Show your love for the 'hood with a hoodie - and other community-centric clothes and accessories

By MELENA Z. RYZIK
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

New York, someone once said, is a city of neighborhoods. From Astoria to Tottenville, City Island to Williamsburg, residents are devoted to their neighborhood butcher, their local diner, their corner park - the things that make the city feel less like a sprawling metropolis and more like a home.

"People are passionate and fiercely proud of the neighborhood in which they live," says Robert Kahn, editor of the book "City Secrets: New York City," in which prominent people reveal their favorite undiscovered spots. "New York is a very big place, and one of the ways that you make it a smaller place is to become intimately involved in your own neighborhood." So it's only logical that instead of donning that iconic (and now touristy) "I Love New York" T-shirt, New Yorkers are showing their pride by celebrating something a little more local - their boroughs and neighborhoods. And they're doing so with everything from tees to jewelry to board games.

'Brooklyn chauvinism'

Manhattan has always been the center of all things New York. There's never been a shortage of loyalty to Little Italy or Hell's Kitchen, and a trip to 125th St. reveals a rainbow of Harlem love. (In 2000, Harlem native Murphy Heyliger opened Harlemade, a quirky design shop selling tees, hats, totes and more.)

But in recent years, as neighborhoods like Williamsburg in Brooklyn have become magnets for young artists and writers, outward signs of borough pride have become more visible.

This community loyalty doesn't surprise Michael De Zayas, the founder of the Neighborhoodies line of sweatshirts and T-shirts. In late 2002, De Zayas, 30, then an underemployed freelance travel writer, made himself a sweatshirt with the name of his neighborhood, Fort Greene, on it.

"People immediately started asking me about it," he says. Within six months, he was taking 50 orders a day for his custom-made hoodies. Now the company is headquartered in DUMBO, where it's grown to 76 employees, including 17 designers. The first order, for a sweatshirt that spelled out "Ridgewick," a combination of Bushwick and Ridgewood, proved to De Zayas that "people really care about specific neighborhoods."

"Living in New York is more than just living in the city or living in Brooklyn," he says. "It's about the neighborhood and neighborhood pride. Where you live says something about you."

Western Addition, Lower Haight, Tenderloin – you probably won't find wide-eyed tourists glued to the windows of their smog-spewing buses as they roll past these lesser known parts of The City. But for the residents who live in these colorful neighborhoods, the names alone are a source of pride. Ironically, an East Coast company has come up with a simple but very effective way for proud San Franciscans to represent whatever 'hood they call home.

"People in San Francisco are very neighborhood-centric, a lot like New Yorkers," says Michael de Zayas, founder and president of Neighborhoodies, a Brooklyn-based company selling hooded sweatshirts with the names of San Francisco neighborhoods on them, "so it just made sense to include a San Francisco line."

De Zayas started his company less than a year ago. The 29-year-old journalist-by-trade (he's currently a travel writer for Fodor's guides) admits he's never had much of a head for numbers, but decided to start his own business when he realized there was actually a demand for the sweatshirts. He says it all started when he had a Fort Greene hoodie (He was living in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn at the time) made for himself, having been inspired by his own need to reprazent."People would stop me on the street all the time whenever I was wearing it and ask where I bought it," he says, "so I thought, 'Hey, I'm on to something here.'"

Since then, the company's grown by leaps and bounds. Neighborhoodies has expanded its line to offer neighborhood-minded residents in some twenty-two U. S. cities the chance to big-up their own 'hoods. Orders have increased exponentially, going from one or two a week to twenty a day (fifty a day during the Christmas season) and allowing de Zayas to bring the entire operation in-house (he was farming the job out to another company before). He's even hired a small staff to help him meet the growing demand for his product.

"It's pretty crazy," he jokes. "I think people just have a really strong emotional attachment to the area they live in and they want to represent it."

He regularly receives testimonials from happy customers who thank him profusely for the chance to proudly rock the name of their neighborhoods. Many of these letters are posted on the Neighborhoodies web site.

One letter, from a guy named Will, an anonymous member of a "party-facilitating" group here in SF called The Partygoers wrote:"I feel both honored and humbled that I can represent my neighborhood in such a fashion. The great Western Addition (or W.A. as we affectionately call it) has been a source of inspiration to me ... and to give it the props it deserves creates a wondrous feeling of belonging and self-worth."

Will's letter might sound a bit facetious but one need only scroll through the other letters on the site to see that they all share this same tone. De Zayas laughs and says that one customer even described the moment she received her Neighborhoodie as "magical." As for the San Francisco line, de Zayas says he receives about the same number of orders for all The City's neighborhoods, although the Excelsior and Tenderloin hoodies appear to be outselling the others by a small margin. The product, he says, seems to appeal to a mostly hip 20-and 30-something urban demographic, although his clientele ranges in age from children to seniors.

De Zayas says that he's ecstatic about the success of the company, but adds that he's taking it all in stride. He wants to add more cities to his line and has plans to include t-shirts and shorts.

"Ya' know, I've always come up with these weird little entrepreneurial ideas but this is the first one that actually panned out. I'm just hoping some day I'll be able to pay off my school loans. That's my secret goal."

For more information on Neighborhoodies, visit www.neighborhoodies.com.

NEW YORK – Neighborhoodies, a fast-growing firm that got its start putting the names of New York neighborhoods on sweatshirts, has opened its first store and is looking far outside the local environs for growth.
"We plan to have at least five stores by the end of this year," said Neighborhoodies founder and president Michael de Zayas. "We have found so much enthusiasm for our concept and we intend to have stores in all the major markets by the end of next year."

At a time when the retail world is dominated by conglomerates and mergers, Neighborhoodies is a small business success story. A poet and former travel writer, de Zayas started the company in late 2002 after he found a strong interest in a hoodie he had made emblazoned with the letters "FT. GREENE," which was where he lived in Brooklyn.

The one-man company had a simple mantra: custom-made sweatshirts with the name of a particular enclave. The concept caught on fast, and there are now 21 full-time employees. In its first year, Neighborhoodies racked about $1 million in sales, and de Zayas said the firm is on track to triple that number this year. The company's growth so far has been organic: Neighborhoodies doesn't have investors, and de Zayas has shunned selling his products wholesale, choosing instead to retail his apparel exclusively through the company's online store at neighborhoodies.com
"We want to keep our business customer-focused and our margins are already small, so we can't do wholesale," said de Zayas. He has been approached by a number of big-name stores that want to pick up the line, but so far has declined.

Opening a store was a natural evolution for the company, he noted. The 1,400-square-foot shop, located on the second floor of Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport, has bright paintings on the wall and a table where customers can check out the different colors and letters available. A custom-printed sweatshirt for $59 can be done in 30 minutes.

De Zayas clearly feels the firm's future lies in retail. The company is close to signing a lease in Los Angeles, and other markets he is exploring for stores include Boston, San Francisco and Cincinnati. The Neighborhoodies name has also been trademarked in Europe and Australia.
While the original sweatshirts were centered on printing a specific place and neighborhood, now customers put on everything from nicknames to political slogans – a favorite at the store right now is "Free Martha."

In addition to sweatshirts, the company also sells products for dogs, as well as a wide range of underwear and T-shirts, and a selection of bags, all of which can be customized. The store also sells items such as miniskirts that are not available online. The Web site is going to be revamped soon with a new generation of products, including sweatshirts in different weights, and de Zayas is formulating a new business concept with products aimed at the urban market.

Even as the company has grown, de Zayas takes a somewhat unconventional approach to business. He finds his employees through Craig's List, an online community network, and he fosters an atmosphere of creativity at his warehouse and headquarters in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood. There are legions of followers – some of whom have up to 20 different hoodies – and fan letters are printed daily on the site.

Neighborhoodies have been picked up by a number of celeberities, such as rap artist Jadakiss and teen star Hilary Duff. The company has also been commissioned to create special Neighborhoodies for each contestant in the Miss Universe pageant. "The colors will coordinate with the colors of the contestants' home countries," de Zayas said.

If "cocooning" has yielded to "hiving"–a marketer's term to assert that Americans are venturing out of their family-centric shell, but not too far–then Neighborhoodies is the right idea at the right time. Neighborhoodies makes sweatshirts hand-stitched with all the land loyalties one could imagine–Lincoln Park to Léogâne, Haiti–and some not on any map.

For a population strong not only on neighborhood identity but also city rivalry, Chicagoans seem to forgive the fact that Neighborhoodies is based in Brooklyn, NY. The founder, Michael de Zayas, 29, says he has filled more than 1,000 orders from Chicago since last fall, based on little more than word of mouth and an ad or two in The Onion newspaper. "Chicago is the neighborhood capital of the world," de Zayas said–out of earshot of his fellow New Yorkers. Besides serving as pledges of allegiance, the shirts' lettering sometimes operates as a code between friends or curiosity between strangers. Two words can start a 20-minute conversation. "I have people stopping me in coffee shops, at bars too," Keith Smith, 32, said, crediting his two Neighborhoodies sweatshirts. "This woman came up to me at the Schadenfreude comedy thing [at Martyrs] and asked me, 'Where did you get that sweatshirt?!'"

He was wearing his Pilsen one that night–though he lives near Belmont Harbor–and proceeded to explain that the shirt teasingly attests to the energy he is contributing to the renovation of an architect friend's four-flat in Pilsen. It reminds the architect just how good a friend Smith is.

Smith's other hoodie, the Léogâne one, is a self-reminder of the time Smith spent there working on an infectious-disease program and operating a small business making bed nets that protect against dengue and malaria.

"It's a way to connect back with what I did in Haiti," said Smith, a research administrator with Northwestern Memorial's Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. "People say, 'Why would anyone buy a Haiti
sweatshirt?' I say, 'You haven't been there. The people are very cool.'" That kind of defiant pride is a common thread among many buyers, said de Zayas, who was working as a freelance travel writer and living in Ft. Greene in Brooklyn when he started the business. Ukrainian Village and Lakeview are popular Chicago orders–Logan Square too.

"Ft. Greene is kind of a bad-ass neighborhood for those in-the-know in New York," he said. "There are enough Logan Square sales to let me know that people feel the same way I do [about Ft. Greene]–it's a cool place people really don't know about and we love it."

De Zayas also has filled a few cryptic or comical custom requests– "Miss Fat Booty," "All I want to do is talk to Josh" and "Jerk Alert". The last is a shameless walking marketing tool for Jason Anfinsen, 26, executive producer of Jerk Alert Productions in Chicago. "It makes people stop and say, 'What the heck is that?'" he said. Jillian Pobocam, 22, a photography student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, considered West Side and Little Italy, where she lives, for her hoodies. Neither made the cut.

Instead she paid homage to her adoptive neighborhood of Uptown and he parents' hometown of Liago City in the Philippines.

"Uptown is one of my favorite neighborhoods in Chicago," she said. "I always feel welcome there." Padraic Connelly, 23, on the other hand, does live in Uptown. But that didn't make it onto his twoNeighborhoodies.
Instead he chose one for his college town of Gainesville, FLA., and the other for Lakeview, the first neighborhood he moved to in Chicago, where he does improv comedy. "I still always end up in Lakeview," he said. "All my friends are there."

Regardless of any "hiving" impulses the hoodies may satisfy, Smith is uprooting his Pilsen one for an excursion outside national borders, when he travels to South Africa in July.The sweatshirt, it seems, satisfies a moreuniversal need–for warmth in places impervious to summer heat. Smith is wearing it on the plane.