Since childhood, Charlie Morgan has been obsessed with subculture. A globally recognized creative, @sofarok has left his touch with brands like Vans, New Balance and adidas, just to name a few. This year, Charlie celebrates his 25-year journey of building his own brand with the release of his first book Heated Words, taking readers through a visual archival playbook of how a font permeated culture.
J.E.: Where do we start?
C.M.: I came of age in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. My interests, primarily skateboarding and graffiti - and by extension footwear and apparel - were, for lack of a better word, subcultures. None of them were easily accessible. This is all pre-internet, you couldn’t Google. You had to hunt. It’s worth mentioning I was also obesely overweight, so I loved skateboarding dearly, but I was never going to be any good at it. But more than anything I loved the visual culture around it - I loved getting R.A.D. or Thrasher as much for the latest board graphics as the skating. I was obsessed with skating and graffiti enough that I wanted to document it all.
C.M.: That grew into me, wanting to make films. DIY is synonymous with subculture, I didn't need a crew to make a film. I could just go out with a mini DV camera and edit at home on a PC, VHS and two VCRs before that. I'd also been a relatively early adopter to online in ‘95 with a 56k modem and I was on newsgroups already discussing graffiti. So there is this innate sense of, ‘I love these things’. And ‘I love storytelling’. And ‘where's that gonna take me?’.
C.M.: Well, it didn't take me anywhere near where I ended up. Straight out of university, I got a gig teaching ‘moving image’, which I realized very quickly, wasn't for me. I think partly because I always struggled academically, and partly because of that unfair old adage ‘those that do do, that those don’t teach’, So I wanted to do something else. At some point, in the late ‘90s, I started to really pay attention to sneakers - trainers as we call them in U.K. I couldn't have all the Jordans I wanted when I was a kid, because, first of all, in the UK, they were somewhat harder to come by. Secondly, there was no way my parents were gonna get me those. The only pair I had were Maroon VIs from the sale rack. But now I could go on eBay, or I could go on a forum and there was this wealth of crowd sourced information about them. And there was all this other stuff I hadn't seen. I got immersed in that whole sneaker world and started to buy shoes.
J.E.: How did you get into the industry?
C.M.: In the early-2000’s, my interest in sneakers led me to a very small agency in London called Unorthodox Styles. The ‘shop window’ of that agency was a sneaker website called Crooked Tongues. The tagline was “Show love, drop knowledge”. It was, for the time, a big community. They were creating a lot of content. I was very active on the forum. They needed a runner / art worker. So, I got my foot in the door doing basic stuff they needed - video content, After Effects, manually going through 1000’s of lines on a spreadsheet to change something.
C.M.: When some of the people who helped start the agency began to move on, taking jobs within the industry, I took on more responsibility. I started being more of a creative within the agency and more of a project manager. This was early days in terms of sneaker culture being something that brands had identified. We started doing work for adidas, focusing on this idea that there are people out there who instead of buying one pair of sneakers every six months, they're gonna over index, and they're gonna buy six pairs a month. And we had the inside track on that, because we were the people that they were trying to target. Also, we had this community, so we could reach out directly to see what worked and what didn't.
C.M.: I did that for six, seven years. My very dear friend, Mr. Gary Warnett, who sadly passed away five years ago, came to work with me. We shared many similar interests, obsessions, whatever you want to call them. Gary and I became a double act. Often travelling the globe on brands budgets for one reason or another.
C.M.: There came a point where Crooked Tongues, it never really made money. It was more of a loss leader, a shop window for this agency. New management didn't really see the value in Crooked Tongues. Ultimately, a partnership happened between Crooked Tongues and ASOS. I went to work at ASOS, which at the time, they were in the ascendancy, they were writing the rulebook on e-commerce - it just blew my mind. And we started to turn what had been a kind of, semi-professional retail outlet, into a full on ecom beast.
C.M.: Suddenly, I was responsible for a huge buying budget. I was handling all the marketing of the site and the brand. And I was responsible for all the collaborations we were doing. Basically, anything that needed to happen, we were getting it done. Myself and Gary did that for a couple of years. I never had a job title all that whole time. I never had a business card that said ‘Charlie Morgan, Whatever’.
J.E.: What happened next?
C.M.: Around that time, a good friend who had been at adidas, had moved over to Vans and was looking for someone to come in and head up digital, whatever that meant. Vans is a brand that I'd always had an affinity for, obviously a skate brand. Their origin story, everything about them is a bit different than everyone else. Their European headquarters was in Lugano, Switzerland, on the Italian border. So I moved from East London, to rural Switzerland, living on a beautiful lake, right near Lake Como. That's kind of crazy.
C.M.: Looking back Vans was a fantastic experience , I learned so much, so quickly, because suddenly there's this thing called social media, Facebook is really taking off, I'm getting insane amount of budget to pump into social because obviously, it's seen as a huge growth area, no one's quite sure how we're going to use it yet. But you know, we need to be there, we need to show up, we need to, have a following. And it all made sense to me, because social was this huge extension of this world I've grown up in of message boards, newsgroups, and all of that kind of thing. I just saw it as an extension - it was really exciting. And I had a job title!
C.M.: Eventually, I decided I really wanted to be back in the UK. I moved back to work for Vice, managing Noisey, their music vertical in Europe. Vice was an intersting company with an incredible reputation and history in and of itself. Music is something I love, but it wasn't my passion first and foremost. So I moved on again. I worked for a bespoke consultancy firm on a project with a big electronics brand who was trying to go from being a white-label goods brand to being a lifestyle brand. Apple was their biggest competitor. So, how do we become more like an Apple? Again, kind of realizing that my interests and the way that I approached things was valid in other arenas. There was a lot of value in taking these things that I had learned from, that were endemic to these little cultures I loved and lived in and applying them to much bigger, broader objectives.
C.M.: After that, I decided I really missed footwear. Oh, and by the way, during this whole crazy time, with all these things going on, I met my now wife. So I'm starting to fly over to New York as often as possible to see my then girlfriend, I took a job with Wolverine, who own a lot of brands, as European marketing manager. A lot of it, it was a very linear, traditional sense of marketing, spreadsheets and calendars etc. but for me It was about creativity and how to engage with people. Making something at that intersection between culture, and brands is what it's all about, for me.
J.E.: Can you elaborate on that?
C.M.: These objects brands create, they don't think much of them after they've come out, by the time they are in the market the team that create and market them our several seasons beyond them,, but they are adopted and become totemic of these other things. And they have this immense value in them, that can be done in the right way. It can be used by a brand to reinvigorate or to grow. Done in a wrong way, you alienate the true believers in your brand. We've talked about that many times.
J.E.: Ok back to the story.
C.M.: To cut a long story short, one morning, I woke up and I was really ill, I was out for three months - life threatening stuff, lucky to survive etc. In the wake of that I moved to Brooklyn in 2016, to be with my now wife. At that point, I was doing bits and pieces of consultancy, but I got to New York, and essentially, everybody in New York knows everybody. It was really difficult because I'm not someone who's great at going out and selling myself, and being the that guy. I'm not the guy on LinkedIn talking about this wonderful thing I did. New York is filled with people who are really good at that.
C.M.: Everybody was hustling. And they didn't have a clue what they were doing. They weren't necessarily very good at it, but they would tell you, they could do it. So trying to find work was kind of difficult. I had a few things going on. But I said to myself, I wasn't gonna go back in-house with a brand. I got approached by two very close friends of mine, who were working at one of my favourite brands: New Balance. The person that hired me said, “you're responsible for how NB turns up within culture”, which was something that made so much sense to me, that's what I want to do, I want to work with brands that I love, and I want to help them accentuate all of this amazing heritage that they may not even know that they have.
C.M.: That's not just necessarily in terms of, for want of a better word, pop culture. It could be from a design perspective, an almost academic level of industrial design. A lot of great brands haven't taken the time to really figure out where the last 30 years of their success has come from. They're not looking back and going, “you know, let’s bring back this sneaker, because we know why it was popular in this time period”. They’re doing it because people want it, but they don't really sort of make any effort to understand, and it's always a sort of temporary transitory conversation. There's an arrogance and an assumption within brands that, well, this is our DNA, this is our creation. So you know, we don't need the adopters of this thing to really cosign what we're doing. Or we're going to get the wrong person to co sign it. Or, we're going to do it, but we're going to do it our own way, which is not the point.
C.M.: So anyway, I go to New Balance and it was pretty amazing, because I got to shape the storytelling for stuff that I loved. I could bring in culture and I could work with media partners to help amplify stories and tell those stories. I got to create a lot of great content. Everything from books to mini documentaries to podcasts. I worked on so many wonderful things, it was really kind of a dream gig.
J.E.: Sounds like it. Why did you leave?
C.M.: When COVID hit, we had a kid and decided to move to Seattle to be close to family. I was in Seattle for a few years. And then four months ago, we moved back to the UK. I am doing some really cool, interesting consultancy for some really interesting brands. I'm very invested in storytelling, andagain trying to find that kind of intersection between the thing, and people and culture and why it's interesting, and why you should care about it over the other thing. And create value in the way that advertising ultimately can also be entertainment.
C.M.: So, how do you how do you do that? I do other things, a bit of everything really, even down to product level. I enjoy the consultancy freelance side of things, because it's project orientated - there's always light at the end of the tunnel. It also feels there's more of a sense of satisfaction, because when it's done, it's done. And it's crystallized and formed, versus perhaps working internally at a brand where things are kind of never ending and you're working on multiple seasons at once.
J.E.: How did your Style Wars figures come about?
C.M.: I've always been someone who goes down wormholes, I become obsessed with things, often things that I think I'm the only person who's ever going to really appreciate it. I call it the ‘Twinkie Effect’. In Die Hard, Bruce Willis phones up his buddy and the guy’s eating a Twinkie. I'm like, What the fuck is that? Twinkie? As a big boy, I liked my food. And I was like, I've got to have a Twinkie. I don't know where I can get a Twinkie. What is a Twinkie? I'd obsess over it for that time period. Because this was the thing that I wasn't gonna get anytime soon. It looks amazing. It's totally different than what's in my drab gray surroundings. I can apply that same logic to all these things. Well, 30 years of my life now I’ve been obsessed with Style Wars. It's essentially, Subway Art, the movie, it's a documentary about hip hop within New York. So I was absolutely obsessed with this film, watching it all the time. I thought, oh, it'd be great if I made Style Wars action figures.
C.M.: I don't know how to sculpt. I like making stuff, but I wouldn't know where to start. So it was just an idea. At one point, I mocked it up. Initially, this was all going to be a bad Photoshop with the backing card. And then COVID happens. I thought, Well, I wonder if I could do this. So I started figuring out where, if I got this bit of this figure, and I took that, and that kinda looks like this guy. And as I was mocking it all up in Photoshop, then I thought, fuck it. So I ordered, you know, God knows how many figures off of eBay. And I started to cut them up like, Okay, now I'm doing this. And then the next minute, I'm buying an airbrush and a spray cabinet.
C.M.: Next thing I know, it’s three in the morning, and I'm trying to sculpt little bits and pieces. And then I buy a 3d printer because there's certain things I can't get, but I could print them if I had a 3d printer. And then I go into the whole world of 3d printing, which is another story. And ultimately, what I created was eight or nine action figures based on this documentary. The main characters. And I did the backing card. I did it because I couldn't get the idea out of my head. I wasn't convinced it was funny or interesting. I just did it because it's something I wanted to exist. That was it.
J.E.: And now you have a new project, Heated Words.
C.M.: Skateboarding, sneakers, graffiti - they weren't mainstream in the sense that you couldn't access it in the same way you could now by just Googling it and finding out every last piece of information about it. You found little pieces of information, and you kind of put them together sometimes in the right way, sometimes in the wrong way. And that is why I had this obsessive reaction to it, because I need to know this jigsaw puzzle so I can fit it into the next puzzle piece. One of the things that is kind of predominant within Style Wars is if you look at the B-boy crews, they all mostly have t-shirts with iron-on flock lettering.
C.M.: I always wanted to know what that typeface is - Old English, Gothic. A very good friend of mine that I grew up with from the same town that I'm from, was equally obsessed. He had gone off and become an art director, creative director and fine artist. He has a degree in typography. One night, we got together and again, for the hundredth time we had this discussion again, ‘what was that typeface?’.
C.M.: We still hadn't come across it anywhere in our ‘professional’ lives. So we set out to answer this story. Because at that time, if you Googled it, if you put in what is that typeface, you know, what is Rocksteady crew wearing? You would find an answer,’ oh, it was, so and so made it or, they did it themselves, or, it's this typeface.’ Wrong answers. There was one website where you could go on, and it would tell you what any font was, and people would just have their answer. And they wouldn't question it any further. We knew these answers were weren't right. So we set out trying to find it.
C.M.: The more we dug, the more we found evidence of it kind of all over the place, really, but very much East Coast centric from the early ‘70s, through to today, because a lot of street wear brands brought it back. We started to look into it. And we were finding, it might crop up in the background of this iconic photograph by this famous photographer, or it might be on this record cover that you've never seen. Or we might find the Instagram account from a guy that was in a B-boy crew in the ‘70s. Then you start looking into the actual type of graphic breakdown of it and realizing it's odd, right? It's not normal. It doesn't apply the rules of typography, it doesn't. It's all over the place.
C.M.: Now I've got all these assets, essentially, and you start spending way too many hours on eBay, trying to find vintage T shirts with it, which is almost impossible. But suddenly, you've got this stuff. What are we going to do? Now let's do an exhibition. So we did a pretty awesome show in London, just before I moved to the States. There was photography by established photographers, there was vintage garments on display. Alongside this exhibition, we did screenings of relevant movies, we had an opening night with DJs and stuff. In our heads, we thought that would be it. But it just raised more questions, more people telling us about their relationship with this typography.. these letters. We thought, ‘What what can we do next?’. We had a few ideas. But making a documentary seemed like a good idea, because we were getting all these different viewpoints. So we started doing that, we did 20 days of filming in Europe and New York.
C.M.: Turns out making a film is quite a lot of work. And you need quite a lot of money to do it. And this story revolves around a lot of these stories, you need the archival footage, etc, to really illustrate it, and that was the big problem. So the idea was, why don't we just put it all into a book,? And even if we self publish it, even if we do a GoFundMe or something, at least then we've kind of passed the baton on to the next people like it's done, it's documented.
C.M.: I emailed someone I met at a dinner party, who works for a publisher, and I just said, ‘Look, we're thinking about doing this and self publishing it, what do you think?’ and pretty much off the back of that one email they wanted to publish it. So suddenly, we've got a proper publisher. I'm extremely proud of this book. It tells the story of these letters from street gangs through to street wear and stops off in punk rock and hip hop. It’s filled with a lot of images that have never been seen before, really important images of important things. Certainly, none of them have been collected together in this way. Ultimately, it is a bit of a detective story of ‘what are these letters?’. Where did they come from? Because no, they don't appear in typography books. So where did they come from? Why do they exist? Who used them? How do they use them? So yeah, that's the book. The cover is amazing. I can't wait for you to see it.