When Eric Hardin heard his friend Abby was driving out to New York City to see some friends, he decided to sell his 1990 Mercury Sable to a tattoo artist at Lucky Monkey Tattoos for 250 bucks. With a total of 2000 dollars in cash, a skateboard, one plastic bag of clothing, and his beloved sneakers, Hardin took off bound for the city, having no plan whatsoever what to do when he got there.

“My back up plan was if I moved to New York and I didn’t like it and I ran out of money would have been to go back to school and get a masters and get a job,” Hardin said. “I didn’t know.”

Hardin had just graduated from the University of Michigan School of Engineering that spring of 2003 with a Bachelors in Chemical Engineering. Although he was interested in what he was studying, he didn’t necessarily know if that was the career path he wanted to follow. He realized how impartial he felt at a job fair he attended at the end of the year. Being a chemical engineer just did not seem to suit him.

So that year, he decided to take a chance. When they arrived, Abby dropped him off at his friend Dave Shayman’s apartment. Hardin had met Shayman in college; he had just moved to the city to start his career as a DJ, working out of his loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Hardin slept on his couch for the first few months.

In the daytime, he would walk across the Williamsburg bridge into Manhattan and look for jobs, living off of three dollars a day to eat in between searching for jobs. Than, he would return home to help set up Shayman’s DJ studio into the night. It was a constant grind for Hardin.

After two weeks of searching, Hardin was able to clinch a retail job at a clothing store that was a block away from Shayman’s loft. The store, Brooklyn Industries, sells messenger bags and Brooklyn-themed graphic t-shirts.

Initially, Hardin was an average store employee working in their store located in Park Slope, Brooklyn. His responsibilities quickly expanded to designing graphics for products. Then, the company opened a store on LaFayette Street in SoHo, where Hardin would work as a manager. He was responsible for hiring employees, organizing events and making sure business was running smoothly.

From there, his retail career took off. He decided to move out of Shayman’s hectic loft into an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, splitting $1,200 of monthly rent with a friend. Soon after, he met one of the higher-ups working for Diesel, who invited Hardin to work for their ‘55 DSL’ line.

“That was my first window into a whole different world of fashion, clothing,” Hardin said. “It was at a whole different price point than anything in the skateboarding world.”

Hardin was able to work with multiple different fashion companies. After a year and a half of working with Diesel, he was invited back to work for Brooklyn Industries as their design director. He helped grow the company from a 1.9 billion dollar company to a 9 billion dollar company.

“When you are young and you are ambitious and you think of retail as an entry level job, you are getting your brain working on how can I not work retail anymore, you know,” Hardin said. “So I told Brooklyn Industries that I think they can grow their business but I think they need to make better products, more interesting products.”

His extensive experience working with clothing helped land him a position at a company called We Are the Superlative Conspiracy (WESC). Hardin was ecstatic; the company was formed by and created for skateboarders who have grown past the age of adolescence. It was formed for people just like him, and he was being offered a job there.

Hardin left WESC in 2007 when many of his peers did as well, but came back when he was offered a position as special projects manager. He was able to work with other fashion companies on collaborations on a global level. Hardin worked his way up the corporate ladder and moved to the headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden to be the head menswear designer.

“I feel super fortunate to have been able to not only meet skateboarders that I looked up to when I was younger, but also to be able to work with them,” Hardin said. “I think one of them - his name is Chris Pastras, and he started a company called Stereo Skateboards with [actor and skateboarder] Jason Lee.”

Although the job brought Hardin many opportunities and experiences, he was ready for a change in scenery. He was ready to start a project on his own; one in which he was in control and he could realize his own dreams.

“I think even early on, I had always wanted to start a company that was my own, or something that I had a little bit more control in. Whether it was starting it with friends, or whatever it would be, I wanted something.”

So, in 2012, Hardin decided to move back to Ann Arbor to realize that dream. He contacted his brother-in-law Rishi Narayan — who founded Underground Printing when both of them were in college together — to help finance the store’s opening. Narayan helped get Hardin’s foot in the door of Today’s current location through his connection to the space’s landowner, Ed Schafran.

Opening and running a clothing store with a few employees required Hardin to bear much of the workload. He had to learn new skills: how to take photos of products, how to design a website, and how to sew clothing, among other things.

At the start, choosing what product would be introduced into the store was challenging. There was only so much money to start out with, and Hardin had to decide what clothing would attract customers the most at the price point.

“You want to fill your store with all of the coolest stuff, but you have to make sure that you will bring stuff in that will sell and allow you to get more and kind of grow the selection,” Hardin said. “It wasn’t like a big company that comes along that was like ‘Here is a bunch of money, see if anything works.’ It’s more like everything is thought out and methodical and putting one step in front of the other.”

Today, the store is arguably one of Ann Arbor’s staple menswear shops. The parameters of Today Clothing’s style is defined by Hardin as ‘craftsmanship and creativity’. The store pays close attention to high quality that matches its price point, even if the tag is remarkably high. This has to do with Hardin’s philosophy of what constitutes the right price: if something is expensive, it is for a reason.

“I can ultimately say nothing is free, and for the most part, you get what you pay for,” Hardin said. “Companies that are manufacturing things that look really nice and are at that price that is too easy to question, if you trace it back to all the hands that have touched it, where the money is getting divided up...Big companies that operate on a major scale, they are making money off of that 17.99 [T-shirt]. How much did it cost [to make]? What the heck did they make it out of and who made that?”

For Hardin, a high quality product constitutes durability, comfort and longevity. There is reason why people would drop over a hundred dollars on a sweatshirt at Today Clothing: the price doesn’t matter when you fall in love with it.

“When the product lives up to it and it looks great and you wear it every day, and all of a sudden, you feel good,” Hardin said. “You wake up and you want to put it on and you go ‘Oh, this isn’t like my other sweatshirts.’ A lot of care went into the design and making of this, and when you look at the overall market, there is product that is not as good as that being sold for more.”

For more information on Today Clothing, click on the button below to go to the store's website