Black Money Business Jobs : The Making of FUBU — An Interview with Daymond John

Amnat77

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The following is an interview with Daymond John, CEO of the clothing brand FUBU, whom I’ve come to know and respect. If there were one mantra I’d associate with him, it’s “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Can’t afford billboards? No problem — just pay retail store owners in key areas to let you spraypaint “FUBU” on their overnight roll-down security walls. His drive and improvisation has led him from sewing cloth in his kitchen to #15 on Details magazine’s list of “50 Most Influential Men.”

It would seem he’s just getting started, but I’ll let him tell the story…

TIM: Many entrepreneurs launch their companies in addition to working a full-time job. How did you manage your time when launching FUBU to get the company going? When did you decide to quit the day job and make this a full-time operation?

DAYMOND: It was incredibly tough, but the passion for the project pushed me through. If your project doesn’t do that for you, well, maybe you need to sit down and revaluate. Even though I had placed our product in the hottest music videos out there, I was still working full-time at Red Lobster. To the public, FUBU was a huge company. Little did they know that I was still serving them shrimp and biscuits!

After a couple years of seeing FUBU as a hobby, I decided to get serious and stick to a standard daily schedule. I would wake up at about 7 or 8 in the morning, and I would sew the hats by myself, tag them, answer a couple of orders that came in overnight. Then I’d take the hats, package them, and begin to ship them out. I took care of all of that until about Noon or 1 PM. Then I’d hit up Red Lobster around 4, work there until midnight, come back home, make more hats, and tally up any orders until about 1 or 2 in the morning. I’d start the routine all over again the next day. I did this for about two years straight.

After my three friends joined the company, the business really started to take shape. With the extra hands, I was able to focus on growing the business at a much faster rate. At the point where I had enough money to quit (I didn’t really have enough to quit the job, because I had taken out this $100,000 loan), I decided that I had to give the business all of my attention and effort. So I quit Red Lobster around ’95-’96, and went completely full-time with FUBU.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/04/07/fubu-daymond-john/
 
''One of the most well-known hits we had with LL was during a Gap commercial. He was wearing a pair of Gap jeans and a Gap shirt, but he was somehow able to sport one of our hats during the commercial. Then during his thirty-second freestyle rap, he looks directly into the camera and says, “For Us, By Us, on the low.” No one at Gap nor any of their ad execs thought anything of it. It wasn’t until a month later that someone at the Gap found out, pulled the commercial, and fired a whole bunch of people after they had spent about $30 million running this campaign.''



LOL..
 

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