eTc Tacoma leads a homegrown streetwear renaissance

For Tacoma’s Umi Wagoner, “fashion is home.”

Wagoner’s interest in fashion certainly started in the home, growing up the son of a designer who co-owned a boutique in town for several years. But more specifically, Wagoner’s love of streetwear – casual, everyday clothing influenced by hip-hop and skateboard cultures and sportswear – was stoked by trips to a defunct Capitol Hill sneaker shop and a nearby streetwear store called Goods, which shuttered in 2012.

The co-founder of eTc Tacoma – a prominent Tacoma fashion label and store – Wagoner’s passion grew more serious when he moved to Los Angeles for school. Equipped with a formidable sneaker collection and equally bountiful enthusiasm (but little practical experience), a wide-eyed Wagoner sent out résumé after résumé hoping to get a job at one of the city’s hip streetwear shops.

“I was, in hindsight, an ambitious young man,” Wagoner said, laughing.

That ambition eventually paid off. After working at the influential L.A. streetwear brand the Hundreds, Wagoner returned to Washington and launched eTc Tacoma with Perris Wright, looking to bring a taste of streetwear culture to his hometown. Since opening their downtown Tacoma boutique in 2014, eTc Tacoma has been at the fore of a mini streetwear boom in Seattle-Tacoma, as a number of new brands and shops have filled out the Western Washington landscape. Leaning heavily into a sense of regional pride with its limited-run designs and ethos, eTc has been a cultural driver among the current generation of homegrown streetwear labels while turning its storefront into a community hub.

“The overall hope was to bring streetwear to Tacoma and help get it involved in the greater conversation of streetwear, on a national, international level by carrying brands from all over the place,” Wagoner said of his and Wright’s initial vision.

In the early days, designing clothing for their own in-house label wasn’t a huge point of emphasis beyond doing some “cool graphics” with inside jokes – “shop culture-type things” to promote the store and find its crowd. That quickly began to change after eTc Tacoma opened its doors.

“Tacoma and the South Sound, there’s a lot of pride out here – pride especially in the place,” Wagoner said. “We’ve always known that, and we’ve leaned on that a bit. We try to do it from a very broad scope, making sure that all of Washington is included. But our customer is Tacomans, and when they walked in the store, they were like, ‘Oh, this stuff is cool. But it’s from L.A. What’s from here?’ They really only wanted to purchase our product.”

Within four years, eTc Tacoma quit carrying other brands and started focusing exclusively on its own label. Their designs often feature local landmarks like Mount Rainier or the Tacoma Dome, splashed across graphic tees or colorful PNW-appropriate anoraks, often adopting color schemes similar to Washington sports teams or patterns evoking broader pop culture references. They’ve collaborated with the Tacoma Rainiers and Seattle Kraken, as well as local restaurants and the Washington State Fair, to combine eTc Tacoma’s streetwear cachet with their shared sense of place.

“Our goal has been to make sure that we are taking things from here and exalting them so that it shows that we stand for the region, because honestly, that’s cool,” Wagoner said. “Standing for something is cool and what we’re standing for happens to be very inclusive because it’s a region.”

When eTc Tacoma first hit the scene, there were already a number of streetwear players making their mark in Seattle and beyond, including Gold + Vintage (and its still prominent Raspberry Hills brand), Can’t Blame the Youth, and Alive and Well, all of which have since closed their brick-and-mortars. But eTc has emerged as a leader among the next wave of local designers and shops, a growing constellation of brands like South Seattle’s Paradice Avenue Souf and Mediums Collective on Capitol Hill.

“It’s growing pretty big,” Roger Maldonado of Mediums Collective said. “We see a lot more emerging streetwear brands, designers. I think eTc definitely leads a lot of the culture because they’re very community-oriented and community-driven, which is definitely inspirational.”

Mediums Collective has similarly found community among Seattle’s creative class, helping elevate fashion within the city’s cultural fabric alongside music and art. A former events producer who started designing his own merch as a University of Washington student, Maldonado and his brother Cesar launched Mediums Collective a decade ago, popping up at music festivals throughout the West Coast, including the defunct Sasquatch! and Paradiso at the Gorge Amphitheatre. After years of traveling to festivals to promote their fledgling brand, the pandemic forced the brothers to think “hyperlocal” and look toward building “community and culture” at home.

The Maldonados, who infuse their Mexican heritage into Mediums Collective’s designs, started connecting with other local designers and artists, organizing pop-up markets and partnering with Seattle hip-hop vets Marshall Law Band on Fremont Fridays – a weekly summer block party that became an immediate hit as lockdown restrictions eased in 2021. Mediums Collective opened its Capitol Hill store a year later.

“It’s all interconnected, right?” Maldonado said of music, art and fashion. “Mediums, for us, is tools of expression. … When artists, designers and creatives as a whole join forces, I think our creative culture just amplifies.”

Down in Tacoma, eTc similarly became a magnet for the city’s young artists, like rapper/producer Khris P and Aramis Johnson of indie rockers Enumclaw, who met in the shop after it opened more than a decade ago. “That’s the real deal community hub,” Johnson said in a 2021 interview. “If we had a Boys & Girls Club for all the artists and people involved, that would be it.”

All that is music to the ears of Wagoner – a cultural maker who’s about building community as much as eTc’s brand.

“It just means the world because that’s what we want to be,” he said. “A meeting ground for like-minded people … to sit and discuss the dreams, the ideas, the visions and then leave here brimming with excitement to go forth and do because they’re so affirmed.”