The Exchanges

Q So, 1996, Damon, you get this, this deal, you do this deal with Samsung. Within two years, FUBU is doing three hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue. I mean, that, that's insane. I mean, how do you, what, what happened?

A I don't know. It's all a fog sometimes, you know, is this rocket ship? Um, but it was having really great partners, uh, and mentors all around and being able to have these systems put in place where we could start scaling. But if you want to simplify it, you know, if the men's division of what we were doing, we would do an approximate, let's say argument's sake, we were doing a hundred million dollars. Um, by that time, by three years, what happens is after year one, you get, you get a license. Comes aboard. Jordache was our first license, and they came aboard, and they started doing ladies clothes. So now we're doing a hundred, say, a hundred and fifty million in men's. They're doing a hundred million alone in ladies.

AI assessment note: “Jordache was our first license, and they came aboard, and they started doing ladies clothes.”

Q And you were literally sewing the labels on?

A I was ripping the old labels out. I was sewing these labels in. I would then start going to screen printers and start putting screen printing on the shirts. Then the next step up after that was to go to embroidery places to start embroidering the shirts to get a higher quality. I was, I kept improving the product, improving the quality. And to basically see the resistance or the acceptance of customers, what level would they buy it at? How much would they pay? 30? Would they pay? 60? 90? Did they like extra large? Large? Red? I wanted to just really start to understand the customer, so I had to keep going back and improving whatever I was doing.

AI assessment note: “I was ripping the old labels out. I was sewing these labels in.”

Q And did people, I mean, at that point, were people like, did they know what FUBU was, or were people still saying, what, what is this FUBU thing?

A Well, They started to know a little bit about it in the tight community we're at, and then, um, this one thing that just put me on the map was we would dress these two or three bodyguards that work for a guy in New York named Ralph McDaniels, and, uh, Ralph McDaniels show, Video Music Box, is probably, um, it's probably been on longer than MTV, or it came out the same year, and Ralph is really known for breaking most of the music artists, uh, from, I would say, 85 all the way to 98. They all had to Really, really beg him to go on his show, and, um, we put on the bodyguards around Ralph, and we found out that Ralph was going to, to Teddy Riley's, um, concert, or Teddy Riley had a weekend that he used to throw in Virginia, so we said, alright, we're gonna take the train down there, because we know he's not gonna know as many people in Virginia, so we'll be able to get to Ralph easier, and we got to Ralph, and he said, I've been looking at your stuff, I know who you are, I wanna put you on my show.

AI assessment note: “They started to know a little bit about it in the tight community”

Q How did you find, ah, the, the stuff? Did you, were just going to like shops and buying a bunch of t-shirts?

A Yeah, I was going to physical shops down on the Lancet street area where people knew they can go and buy shirts. And then I was starting to order as many catalogs as I could of people that were selling sweatshirts. So like CCM, the Jersey company would sell CCM jerseys that were blank, or I would go to Boulder, the Boulder company in Boulder, Colorado, they would sell sweatshirts. So I would just start to source as many places as I could find something of high quality that was, that had no name on it. And they were using it for that purpose. They were premium companies. They're the same company that would sell it to any You know, large, large companies so you can put your company name or logo on it.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I was going to physical shops down on the Lancet street area”

Q And, and banks are looking at you. You had no sort of history of having a business, so they're thinking, you know, why are you going to take this risk?

A Why would they take the risk? I had, I had no financial intelligence. I had no history in this business. I had, uh, you know, I had really, I could collateralize the home. I could, I didn't do it at the time because my mother wasn't allowing me to go and put that up at risk. So, um, you know, I don't blame them. I wouldn't have gave myself the money, you know? And then my mother, I remember coming home and she came home and she said, You know, you've been working on this house as long as I have. You put as much money as you could into this house, and we have some equity in this house, and we need to go out, and I wouldn't do this if you didn't have 300,000 dollars in orders, because this is all we have. Let's go out and let's take out as much equity as we can on this house, and once you sell the clothes, you put the money right back in, and hopefully you'll have a nice profit. So she goes out and she gets a 100,000 dollar loan on our house.

AI assessment note: “I don't blame them. I wouldn't have gave myself the money”

Q Yeah. You, um, as a kid, did you, did you sort of dream about the things that you wanted to do, the kind of person you wanted to become?

A Earlier on in life, I, I really dreamed that I wanted to be maybe a pilot. Um, I really didn't know what else I wanted to be in life. You know, I had no idea, uh, until rap music really started coming around, and I figured I wanted to be working in rap music, but I didn't know how to do that if I couldn't rap, sing, dance, or produce. I really didn't know how to do that. I tried, well, I could dance a little bit. I, I actually did, did do some kind of dancing, hoping that Run DMC or, or LL Cool J or Russell Simmons would discover me. Um, At one point, I did get an offer to dance for a group named Houdini. Sure, yeah. They were going on tour. I got an offer to breakdance for them, and my mother said, no way in the world are you going on tour.

AI assessment note: “Earlier on in life, I, I really dreamed that I wanted to be maybe a pilot.”

Q And you were literally sewing the labels on?

A I was ripping the old labels out. I was sewing these labels in. I would then start going to screen printers and start putting screen printing on the shirts. Then the next step up after that was to go to embroidery places to start embroidering the shirts to get a higher quality. I was, I kept improving the product, improving the quality. And to basically see the resistance or the acceptance of customers. What level would they buy it at? How much would they pay? 30? Would they pay 60? 90? Did they like extra large? Large? Red? I wanted to just really start to understand the customer, so I had to keep going back and improving whatever I was doing.

AI assessment note: “I was ripping the old labels out. I was sewing these labels in.”

Q And did people, I mean, at that point, were people like, did they know what FUBU was, or were people still saying, what, what is this FUBU thing?

A Well, they started to know a little bit about it in the tight community we're at, and then, um, there's one thing that just put me on the map was we would dress these two or three bodyguards that work for a guy in New York named Ralph McDaniels, and, uh, Ralph McDaniels show, Video Music Box, is probably, um, it's probably been on longer than MTV, or it came out the same year, and Ralph is really known for breaking most of the music artists, uh, from, I would say, 85 all the way to 98. They all had to Really, really beg him to go on his show, and, um, we put on the bodyguards around Ralph, and we found out that Ralph was going to, to Teddy Riley's, um, concert, or Teddy Riley had a weekend that he used to throw in Virginia, so we said, alright, we're gonna take the train down there, because we know he's not gonna know as many people in Virginia, so we'll be able to get to Ralph easier, and we got to Ralph, and he said, I've been looking at your stuff. I know who you are. I want to put you on my show.

AI assessment note: “they started to know a little bit about it in the tight community”

Q So, 1996, Damon, you get this, this deal, you do this deal with Samsung. Within two years, FUBU is doing three hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue. I mean, that, that's insane. I mean, how do you, what, what happened?

A I don't know. It's all a fog. Sometimes, you know, it's this rocket ship, um, but it was having really great partners, uh, and mentors all around and being able to have these systems put in place where we could start scaling. But if you want to simplify it, you know, if the men's division of what we were doing, we were doing approximately, let's say argument's sake, we were doing a hundred million dollars. Um, by that time, by three years, what happens is after year one, you get You get a license, comes aboard. Jordache was our first license and they came aboard and they started doing ladies clothes. So now we're doing a hundred, say, a hundred and fifty million in men's. They're doing a hundred million alone in ladies. Wow. And you start to put other licenses on. So bags, shoes, boots, um, fragrance, suits, bedding. And each one of those are doing 15 or 10 or five million a piece, socks and things of that nature. And that's how the scalability Got to 350, but, you know, three hundred and fifty million dollars in the fashion business is great, but it's, it's not, you know, listen, Under Armour's doing three billion or four billion. Puma's doing twelve billion, you know. There's real numbers that, that, that, that are out there, um, even though I'm extremely proud of, of what happened, but that's how we started to scale.

AI assessment note: “Jordache was our first license and they came aboard and they started doing ladies clothes.”

Q Damon, you know, over the years, you've worn tons of different hats, uh, but I'm curious, I mean, as a Shark Tank judge, right, you have seen hundreds of pitches by early stage founders. What, what tends to grab your attention in a pitch? Like, what, what are you personally looking for in a founder or, or in their brand or company to make a decision on whether to invest?

A Well, you know, I always say that nobody has the right to judge you, but God, we're only judging what is working for us. So I'm listening to the story and seeing if it's a play for me. Will I add value? Can I either reduce costs or increase sales, uh, by what I'm doing? If not, my money is just as good as anybody else's money. Right. But now when I get down to the founder, um, did they create this because they had a pain or they were trying to bring a customer joy? What is the backstory to the failures that they've had, uh, Uh, and how they still decided to overcome that failure because they knew that the solution or the pain they were solving with somebody else was something bigger and better. Um, and then of course, do they know their market, their audience, their numbers? And then finally, Is who are they? Can I trust that they will make the right decision? They're problem solvers that people could look past the company and look at who founded the company and want to buy into their story because that company may move from selling socks to underwears, to lotion, to something else. And is that person constantly the one that people are going to trust to take them down that route of telling them That story. So I always ask founders and say, you know, you can't answer why me? Why now? And why this? Then you have a me too product, but you have to add all the time to your career, b…

AI assessment note: “So I'm listening to the story and seeing if it's a play for me.”

Q though. I mean, 75% of her sales right now are, are, are B to B. I, my instinct is don't discount direct to consumer, right? I mean, Bombas is a direct to consumer. I mean, that's, that's their bread and butter. I know that people probably don't buy aprons and linens as much as they buy socks, but people do buy linens and aprons for, you know, for their homes.

A Oh, you'd be absolutely surprised. You know, the hottest thing in, you know, these days are live selling, live selling on whatnot, TikTok shops, and all these types of things. And live selling, you can live sell to an audience of other ambassadors that will sell the product themselves, or you can live sell directly to consumers. The best thing about that is you're, you're directly hearing what they're thinking about the product, right? You know, you sell obviously to B to B. You don't know why the person liked this, you know, the end customer liked it, disliked it, what they loved about it, what they prefer about it. But live selling platforms are the best by far. It is a huge, huge market right now. And we're right at the, we're right at the beginning of it. And you get some real feedback.

AI assessment note: “you can live sell directly to consumers. The best thing about that is”

Q All the while working at Red Lobster at night, right?

A All the while working red lobster at night and sewing the hats and delivering the hats at the same time and trying to source the goods. Um, yeah, I mean, just, uh, but enjoying and loving what I was doing. It was kind of like this, this new discovery, this path that I was going down that I was just so excited about. And to say that, I also have to say that through 89 and 92, I closed the business three times because I ran out of money. Um, because all these development costs, all the gas, all this going on those Trains and cars to go in these places, I would run out of money. Um, but I would, I would only run out of like a 500 dollars, a thousand dollars, and before you know it, you know, I'm walking down the block, somebody would say, hey, aren't you the little kid that sells food? I say, yeah, they'd be like, I need some more. I've been looking for you. What do you mean you've been looking for me? I need some more. And I would keep opening the business back up because the business started to call me instead of me calling the business.

AI assessment note: “All the while working red lobster at night and sewing the hats”

Q you had this, like, several years of this incredible expansion and growth, and at some point, like, at a certain point, FUBU was everywhere. Then, I guess you did something interesting, which is sort of a euphemistic way to describe this. Um, you, in 2003, you semi-retired the brand, at least, at least in the U.S. Was that, I mean, was that because FUBU was, like, overexposed, or, or what?

A Well, what we did was we reduced Most of the distribution of it. I mean, we still obviously kept our categories, but we would really narrow down to just a couple of stores just to test the product and see how it's going. Cause we felt that it just needed to cool down. And more importantly, we would reduce all the logos as we could. So, because people, you know, they already had 10 years of FUBU in their closet. They already thought that, you know, it may not have been for them at the moment cause we, you know, it goes through cycles, you know, and a hot brand lasts five or maybe six years. Maybe seven years. Um, so we kind of just slowed the brand down.

AI assessment note: “Cause we felt that it just needed to cool down.”

Q Wow. And, and so you went there to meet with them, and they, was the person that you met with in New York?

A Yeah, of course. I was nervous. I wanted to present it. Um, you know, I brought my mother with me. So, later on, you know, my partners at Samsung would say, you know, first meeting we ever had for a potential investment or whatever structure that somebody brings their mom. I'm like, hey, well, mom's pretty smart, so I'm gonna bring her with me. And, uh, you know, I didn't think I was gonna hit five million dollars worth of clothes in three years. I barely even sold the first 300,000 dollars worth of clothes. Yeah. But I had known my customers so well because of all those things that I was doing that as we started to put the brand out there, we did about thirty million dollars in three months.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, of course. I was nervous. I wanted to present it.”

Q So, last question for you, Damon. How much of your success do you think is because of just your hard work, and your, your intelligence, and your skill, and how much because of luck?

A Very hard. I always contradict myself because I don't believe that there is anything such as luck. I just believe it's determination and drive meets opportunity. Um, but when I look back and I sit there and I, and I say, see who I am, you know, on this national platform, able to change lives, father of three and a Pisces, I say to myself, wait a minute, you know, some things, God has had to bless me in various different ways. And that's why I worked so hard to try to pay it forward to other people. Because it's got to be some kind of luck. I don't know why I was chosen. I have no idea, but a lot of it is determination drive, but I, I think there is a bit of luck on what's going on in my life.

AI assessment note: “a lot of it is determination drive, but I, I think there is a bit of luck”