AND1
Basketball trash-talk tees that grew into a sneaker empire. AND1 turned playground streetball into ESPN programming, and by 2001 it trailed only Nike in US basketball-shoe market share. If you owned the shirt that said "Pass. Save yourself the embarrassment," you know.
Three Wharton grad students—Jay Coen Gilbert, Seth Berger, and Tom Austin—founded AND1 in 1993, selling T-shirts out of a car. The shirts featured a silhouetted baller known as "The Player" and trash-talk slogans like "Pass. Save yourself the embarrassment." Streetballers got it immediately: within two years the shirts were in 1,500 stores nationwide through its Foot Locker partnership. The name itself is pure basketball—an "and one" is the free throw you earn by getting fouled on a made basket.
The brand's masterstroke started with grainy 1994 footage of NYC streetballer Rafer Alston, a.k.a. "Skip 2 My Lou," and his impossible handles. AND1 cut it into the first AND1 Mixtape, and in the summer of 1999 gave away 200,000 copies through FootAction in three weeks. The tapes made streetball legends into celebrities, and the shoes rode the wave: Vince Carter won the 2000 NBA Slam Dunk Contest in AND1 Tai Chis, and by 2001 the company was second only to Nike in US basketball-shoe market share with $285 million in revenue, signing NBA stars like Kevin Garnett and Jamal Crawford.
From 2002 to 2008 the AND1 Mixtape Tour rolled city to city and aired on ESPN as "Streetball," making household names of Hot Sauce (Philip Champion) and The Professor (Grayson Boucher). Ten Mixtape volumes were released, the last in 2008. But AND1 had been sold to American Sporting Goods in 2005, and as the streetball boom cooled, the brand slid from cultural phenomenon to discount-rack afterthought—leaving behind the tapes, the tees, and a generation that still says "Skip 2 My Lou."
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