From GQ’s November 2020 issue, The Big Pivot explores how nimble businesspeople in companies large and small—from an Austin, TX drive-in to an abstract painter to an Atlanta bookseller dedicated to Black literature—created communities and gave us hope in the middle of the pandemic. See all the stories here.
“I still have PTSD from running a business that was based on what people wear to work,” Antonio Ciongoli says. He used to make fancy Italian suits for Eidos, the brand he started in 2013, though over time his designs grew progressively more elastic-waisted and crunchier-feeling and generally unsuitlike. Eventually he stopped, and started a new line. This one, 18 East, launched in New York in 2018, would be dedicated to the kinds of clothes he truly loved: baggy cargo pants and camp shirts and hoodies built for skateboarding and hiking in the Vermont woods where he grew up. People were into doing these things in the pre-pandemic days, of course, and 18 East’s sales were up about 30% this year before COVID hit. But when life screeched to a halt in March, it became clear that Ciongoli’s clothes were even better suited for a summer where office work no longer required pants and leisure time meant simply going outside: As of September, he was up more than 200% year over year.
Making that leap required a few adjustments. The 18 East store-slash-office in Nolita was shuttered for a few months, and Ciongoli packed and shipped orders from home in New Jersey. Clothing production in India, where he makes most of the cut-and-sewn pieces, was halted, so he pivoted to graphics-heavy tees and hoodies whipped up by a mom-and-pop printer down the road in Manalapan Township. “It is the most run-and-gun operation you could possibly imagine,” he says. “But it feels good.” Ciongoli also doubled down on his small creative community, working with graphic designer Saeed Ferguson’s label, ALL CAPS STUDIO, in the wake of George Floyd’s death on a tee that raised money for bail funds. By the time the initial shock of the pandemic wore off—and a killer pair of Eastern-inflected double-knee pants, among other things, got through customs—18 East was prepped for blastoff. “The amount of orders we have per drop has quadrupled,” Ciongoli says. New releases launch weekly at 11 a.m. and routinely sell through by 11:01.
Instant sellouts mean he’s dealing with the occasional rude DM and spending his nights finalizing designs to hit production deadlines. But returning to his roots, fully embracing skate culture and his Vermont crunchiness (and the particular, unfussy clothes that go with them), has meant reconnecting with what he loved about making clothes in the first place. “For a long time, the job as a designer of a small brand felt like a ton of grind without a lot of upside. You start doing this because it's fun, and for a long time, I forgot about that,” Ciongoli says. “And it's back to being fun.”
