Name: Inside FTP: Working with Travis Barker, Police Raids, and Growing the Streetwear Brand
Uploaded: 2025-01-13T05:16:35.000Z
Duration: 7 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

I think one of the crazy experiences I've ever had over at FTP is a regular day, showed up at 9 a.m., you know, get the job done.

To-infinitive

I got my boy Nate outside at the taco truck, trying to get his little breakfast.

You know, I walk in with my coffee, everything's cool.

Well, I hear two loud knocks at the door.

So I casually take my time walking to the door.

I'm not in any kind of rush, because I'm like, man, they're trying to force me to get up.

I just sat down, I got my coffee, well, I open the door.

Police officers all over the place, guns drawn.

I mean, these officers are not even wearing, like, police uniform.

They got on jeans and running tennis shoes, and folks are hopping out of minivans and asking us if we have any kind of anything in here.

And I'm like, man, this is, we packing ship t-shirts.

My name is Zachary Clark, and I'm the owner and CEO of FTP.

I grew up in Culver City for, like, a little bit of my life, and then moved over to Crenshaw area.

Where I'm from, definitely sculpted the brand and made it what it is today.

I grew up in a little bit of a rougher area than a lot of other brand owners, and that definitely made FTP what it is.

I think working at FTP is like a super family experience.

Thankfully, I've able to, I've been able to just hire strictly all my friends, and then friends of friends.

Everybody gets along really well, and it's just a, it's a great place to be at.

You feel like you're a part of, you feel like if you work here, you're just like a part of something.

Like, everybody's cool, there's no animosity.

It's just all one big family, and that's just pretty much what FTP is.

Yeah, I mean, we don't really follow, like, general rules.

That's why I think it is, the brand is what it is, because we're not going, like, by a specific, like, script, or, like, by how other brands have done it in the past.

And it's just like a, it's like we're just freestyling it, and I think that's what works for us, and it's gonna, we're just gonna continue to do that, and not really care about opinions or what other people think, and just keep running it.

I think a lot of kids have the, like, the fuck you attitude, and I think our brand definitely gets that message across, of, like, we do what we want, and I think a lot of kids just can relate to that, that specific message, and that's why people wear stuff and buy it.

My name is Scholar Blocker, self-proclaimed warehouse manager of operations.

Shoot, I've known Zach probably since I was, like, seven years old.

We grew up playing at Ladera Little League, playing baseball.

He moved around the corner from me probably my 10th grade year, maybe 11th grade year, and once he was around the corner from me, I mean, we were just, like, inseparable, you know, we both stopped playing baseball, 10th grade.

So that little transition for us, it was just like, okay, now what?

You know, we were used to playing baseball every day, now we're taking on just the streets and being a, you know, African-American teenager.

Not necessarily the best environments, but those same environments were the environments that helped us grow up, you know, as young men, and helped just give us just a different outlook on life, and what to dream for, and what to hope for in the future.

When the brand got banned from the school that I went to, it made kids want it more, and it made me work harder, too, because I don't know what school would try to ban something that a kid is doing, you know?

Try and do something positive, but they turned into a negative thing, so.

You know, if you ever miss a day in class, you know, they'll call home to your mom or your dad, they'll say, hey, look, your son, daughter, whatever, they didn't show up to class.

Well, that same message, they called every single student at Culver City and told them, if you wear FTP to school, you got to take it off, you got to come to the front office, get a shirt out of the lost and found.

If you weren't trying to comply with any of those rules, you eventually had to go home for the day.

And I think that point alone, when those phone calls hit and those messages got to everyone's house, I mean, that was like the spark, in my opinion.

That was the spark that was just like, yo, this is really something right here.

The fact that the school could recognize the impact or the message that we were trying to give off and they tried their best to shut it down.

I mean, you see where we're at now, you know.

Obviously, they didn't do a great job, they just helped us, you know, kind of push it up to the next level.

And so, you know, Culver City just doing that, it really helped in the whole story, the myth, the legend of FTP and Zachary Clark.

To the counterculture, which is us and all the folks that we believe wear FTP, we recognize what we're seeing.

And that is a, that's a huge, huge piece to the puzzle.

If the world is going to react like that to the message and the brand that we're putting out there, you know that you got something big.  I think the reaction to the controversial designs is pretty, well, back in the day, it was like pretty shocking because I was like young and people were like tripping over like certain things.

I think that's what made the brand what it is today because like shock value, whatever people were, people weren't doing that stuff back then.

I choose to remain anonymous because I don't want to face directly related with the brand.

And I don't really, I'm not a big on like social media, like posting a lot of photos and stuff.

I just, I just like to be low key and I want it to have like longevity.

I'm not, I mean, technically people, people know what I look like, some people, but I think I, I think I've been covering my face since like, maybe like 2013 or 14 or maybe earlier.

Travis Barker is a super, super cool dude.

And I was thankful to meet him through my friends, Suicide Boys, who are like really big artists and friends of mine.

He just like embodies the message I'm trying to get across with FTP.

I was really thankful to work with him and really glad that he was down to work with us too on that lookbook.

These shoes are super dope and they did a lot of good skate shoes in the 90s.

But another thing is, um, we're due to the, like the name, a lot of, a lot of bigger brands don't choose to like not work with us.

So DC accepted us for what we are and let us have complete creative control over what we wanted to do.

And they didn't, they didn't hold us back at all.

Eventually I was trying to explore the idea of possibly a store, maybe in 2020 for our 10 year anniversary.

I just want to, I just want to explore that idea.

But, um, I don't want it to just be, uh, something that's just open every day that everybody can just go to like a normal retail store.

I want it to be like an experience that you can only, you can only go to on the week, like Friday, Saturday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

Uh, the biggest challenges I've faced with the brand is definitely the name.

Having a brand with the word fuck is extremely, uh, it's an extreme challenge and extremely hard to do.

I mean, we've able to, we've been able to push past that and, and now the name doesn't really, it doesn't affect us in a negative way, but that that's been the hardest part is growing, is growing a brand with the word fuck in the name.

And getting people to accept that and getting other brands to want to work with us and collaborate with us.

And then I think with the brand, I've learned that everybody's not here to help you.

Some people are here to use you and use what you, what you have and what you've built for their own personal gain.

And that you have to really choose your friends wisely and choose the people that you fuck with really wisely.

My name is Zachary Clark and fuck the population.