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Blackstock & Weber | Techstars Los Angeles 2018

Founded by Chris Echevarria, Blackstock & Weber is a company that creates thoughtfully designed essentials for wherever life takes you. The company completed the Techstars LA program in 2018.

Chris Echevarria is a trend spotter, trained menswear designer, and cultural savant well-equipped to outfit a new generation of men.

“Whenever I acted out in school—and this goes back to when I was very little, like three or four—my mom would tell me, Chris, if you don’t behave, I’m going to take you shopping at Walmart. I would scream and cry: No, not Walmart!” Chris laughed a little telling that story.

This is a man who learned to read in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. As he said, shaking his head, “Fashion is a huge part of who I am, and my mother is pretty much the reason.” Chris has always known what he liked, and possessed a distinct level of taste. He’s a graduate of the prestigious menswear design program at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In some ways, his journey to founding Blackstock & Weber, a company that designs premium, handcrafted footwear for the modern man, looks like a straight line.

Except that Chris is a person of color, and percentage-wise, there are not a lot of entrepreneurs who look like him—especially in fashion and tech.

We Don’t Need a Bone, We Just Need Real Opportunity

Chris is no stranger to the struggles of being a black male within corporate America. He sees a trend toward inclusion and diversity in tech right now, and he sees both good and bad in it. “The good is that people are aware of the lack of color in the room. The bad is that individuals on both sides of the fence perceive this as throwing people of color the proverbial ‘bone’.”

“We don’t need a ‘bone,’ we just need real opportunity.”

Chris has advice for both other aspiring entrepreneurs of color and for companies who want to be more inclusive. For the POC who dreams of starting their own company, his main advice is to keep showing up, and to own the fact that you’re unapologetically you.

As for how entrepreneurship and tech can be more inclusive, Chris’s solution requires digging deeper. “Foster the talent where the reserves haven’t been tapped,” Chris says. “If you keep looking in the same places, the faces and types of people you attract will naturally repeat themselves.”

A Lifelong Entrepreneur

Chris has been an entrepreneur, or at least had a side hustle going, all his life. In college, he and his roommate ran a substantial sneaker resale business in their dorm room prior to the existence of marketplaces like GOAT or StockX.

He can tell you the exact day he quit his day job: December 28, 2017. “I went full on doing this, and I haven’t looked back.” But still, that momentum doesn’t mean that he hasn’t had his doubts. “I always, in the back of my head, feared taking that leap. Can I do it on my own? Am I good enough? Entrepreneurship is hard, especially starting out as a solo founder.”

Yes, it is.

For Chris, Techstars was a huge help in making something hard just a bit easier. Before Techstars, he’d met many entrepreneurs, but met very few that exhibited the same level of passion he did for his fledgling idea. He went through the Techstars LA program in 2018, and for him, it was all about the people. “Techstars has a rigorous process of finding founders that are of a certain caliber. Everybody is very serious about what they’re doing and seeing their dreams through to completion. It’s great to have a network of people around you that are just as driven as you are.”

The Next Generation-Defining Menswear Brand

Blackstock and Weber has been selling beautiful, well designed, handmade shoes for a year and a half now, and Chris is excited to build on that success by growing into a full scale lifestyle brand. “We want to be the next generation-defining menswear brand,” Chris said. “This is how I envisioned the brand evolving from the beginning.”

What does that look like? To Chris, “A tee shirt and jeans can be just as classic as a tuxedo. It’s about creating the scene. Our ideology is rooted in and influenced by film. We want to give guys the tools to create their own scenes in their lives via staple pieces that every man needs in his wardrobe and an assortment of other curated goods from around the world.”

Chris isn’t one to dream small: “We want to put our spin on how men present themselves. We believe it’s deeper than just shoes and clothes. Our goal is to be a source of inspiration and a trusted voice. We need our place. We believe this is something men across the globe are searching for.”

Then again, if he did dream small, Chris never would have gotten this far. He’s a long way from sounding out the words in Vogue, and he’s been driven by his passion, tenacity, and discerning taste every step of the way.

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