Sunday’s Cool Dropouts – Local Bootleg Brand Duo.

sage uyindoda wearing a Fokkof t-shirt.

Bootlegging also known as counterfeit means to imitate something. Counterfeit products are unauthorized replicas of the real product or established brands. This creative duo caught alot of peoples attention including myself with their bootlegging creativity and skills. I wanted to get to know them a bit better and get to dig a little deeper about their brand, how they started and how people have been responding to it all.

1. Can you tell me a little about yourselves and your brand.

I am Katleho Manare from Soweto, Phiri and my friend and co-founder of Fokkof is Isaiah Lebepe mostly known as Ncaa Stuff hond and he’s from Joburg South, Finetown just after Ennerdale. You could say we grew apart, different neighborhoods, but somehow South African subcultures, Sports, Music and maybe politics kept us connected in such a way that by the time we met we had mutual interests, we may have also experienced the same struggles and looked up to the same struggle heroes. We are both College dropouts, but I don’t like calling it that cause my perspective of a dropout is different. I see a difference between ‘Having no money to pay for school’ and ‘Quiting school because you feel like that’s not a place for you’ I don’t know what to call ourselves other than dropouts.

Isaiah Lebepe and Katleho Manare make satirical graphic T-shirts, fusing established brand logos with everyday vocabulary from the hood.

2. What made you want to start a bootleg brand?

The year was 2016 Isaiah was studying graphic design and I was studying marketing. Our plan was to make t-shirts that’ll make us standout and could wear on a sunny sunday in summer time when we go out to parks or festivals with our peers. Isaiah was playing around with photoshop and doing bootlegs and he bootlegged FILA with the words “fuck off ” and we liked it but I thought that if we want to make it look more appealing we should make it represent us and make it more relatable, I then suggested that we should change it to “Fokkof” and we fell in love with it. Isaiah and I felt like at that time bootlegging wasn’t as big in South Africa and making printed t-shirts was deemed as not being “creative” (still is) but we visualize t-shirts as more of a staple in the street culture and a wearable canvas but in our process of making the t-shirt it was a total different story, so we decided to make the t-shirt, took pictures and uploaded them on our social media accounts and everything negative people said about printed t-shirt not being creative enough was history. Starting a brand wasn’t our plan, people who bought our t-shirts decided that for us.

3. How do you feel about people who think your clothing brand is a knock off?

Well that doesn’t bother us cause we haven’t had people say that with our stuff and people should read Supreme NY on how it started, they’ll understand. Such negative comments mostly come from people who aren’t aware of the underground street culture, I would be rude if I were to say they are uncultured.

4. Bootlegging requires alot of creativity, how did you come up with the Fokkof t-shirt idea?

It just came up, we don’t brainstorm for most of our stuff we just throw around words on a logo and the most perfect will eventually pop up and If it doesn’t look good on the design we just skip to the next one. We have looked over a lot of stuff that people could’ve loved but we didn’t like them personally. All we do is to impress us first before we throw it out there.

5. Can we expect more clothing pieces from your brand and is it just t-shirts and hoodies?

We’ve dropped tote bags before with controversial messages on them but I’m not sure if we gonna drop them again that’s for us to decide when the time comes. If there’ll be other garments it will probably be everday essentials such as sweaters, coach jackets, six panel caps and maybe framed work but what I think we’re looking into now is collaborating with our friends who do music, then do FOKKOF compilations maybe and drop them on Vinyl. I just wish that could pass.

6. How can people get the t-shirts ? And what are your social media handles?

We’re on Facebook as Sunday’s Cool

Dropouts – Instagram @Sundayscooldropouts_ with the underscore at the end.we not using our old acc anymore

– Twitter @Sundayscool1 Or e-mail us at sundayscooldropouts@gmail.com

The name Sunday School Dropouts came after we dropped our second t-shirt when homies were telling us “As’thandazelwanga” basically mean We need Jesus. We decided to put all out social media accounts under that name, but we did some word play with it cause the shirts were made to be worn on a sunny sunday but we decided to call that Sunday’s Cool instead of Sunday School.