Sexhippies is a Brand You Will Know

Village Psychic

Let’s start with an obvious question: after spending much of your life in New York City, why are you running a skate-related brand in the Berkshires?

Ben Baptiste of Sexhippies

My family's business grocery stores, Guido’s Fresh Marketplace, have been around in the area since 1979. They’re named after my grandfather. I was supposed to take over the business with my sister and my two cousins, people in charge were looking to retire. It just seemed like, as I got older, the type of security that I would have in doing that was starting to become more appealing. So I moved back.

But I started asking myself, was it really meant for me? Was that really where my heart sat? Probably not. I naturally started tinkering around with Sexhippies again, around the beginning of COVID. I had made some t-shirts back when I lived in the city, and I sold them to all the shops in the city and a few to friends, but I never went beyond a t-shirt. It was more or less that I’d come up with an idea that I really wanted to see happen, and it wasn't an idea for friends’ brand or some other brand, just as a vehicle to put things out.

I feel like we'll look back on COVID as being this incubator time for a lot of folks.

I mean, it was weird. Obviously, I was part of a grocery store. My life really didn't change all that much because of COVID. We just got busier, it's not like work stopped. I was very much on the front lines, I was the person that was standing out in front of the store letting people in. That was the worst.

Did anything crazy happen?

Customers stealing our toilet paper out of our bathroom. People trying to steal things out of each other's carriages. You got to see some incredibly low moments.

Was any of that instrumental in turning you off of being part of the family business?

No, I don't think so. Sexhippies started ramping up again, and it was then that I realized that I could make quality products without having to ask any favors to do so. Having to call someone and say, “Hey, what's the factory that you guys use?” you know, how everything usually works in this little small world.

I had been out of New York for several years at this point. It would have felt sort of weird for me to pick up the phone and say, “Hey, man, I haven't talked to you in five years. But can you help me out with something?” I just decided that I could go about things in a different way. I was able to piece together a little bit of a lineup by starting from scratch. That was about four years ago.

To be honest, I really didn't have too much intention of it being a skate company. I can't help it though, because I'm a skater. No matter what it's going to involve skateboarding at some level. I feel like the shops that I have right now are pretty good. Half my shops are non-skate, then the other half are more traditional skate shops.

So how does skateboarding fit in?

I don't really read much skate content these days, but because we had been talking, I was checking out your piece with Hannah Tallman. She mentioned that everything for her has kind of panned out through Instagram.

I was just thinking about how the Vargas boys, the two kids that I work with the most, are these weird outliers in that it's not worked that way for them. I heard about them from Armin Bachman at Orchard. Jojo, the younger of the two, he was skating at Eggs and the Glue folks were in town and they were like, “Yeah, that works.” Eddie Jr. is working with Alltimers now and that was mainly just through me making a phone call. It's almost like an older way of doing things, word of mouth.

Before we get too far into anything else, we should address another obvious point: where does the name come from?

I guess I should go really far back then. Before I moved to New York City, the last two or three summers I had been living all over the place, but I kind of came back and settled in the Berkshires for a few years. I started managing an organic arugula and lettuce farm. So every summer, I would rent a big house and talk to a bunch of my skate friends, whether it was dudes in Boston or dudes in Albany. They all loved the area from coming here to visit, so they're always like, “if you have a job, I'll move there for the summer.” We're all working at this farm together, harvesting lettuce by hand out in the fields all day long. One of the dudes that worked there at the time, was like, basically homeless, and just sleeping around with people for shelter.

It was those types of hippies that worked at this farm with us skaters. These are like…old school hippies. This dude, we started calling him a ‘sex hippie’. Like, “Oh, you're the sex hippie.” The bins that we’d be harvesting would be covered in dust, and I used to draw the logo on them. I would write the logo on his bin whenever he wasn't looking.

So after that you moved to New York. Were you skating much at that time?

Ben taking a break from the brand to execute a switch krooked grind. Photo by James Christenson

I was definitely going out seven nights a week the first couple years I lived in New York and not really skating. Then I got sober and I started skating again. I started skating with Ted a lot, as well as the Quartersnacks crew. I was living on Thompson Street in SoHo, and the ledges on the west side were the closest ledge spot.

That was the only place that I could walk out of my apartment door, grab a coffee and be at the spot in 10 minutes. I bought a little fisheye that I was sticking on my iPhone, and I started filming just single clips and putting them on to sexhippies.com. This is right before things like Hellaclips, there was still some sort of novelty to posting a single clip online.

The pre-YouTube era before everything had been fully filtered onto YouTube.

Along with the videos I started just making some t-shirts, and I printed a little at LQQK, because my buddy Max was working there at the time. We would just hang out and print shirts. I started selling them in all the shops in the city, at Supreme and Labor as well as Exit in Philly. Then…yeah, I just left it alone. I think I made two or three t-shirts. People were stoked on them, but I was never that stoked on them.

If you got it out of your head into the real world, that’s better than 90% of people do. There's a lot of ideas out there, not a lot of execution. You executed.

I think Peter Sutherland might have been one of the first people that said something complementary about it. That definitely made me feel like “Okay, I think I probably have something here.” I was still at the point where I felt embarrassed to say the name, because to me, it was this joke from a very specific time period.

When I started looking at it again, around COVID, I started seeing it as this wonderfully ambiguous moniker that I can use. This can be something for everybody. No matter who it is, they can decide like, “I can fuck with this or I cannot.”

I mean, look at the symbol: It's not male, it's not female. It's not like any defined thing. It can be what you want. It's an intersection of things.

People will write me a DM me or whatever on Instagram and just say, “Hey, this is what I think it is.” And I always say, “Yeah, you’re right.” No matter who it is, I just say, “Yeah, you're dead on.”

The first item to bear a Sexhippies logo

So how did Sexhippies become your full time job?

After the first season, I started basically burning the candle at both ends by working at Guido's and still working on Sexhippies.

I’m working at Guido’s, and I'm waking up early, I'm getting home at five or six o'clock, taking a nap, and then working on Sexhippies until 2 AM. It got to a point where I was like, “Okay, I need to take one day off a week and start focusing on Sexhippies.”

I approached this sage-like advice guy who’s always been there for my family and their business. He took a look at what I was doing and basically said “You need to leave Guido's altogether. You need to put all your eggs into this basket and go for it.”

That is the exact opposite of what I would expect.

Entirely, I was not expecting that at all. I do see it in that my stepdad and his brother started Guido’s when they were barely in their 20s.

You’d expect someone who’s older, wiser and likely more practical being wanting you to cover your bases. Then again, someone who's actually built something, who's actually been through it knows you’d be kidding yourself and distracting yourself from what you should be doing.

I couldn't stop working on it if I wanted to. No matter what happened, I was going to go home and take a nap, and I was going to wake up and work on Sexhippies until it was too late. I was expecting to just take Mondays off from the grocery store and I thought that that would be enough that I would be able to do what I needed to do with the brand. I'm really glad that I stepped away entirely. At that moment it was really scary. I didn't have very many accounts. Things have always sold pretty well online, so I was pretty fortunate for that.

And then, these couple stores that I was working with in Japan, one of them was like, “Hey, we think that you've got something here. Would you be willing to have us distribute the brand in Japan?” That turned two accounts into six or eight accounts. So that's helped a lot.

How long of a gap was it between you making that first run of shirts and then getting to this point?

At least 10 or 12 years.

That's inspiring in its own way . You’ve had this idea and it won't go away. You're meant to have it.

I mean, I've always worked in retail. I worked in retail for a long time. My first job in New York was at DQM when it was still Dave’s Quality Meats. Then I worked for Nike Stadium. I left that job to open the first Carrhartt WIP Store.

I worked with them for like a year and a half. I was really only there to comprise the team and get the store open. After that, I moved back to the Berkshires for the summer because of a bedbug epidemic of sorts.

I'm pretty sure what happened was that my building sold. It was one of the last affordable buildings in all of Soho, and these people were doing everything in their power to get us out. We would get rid of bedbugs, and they would be fucking back. So yeah, so I came home for the summer. And while I was here my buddy Kyle, who was the reason that I started working at DQM in the first place, and Nike as well, he left Nike to go work for Supreme. He hit me up and he was like, “Hey, would you be interested in doing some freelance work?” So I started sourcing vintage and coming up with ideas for Supreme, and that allowed me to stay here.

There are probably a lot of good thrift stores in your zone.

Yeah, it was way better when I first moved here. It's not what it used to be. I just started helping out more with the family business, and of a sudden, like, working freelance didn't really seem as attractive as having something really real. Also, I was always really shit at paying my taxes. So having the stability of the family business just seemed like the right thing to do. I'm glad that all those things happened, because if I didn't work for the family business, I never would have learned the Adobe programs, and I live and die in those things these days.

There's also a lot of lessons to gain from being in a place where you know you don't fit.

Not that this really mattered but the owner of the stores is my step dad. My mom remarried when I was pretty young. So I've grown up around this guy, but it's still not quite the same.

There were other blood relatives involved, my cousins and my sister. And I just, I don't know, I have other interests. I love food, I love cooking. But at the same time, it's just not the same. You know? Now I get to spend hours and hours sifting through eBay search results. Instead, when I would be like, “Oh, my God, I really need to get back to work.” Now. I can just be like “Yeah, this is what I'm supposed to be doing.”

Kenny Reed with a backside flip in a very influential hat.

VP
It’s clear that this isn’t just a t-shirt brand, it definitely has a point of view. What is that point of view?

Somebody was asking me to describe it, and the best way I could describe it at the time was this: if you think about all the hats that you saw Kenny Reed wear throughout his skate life on video. That’s it.

That's a big one right there. It's a clothing company based off of Kenny Reed's hat choices.

The sweaters that I make are definitely inspired by Kenny Reed’s hats. The area of the Berkshires where I'm from is only 40 minutes away from Allbany, so I've known Kenny for a long time. He and my buddy Kyle, who I was talking about, they were part of the older Albany crew when I was growing up.

The reason I know all those Albany guys is because they all used to come to the Berkshires to skate because we had better spots. Besides that, Albany has a lot of good spots, but they're good spots to get tricks at, not spots that are fun to skate. We do have those kinds of spots, so they’d all come out here.

Albany was a very different place back then, if you went anywhere near Plaza, you'd get a $300 ticket, if not worse. That existed up until a few years ago, which has entirely changed the entire dynamic of Albany. Now it's a destination.

I went out to SF, this is probably in the early 2000s. Kenny was the connector of helping me get out to SF. Later on, he then helped me and another friend get out to Barcelona. He's always been a common thread, even if I would only see him every couple of years, because of his travels at the time. But he definitely helped me get out there in a lot of different ways.

We had a huge party at my house in the Berkshires, this was before I’d moved to New York City. He ended up coming and hanging out for the weekend, and he accidentally left his hat. I sent a picture and I was like, “Here's your hat. You want it back, right?” and he was like “No, you keep it.” Now my uncle has it. He just was like,” I fucking love this hat.”

Sexhippies hats, as proof of said influence.

There’s overall a moment in skating I’m referring to with all this. There was a company called HalfLife if there was a they had an industry section in 411. They sponsored Quim Cardona and Matt Field, even been before I-Path. I mean, I love reggae music and all things that have to do with it, but not enough to like go to full I-Path.

You can see the current of reggae music in the clothing. The belts are, are handmade in Jamaica. You know, there's, I guess that's another thing is that by being small, I make interesting things like that. I could seem to probably be a little bit bigger, but not too much.

I wonder if coming from the background of someone who has been involved in a family business helps you to see your own business in a better way.

The people in this industry whose advice I really trust have all told me to just take it slow. I can't really move much faster just by myself.

As I was digging in on this most recent collection, the Fall / Winter 2022 one, I was like, “Holy shit, I need to start making jackets.” I have tons of jacket samples, but decided that I'm not making jackets here because it's just not ready. When the time comes, when I find the right person to make the jackets with, then there will be a jacket.

Where is the brand going in the next bit?

Well, I’ll tell you that the product shots did not look that good in previous seasons. Dane is a wizard of flat photography, he helped me out. I didn’t even know him, he just reached out to me and said “Hey, man, I really like the stuff that you're making. I think it deserves to look better and be represented in the way that it should be.” He drove all the way up and picked up the stuff and did a bang up job. I've had a lot of friends helping me out.

You also have Romek Rasenas shooting photos.

Romek has shot a lot of stuff for me. He shot all the stuff for the last season as well as some lookbook stuff. I'm lucky that I have a lot of photographer friends in my life. There was an ad in Lilypad, Johnny Wilson shot that and basically did the whole thing for me, which was great. He's been a big help in a lot of ways, Romek been a big help for sure. I'm sure there's a lot more people that I'm forgetting off the top of my head right now.

I feel really fortunate that I made no longer have to like dealing with grocery store world you know, but at the same time I'm still like, figuring it out because it's just me it's not like I only get to work on the things that I want to, I have to do all of it. You can't just live in the mind and be be you know, picking up patterns and looking for references and stuff. You have to get this stuff made and then you have to figure out how to sell it and where to sell it and who'll sell it and how much it costs.

The video that just came out not too long ago, that happened totally by accident. I had always had my eye on that specific camera I used to film it because that's the camera that Mariano’s part in Mouse was filmed with. Whenever I would see one on eBay, I would put a bid for like $250, knowing I would lose, right? And then I won and I was like, “Oh, shit. Well, here comes the camera.” I talked to RB Umali and was like, “Here, I got the camera! like, What are the settings? How do I do white balance?” Inside the viewfinder, it's black and white, like, how do I deal with it? Also, I'm not a filmer.

Thankfully, he just told me which setting to use in the daytime, which ones to use in the nighttime. The only modern thing was I had a light, everything else was time specific.I wanted to make a 5 minute video, and then it became a 15 minute video.

To draw the distinction, this is not a Digital-8 camera, this is a Hi-8 camera, right? There's a difference.

It's a Hi-8. Yeah. It started glitching like crazy right at the very end of filming. I should probably send it out for repair.

I recently got an HPX-170 a couple weeks ago, because I realized going forward that it's much easier, because if I was stuck to that dated format,I had to film every single clip. Whereas with HPX all the other people in my life that are filmers can actually film with that.

Not to mention the fact that you have to transfer the footage from the Hi-8 digital tapes, and that's a whole process. It's a lot easier to just deal with the HPX, but now I have to learn how to use Adobe Premiere. Welcome to another Adobe program I’ve learned. Just check it off on the list, man. Check it off.

My friend Jules edited the Hi vid, I didn’t edit that. I helped out with clips, but as far as the intro and the feel of it, that was definitely him. I’m pretty stoked on how it came out. I just didn't want it to look like everything else. Naturally, that just kind of happened.

Do you have another video project you're working on now that you have this camera? Is this leading to more videos?

I would love to be on road trips filming and stuff like that, but I’m just not quite there yet. And that's fine. I mean, where I live in Massachusetts, Albany is. 40 minutes away, and then 30 minutes in the other direction is UMass.

Like you were saying, do it slow, growing slowly, growing at a pace that seems reasonable. It's cool to enjoy where you're at.

SH

As of right now, outside of making that video, I spent money on a print ad and that was it. That's been the only promotion outside of Instagram. I think in this next clip we'll start with some more other people involved.

Eddie Vargas Jr. and Jojo Vargas representing Sexhippies.

So who's who's involved? Do you have an official team?

No, I definitely don't have an official team, outside of Eddie and Jojo. I mean, the Wilsons. Johnny and Andrew have been big supporters since the very beginning. And Carlos Kanter. He's the sickest. Jasper Dohrs as well. Also Zac Gavin and Tristen Ramirez, they're both in Jeff Cecere’s video.

I wouldn't be bummed if Jeff would be down to work on something that would be super cool.

Put it out into the universe.

Photo of Carlos Kanter by Kris Qua - Cooper Qua’s dad!

There's also this kid Colby Strong who's from the Berkshires originally, but he lives out in LA right now and loves it, he's really sick. Dutchmasteress Briana is representing as well, who I've never actually met in person in my entire life. When she was coming up in Boston, I was living in New York.

Skaters representing the brand really makes it feel real. Is something bigger than that you can point to that made this overall change of the brand becoming real happen? Is it doing it full time? Is it being in enough stores where you felt comfortable enough that it's out there?

I think it has to do with the fact that instead of seeing the brand as my finger drawing that logo on different objects at the farm as a joke, I started seeing it for how nice and open ended it was. In a brand you want something that's going to have legs that can go for a long time. I just came to a point where I felt like it’s something I can stand by. It’s inclusive to anyone and everyone so why not? Why not run with it? I can make good shit, I didn't know I could really make quality things. Now that I know I can do that, I can really stand by it.

It's funny, though, I used to feel embarrassed to say the name. That changed probably about a year and a half to two years ago. It went from me dodging questions to just feeling like I could own it.

I've been through a lot of different phases of skateboarding in my life. And I remember all of it. So now I get to reach back to all of them. You end up filling up your brain with so much useless skate related information, and I can actually get to use some of it now. Which is really cool.

Village PsychicMay 29, 2023