Letter from Richard Wheeler:

Right. Here's the story:

I was working for a moment; at a corporation, and it was horrifically boring. I can't tell you where, because that might get me sued. But imagine this. After two years working there I started to believe that fashion was awfully boring. So I entirely quit. 

So I'm on the phone with David, my booker friend, and I tell him I've just walked out of his job. And I can hear him laugh and tell his boss what I've just done. And Nathalie, in her wonderful French accent is like "Richie, I love Richie! Tell him to get in a cab and come here now. I'll pay for it." So I go over to the offices of Next, then the biggest and one of the most powerful Model Agencies in the world to meet with Nathalie.

She sits me down and says "all you have to do is sit there. You don't have to do anything, anything at all. I'll give you a salary, a visa, and you go out and get drunk every night until you feel better. Than we talk." And I'm like "awwww, there's got to be a catch." She says " Just one. You're going to have to convince the owner you've been an agent for years." As she pointed me in the direction of his office, she whispers in my ear - "say you were with a former Model agency, they've just went bankrupt!" So I gave it a shot.

After about four months of drinking a lot - a real lot. I stared to miss designing - and I thought it would be great to make some tee shirts that said things about what I wanted to say when I went out. (Tee shirts were designed to party in.) So I started writing things that I wanted to say at night - and then I'd put them in the color copier and then print them by hand with an iron - you know, the sayings like ‘I Only Sleep With the Best,' ‘Almost Single,' and I started wearing them out.

‘Please don't feed the models.' Well that's a no brainer - always being told to watch their weight and what not. One day I looked at a model walking in, and I just kind of said out loud, to no one in particular, "oh - god, please don't feed the models." Wrote it down twenty times until I liked the way it looked and then put that one down on a shirt. I showed one girl that design, she grabbed it, screamed, and ran off to the women's board and like six girls giggled. After giving out fifty over the course of a week, I had a whole bunch of women running around New York wearing my shirt. And then it just exploded. An email came in from Urban Outfitters.

They wanted to run a order for a lot of tees! - which was quite challenging since I was still using an iron? But I had to make an answer. So I thought a minute, figured I needed at least thirty grand and since I had $500 to my name, figured it was a good idea to confirm with a two week deadline. Makes perfect sense right???

I picked up the phone in the morning asking for a dollar, 5 dollars, 50 - whatever I could bloody get - borrowed money everywhere knowing that if the order was one day late, I would lose all. Well - that was nearly five years ago. If you're reading this then you probably figure - I made the deadline. Me and my team, we now make up Emperors New Clothes.

It started with Bond. Gavin Bond. He's been my mate forever. He was one of the people that really helped me at the start: not only because he came up with great slogans, but because a lot of the pictures you're looking at - the ones with the celebrities and such- they're taken by him. His work shows up all over the place: like in Vanity Fair and GQ, Maxim and Entertainment Weekly, now even Victoria's Secret's got him. So there we went from being very good friends to being the perfect partners in business.

I guess we're just a bunch of crazy, exceptional people who share a Corporate Vision: ENC Owns Tees. Well, that's what we do...I guess. We own tees.