Neighborhoodies in the News

Say it with a sweatshirt
Entrepeneur finds niche for "Hoodie" line

By BILL PICTURE
Of the Examiner Staff

Right: Representin': Neighborhoodies offer San Franciscans a way to give their 'hood its due props.


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.