my apartment, and I asked him, “Here, can you come up with an eye graphic?” He went to work on visualizing what the Keep Watch logo would look like. He did that, but I felt like the hat was missing something, and I was like, “Oh, this would be dope if the hat looked like it was eating you, so let’s give it an under brim where it’s like a mouth that’s eating your head.” I had our other intern, Henrik, who came from Sweden, create the mouth under brim, and that eventually became one of our most iconic designs.
Greg: The cool thing about the eyeball — aside from Mike just thinking it would be cool — was that when you look at pop culture, you can see an eyeball throughout the years in different forms. Using the eye in art and fashion has been something that has been around. I think it was time for there to be an eyeball in streetwear, and I feel like we sort of filled a void. It’s our stylized version of an eyeball. It’s like a tradition that we’re taking part of in pop culture. Sometimes people send us some other stuff that has an eyeball on it, and we’re like, “It’s just an eyeball.” [Laughs]
Mikhail: We have our specific eyeball, which looks a certain way. Its veins are a certain way. We know that eyeball when we see it, but yeah, it’s just an eyeball. God owns the copyright for that.
2007: Death Adder
Mikhail: I really wanted to create another phony sports icon. This idea of playing with sportswear was really appealing to me, and I just wanted to create these fake logos and icons for teams that didn’t exist. The Death Adder seemed imposing to me. An artist by the name of Dennis Chow created the Death Adder that we are all familiar with. I think part of the inspiration was from this shoot Vice did about goth-jocks or something. Either way, I really wanted to make death-themed sports gear, and that’s where the Death Adder logo came from. Aside from that, it was also just really strong to take the “Adder” out and just put “Death” on things.
2007: Introduces Full Cut and Sew
Mikhail: The thing that I remember most about the first cut and sew line is when we introduced it at Magic, which was only a couple of months before we released it. Nobody expected it. We had already been working on it for a while, and we saw other brands like The Hundreds start their cut and sew line. 10.Deep had little bits of cut and sew for a while at that point, but then we rolled through Magic and we had this gigantic collection of everything from backpacks to jeans to jackets to buttondown shirts to this, that and the other, and most people walked in and were taken aback by it. Not necessarily by the designs, like, “You guys reinvented the wheel,” but more like, “Whoa, you guys are actually a real brand now.” That’s what basically cut and sew symbolizes in this world.
Greg: The intro to the cut and sew line directly stemmed from Japan. We had done some sweaters and some little pieces here and there, but when we linked up with our Japanese distributor, part of the agreement was that we needed cut and sew. We needed more than hats and shirts. We needed a full collection, so the company that linked us with the distributor also linked us with production in China. We started producing a full range to offer, essentially for Japan, but the concept was different than a lot of other deals. Generally speaking, the kind of deal that most Japanese distributors would do is that they would produce the cut and sew collections in Japan, and then pay the brand a royalty. We had a different situation.
Mikhail: It used to be that you were basically licensing your brand out to the Japanese to create a cut and sew collection that they kind of controlled. You would import back in and it would be super expensive.
Greg: That was just sort of what was going on with the streetwear scene, at least with a lot of the brands that we were friends with.
Mikhail: This deal was more like, “We’ll help you do it and sell it, but you guys are doing it.” It’s funny because when we look back it at now, it was kind of like being a kid in a candy store. They let us do whatever we wanted without guidance when we really needed somebody to tap us on the shoulder and say, “You really shouldn’t do that because there’s no way you’re going to be able to sell that.” [Laughs] It was a huge learning process.
2007: Pop-Up Shop on North 5th
Mikhail: Aaron from Kill Shop Kill had a space on North 5th [in Williamsburg] and was vacating it, so he asked if we wanted to take it over for about three months, and those three months turned into six months. Some kids ran in and stole a bunch of stuff. [Laughs] It was our first experience with retail and it kind of got us into thinking, “Let’s open up a real shop, a permanent space where we can actually function as a real retail store. What became our actual storefront at 350 Broadway in Brooklyn was our office and warehouse at the time. When we first got it, the initial idea was to make it a store, but it was more important to have a space where we could work out of and keep our clothes and ship them out.
2008: Meeting L’Amour and Prolly, and Starting DART
Mikhail: Prolly was a big fan of the brand, and I remember that he creeped me out because he asked if he could come to my house and exchange something, and I was like, “Uh, no,” because I didn’t know who he was. I don’t even remember how we met him personally. I think he was friends with the Trouble & Bass guys. He was a huge fan of the brand and had this blog PROLLY IS NOT PROBABLY, and it was growing in popularity as this cycling blog. John had this idea to be like, “Well, what if we created this fixed gear team?” because that was getting popular, and we basically let John kind of run with it. [Laughs] I don’t care about it now because I’m not in the scene, but when we introduced the team, we had this lookbook that was almost like a trading card for each team member. It got a lot of flack on cycling blogs. [Laughs] It was just not what you do in the cycling world. I guess people thought it was cheesy. I thought it was kind of funny and cute, you know, like baseball cards. John spearheaded it and did it for a while. We’re still active in the community. A lot of the staff rides fixed gears. I ride my bike and Greg rides his bike, but it officially lost steam when John moved to Austin and his blog really took off.
In addition to that, John was also working as an architect. He offered his services to design our first shop and helped build it out, so that actually came about before DART. That’s really how the relationship started. He helped build out the shop, and because of that, he introduced us to Joel, or L’Amour Supreme, who was also into cycling and was an artist. John brought him in to make some sick designs for our cabinetry. He never did the cabinetry, but we’ve been friends and coworkers ever since that day.
Greg: Meeting John did a few things. It developed DART. At the time, a lot of streetwear was involved in the skate community, and we had always been skate friendly, but we didn’t have a skate team or anything. There was this idea of creating a fixed gear team, Death Adders Road and Track. We sort of allowed it because John was so into it. We really let John roll with it. We knew going into it that it wouldn’t be a big money maker, but we thought it would be interesting and we were working with our friend.
2008: Kern Tees
Mikhail: Richard Kern is one of my favorite filmmakers and I think he’s a great photographer. I thought it would be cool to work with him.
Greg: You were also surprised that nobody had ever done anything with him before. He had done some stuff with Hysteric Glamour, but he hadn’t really done anything with anybody before.
Mikhail: I just hit him up. Granted, he’s pretty big right now, but at this point in time, he hadn’t really hit his resurgence yet, which Vice helped create. To me, he was just this dude that I idolized in high school and college, so I sent him an email, and he was like, “Yeah, sounds cool to me. Want to come by my house and studio, and pick out what you want?” He was one of the easiest people to work with. One of the things I remember from the experience, besides working with an idol of mine, was that it killed a possible “Ducktails Disney” collaboration. [Laughs]
2009: 350 Broadway Opens
Mikhail: I just remember being there until 3:00 a.m. being really particular about everything.
Greg: It was our first experience with retail. It cost us way more money than we could have ever expected. Especially in New York, there were no other brands from our generation — this second wave of streetwear — that had a flagship store, so we were one of the first brands of our generation to have a store, and it was a big deal. To do it in Brooklyn, and have our home be our flagship store, it was a big thing for us.
Mikhail: We learned how crazy it is to actually build out a store. We were trying to build out a cool space. We didn’t factor things in like the best thing for actually selling product. We didn’t know any of that stuff at the time.
2010: Das Racist and Other Music Releases
Mikhail: We already had the blog for a while and we put out some releases. We had the Keep Watch series that Michael Cohn had created. We were introducing our fans to great new music, and we were opening up musicians to a wider fan base. Then we took a meeting with Das Racist. Everyone knew them from the TacoBell/Pizza Hut song — they were kind of a meme at that point. We found out Heems was a fan and wanted to come by to talk, so we sat with them and they told us what they were looking to do. They really just wanted help promoting it and getting it up on the blog, and then pressing up copies for them to hand out at South by Southwest. Heems sent it over and I loved it off the bat. I still think of them as one of my favorite hip-hop acts. You either get it or you don’t, but they’re incredible. We got Mad Decent involved in getting it mastered, and that’s how they connected with Mad Decent. It got written up on NahRight and various places, and I remember waking up one morning a couple of months after the release came out and our traffic was through the roof. It was insane. I went on Pitchfork, and I saw it had been reviewed. It got a really glowing review. Music had been such an integral part of the brand, and now we had developed this platform to expose new artists and put our fans on to exciting new acts. Das Racist wasn’t the first group we did a release with, but it was the first one that people took seriously.
2010: Echo Park and Tokyo Opens
Mikhail: They happened a month apart from each other. We opened Echo Park and as soon as that was done, we had to take a trip out to Japan.
Greg: Echo Park started from our relationship with Mad Decent and Diplo. I became friends with Diplo’s manager, Kevin Kusatsu, and I kept on seeing him at all these different events. It was at Dark Disco. I remember talking to him and I asked if he wanted to help open a store in L.A. He said, “Okay.” I went out there to check out Echo Park, and I thought it was cool because it sort of fell in line with our brand and our aesthetic. It was a mistake to choose Echo Park, though. 350 worked out because we are a Brooklyn brand and we are from the neighborhood.
Mikhail: We didn’t know much about L.A. Echo Park is a great neighborhood, but it just wasn’t the best place for us. We followed it up a month later with the store in Japan. Our popularity was growing more and more in Japan, and our distributor said we should open up a store there. That was really the next step for us. We went out there with Joel [L’Amour Supreme] and Prolly.
Greg: It was at Agenda in Huntington Beach, and the Japanese distributors wanted us to open a store in Japan, and I didn’t think they were serious. The distributor had never opened a store for a brand before, so it was a big deal and a cool move for us.
Mikhail: Yeah, regardless of Echo Park being the right move, it was good for the brand. It was like, “Oh wow, Mishka’s got a store in L.A. and a month later, they have a store in Tokyo!” The party that we threw for the Echo Park store was crazy. It was the event of the night, and having something in L.A. that’s the event of the night is no easy task. That’s where our relationship with Wavves started.
Greg: It was full circle for us. It was cool to have started off in Japan with no money and no idea what we were doing, and now we had a store there. In 2006, we went to Japan and in 2010, we had a store. It was really cool to have friends get to see us grow.
2011: Psychic TV
Mikhail: That was something like the Kern thing. I thought it would be cool. Genesis was an idol of mine. I’m a huge Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV fan. I honestly don’t even remember how it came to be. Genesis came by the warehouse and we talked for a while because Genesis is full of countless stories, and the collection came to be. This was right around the time the Tate was recognizing him. He was being truly recognized as one of the great artists of the last few decades, and he was one of the easiest people to work with. He kept saying that he agreed to work with us and that meant he knew he could trust our judgment. It opened us up to a new audience. No streetwear brand was going to be working with Psychic TV. I guess the cat is out of the bag here, but we’re going to try to do something again with Genesis. But the first collection focused on the earlier, kind of darker neo-folk experimental Psychic TV stuff, and the second one is more focused on the evolution of Psychic TV.
Mikhail: Hopefully we might do another Mishka x Psychic TV capsule collection since it opened up to a vast new audience. It was strange to see how many different people were touched by Genesis and his art, and that led to working with another one of my idols, Douglas P. from Death, in June.
2012: Harvey Comics Collab
Greg: The cool thing about Harvey is that it was the first real licensing that we did. We had done collabs, and things that could be seen as licensing, but there was this thing with streetwear where there has sort of been this idea that everything is a sort of flip. It’s a parody. It’s not permitted. That’s kind of been the basis for streetwear, this idea of taking something and appropriating it, re-appropriating a logo or art. It’s almost like a version of found art. We started thinking about things we could do, and I think Mike threw out Harvey Comics. We reached out to them, and now they are owned by this company called Classic Media. They were so open to doing something with us, and it really opened the door for us to have interested licensers to come to us with an offer to do something. You know, Harvey Comics is kind of punk rock. They had these characters that are iconic, but just never as big as some others.
2012: La Brea Opens
Greg: I realized we made a really bad decision by moving to Echo Park, but we really wanted to do it and we really wanted to stand because that’s what we do. You know, the store wasn’t doing too well, and we needed to figure something out. I made a random trip out to L.A. one day just to look at spaces. By happenstance, I realized I had booked my hotel incorrectly. I came in on a Thursday night, but the first night at the hotel was Friday, so I didn’t have a place to stay. I contacted my friend Mega, who runs Black Scale, and he let me stay at his crib. I got there at 1:00 a.m. and I told him I was looking for a storefront. He said that they were trying to move their store next door. He wanted to break the lease and they needed somebody to move in. I checked out the space, met the landlord, and that was basically it. La Brea is just a classic block.
Mikhail: As much as we loved Echo Park and loved that neighborhood, it just wasn’t really effective to have a retail store out there for what we were doing. The only people we were really attracting to that location were fans of the brand who knew us already and were making the trip out there. Part of the plan with moving to the West Coast was to bring in people who didn’t really know who we were or kind of knew who we were. Most people didn’t even know we had a store in L.A. when we were in Echo Park because of where it was. The move to La Brea was definitely the first step in properly trying to cement our footing on the West Coast.
2013: SF Opens
Greg: SF was an interesting one. It was opened by one of my best friends, Chris Brennan. He wanted to open a Mishka store for years, and I had been trying to talk him out of it. For one thing, he didn’t want to open up on Haight Street, and we learned from the Echo Park location that when you open up a store in a secondary market from where you’re from, you need to open it in an established retail environment, no matter how you feel about it. He was saying, “The Haight isn’t cool. The Mission is cool,” and that’s like what we heard with L.A. “Oh, Echo Park is cool. Hollywood is whack,” but we finally opened it up. It’s been going well. I’m happy with it. It has added another store to our arsenal, and it’s helping to take us to the next level.
Mikhail: Chris had been a friend of the brand for a long time, and even though I tried to dissuade him plenty of times from opening the store, he really wanted to do it, so, he put together a plan and we couldn’t stop him. Truthfully, he’s probably one of the best people to be doing something like that, and he’s helped us to expand even more into the market out west. It’s a great little shop in a really cool area out there.
2013: SpongeBob x Basel Castle
Greg: SpongeBob was awesome. They came to us, and this guy Mel from Flud had been doing stuff with Nickelodeon and SpongeBob. They had done stuff with SpongeBob before, but they really wanted him to be redrawn and reworked. They came to me and said they wanted to do something with an artist. It was my idea to use L’Amour. I showed them his stuff, and Nickelodeon loved his work. The very first sketch he did ended up being the final graphic. We had a meeting with them and the whole team loved it. They had no comments. It was awesome for us. It was a great property to be able to work with, and it was great to involve L’Amour and to bring it to Basel. That was always part of it. Nickelodeon wanted to do something at Basel Castle.
Mikhail: In the world of licensing, there are certain brand identities that don’t really want you doing much to them. They basically just want to license it out, have you put it on shirts, and collect their royalties, while there are other ones who don’t care so much. They kind of like the idea of having their properties messed with or turned into something different. Then there are ones like SpongeBob, which probably have gone as far as they can possibly go on the regular route of licensing, so now they’re branching out and trying to do cool projects to expand the brand. Licensing is a weird animal because you kind of never know what you can and can’t get away with, and everybody’s completely different, but it’s cool having these properties come to us showing interest that they want us to do something with them.
Having followed the streetwear market for nearly 10 years, we’ve seen tons of brands come and go, yet there are a handful that have been able to persist throughout the years. Mishka NYC is one of the standout labels, having built their own niche through a series of releases, events and partnerships. We caught up with Mishka founders Mikhail Bortnik and Greg Rivera to discuss the 25 biggest milestones for the brand thus far. Read on to find out all about Mishka NYC.