Daymond John

#1FUBU had just landed roughly $300,000 in orders.

#2That should've been great news.

#3Instead, Daymond John and his partners had a new problem: they couldn't afford to make the clothes.

#4They'd gone to the MAGIC fashion trade show in Las Vegas without enough money for a normal booth, so they worked out of a hotel room. Buyers came in, liked what they saw, and placed orders much larger than the little company was ready to handle.

#5So one question was settled.

#6People wanted FUBU.

#7Now came the harder one.

#8Could FUBU actually deliver?

#9John went looking for bank financing. One bank said no. Then another. Then another. He later recalled getting turned down by dozens of them.

#10From a bank's point of view, the risk wasn't hard to see.

#11FUBU was young. It didn't have a big factory. Its cash flow wasn't stable. Its founders didn't come with years of financial history.

#12They had purchase orders.

#13What they didn't have was the money to turn those orders into clothes.

#14And the biggest asset still available to the business wasn't really part of the business at all.

#15It was John's mother's house.

#16Margot John had been part of the story long before FUBU had a name.

#17She taught her son how to sew.

#18John didn't come into fashion through design school or an established clothing company. He grew up watching his mother make things, and he learned how to use a sewing machine himself.

#19His first products were simple.

#20Wool tie-top hats were selling for around $20. John figured he could make them himself and sell them for less.

#21So he and a friend made some.

#22Then they took them out to the street.

#23One day, they sold about $800 worth.

#24That told John something useful: there were customers.

#25But having customers and having a sustainable business turned out to be very different things.

#26John later said he shut the operation down three times between 1989 and 1992 because he ran out of money.

#27And each time, something kept pulling him back.

#28People who'd bought the clothes before came looking for more.

#29The business could stop.

#30The demand didn't always stop with it.

#31John still needed a regular paycheck, so he worked as a waiter at Red Lobster.

#32FUBU got the hours that were left.

#33On weekends, he and his friends loaded clothes into a 15-passenger van and drove to events. The van carried inventory. Sometimes it was also where they slept.

#34This still wasn't much of a company in the usual sense.

#35But there was a team.

#36J. Alexander Martin. Keith Perrin. Carlton Brown.

#37With John, that made four friends with roots in Queens and a pretty clear idea of what they wanted to wear.

#38The name captured it.

#39FUBU.

#40For Us, By Us.

#41They weren't outsiders trying to figure out a market from a distance. They were making clothes from inside the same culture they wanted to reach.

#42That mattered, because they couldn't afford to reach people the normal way.

#43Magazine spreads and TV campaigns cost money FUBU didn't have.

#44So John and his friends went somewhere their customers were already paying attention to: hip-hop video shoots.

#45They carried clothes in. They asked artists to wear them. They hung around. If they got turned down, they came back.

#46Brand Nubian, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Busta Rhymes, and other artists began showing up in FUBU.

#47The founders weren't paying to make an ad that looked like hip-hop.

#48They were getting the clothes onto people who were actually part of it.

#49And one relationship became especially important.

#50LL Cool J was from Hollis, too.

#51You might think that made things easy.

#52It didn't.

#53John and his partners brought him clothes. LL wasn't feeling them.

#54So they came back with more.

#55Still no.

#56They changed things and tried again.

#57Accounts from the period put it at roughly eleven attempts before LL finally wore FUBU.

#58Then he performed in it.

#59After the show, though, something changed. LL came back and asked what else they had.

#60Now he wasn't just doing a friend a favor.

#61He wanted to see more.

#62The artist strategy helped people notice FUBU.

#63The big trade-show order proved retailers wanted it.

#64Neither solved the manufacturing problem.

#65So Margot made a much bigger move.

#66She used her house as collateral to help raise roughly $100,000.

#67Then the house stopped being just collateral.

#68Furniture moved out. Sewing machines moved in. Fabric started piling up. John and his partners worked there.

#69A family home became a production space.

#70For a while, that looked like the solution.

#71Now they could make more clothes.

#72Except a few months later, the money was disappearing again.

#73FUBU had to pay for fabric first. Production first. Labor first. Shipping first.

#74Retailers paid later.

#75Thirty days later, maybe. Sixty. Sometimes ninety.

#76On paper, the company could have sales.

#77In the bank account, it could still be nearly broke.

#78John later recalled that FUBU's cash fell to roughly $500 and the mortgage was in trouble.

#79They'd risked the house to get money.

#80And somehow, they were short on money again.

#81Margot had another idea.

#82Put an ad in the newspaper.

#83FUBU had orders and needed financing. That was the message.

#84Calls came in.

#85One of them led to Samsung's textile operation.

#86By then, FUBU needed more than another check.

#87It needed a way to make far more clothes. It needed systems for handling larger orders. It needed financing, administration, and distribution.

#88Four friends working from a house could only carry the business so far.

#89The Samsung relationship helped FUBU move toward a much larger production and distribution operation.

#90The path there wasn't exactly conventional.

#91Banks had said no.

#92Margot had risked the house.

#93The borrowed money had nearly run dry anyway.

#94Then a newspaper ad opened a different door.

#95And suddenly the company's problem was changing.

#96It wasn't just “Can we make this?”

#97It was becoming “How big can this get?”

#98FUBU didn't jump straight into major department stores.

#99Small retailers came first. Those stores knew their customers, and some of those customers were already looking for FUBU.

#100As the clothes sold, bigger retailers paid attention.

#101Eventually, FUBU reached Macy's.

#102Think about that shift.

#103John had once carried the clothes around himself.

#104Now they were hanging in a major department store.

#105At one point, the founders themselves appeared in a window display at the Macy's flagship on 34th Street in New York.

#106These were the same guys who'd been loading clothes into a van.

#107The same guys who'd worked beside sewing machines in a house.

#108Now they were standing behind the glass at one of the city's best-known retail locations.

#109And around this time, LL Cool J took FUBU somewhere even stranger.

#110LL appeared in a Gap commercial.

#111Gap paid for it.

#112But LL wore a FUBU hat, and his rap included language that echoed the name: “For Us, By Us.”

#113FUBU hadn't bought the commercial.

#114It was just there.

#115Some consumers reportedly went into Gap stores looking for FUBU, thinking the clothes might be sold there.

#116The contrast with the early days is hard to miss.

#117John had once chased opportunities on video sets because he couldn't afford advertising.

#118Now a major company's own campaign was putting FUBU in front of a national audience.

#119Still, one commercial didn't build FUBU.

#120John himself later pushed back on the idea that there'd been one magic break. He described the rise as hundreds of different things adding up.

#121The music videos mattered. The local stores mattered. LL mattered. His mother's house mattered. Samsung mattered.

#122None of them was the whole story.

#123Together, they became a very big business.

#124By the late 1990s, FUBU was in thousands of stores, expanding internationally, and generating sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

#125The product line grew. Licensing grew. An NBA partnership became part of the expansion.

#126The old problem looked solved.

#127FUBU could make plenty of clothes now.

#128Then it went too far.

#129The company began producing large amounts of inventory in anticipation of future orders. John later recalled a period when FUBU made more than twice what it expected to sell.

#130But those orders didn't all show up.

#131Now the clothes were sitting there.

#132To move them, FUBU had to discount.

#133Products flowed into clearance channels.

#134And something that had once helped the brand started disappearing: scarcity.

#135Early FUBU had been hard to find because the company was tiny.

#136Later FUBU could feel easy to find because the company had gotten so big.

#137Counterfeits became another problem.

#138For years, FUBU had struggled to get noticed.

#139Now it had to protect what all that attention was worth.

#140At first, there weren't enough clothes.

#141Later, there were too many.

#142By the early 2000s, FUBU wasn't nearly as visible in the United States as it had been at its peak.

#143But the brand didn't just disappear.

#144The company pulled back in the U.S. and leaned more on international markets and licensing. Regional partners continued developing FUBU in places including Korea, Japan, China, and Europe.

#145The model changed.

#146In the beginning, doing almost everything themselves had helped the founders survive.

#147Once the brand became global, doing everything themselves wasn't necessarily the answer anymore.

#148FUBU also tried taking its connection to hip-hop into another business.

#149In 2001, it launched FUBU Records.

#150LL Cool J, Nas, Ludacris, and others were involved.

#151The idea made a certain kind of sense. If FUBU made music, that music could create videos, and those videos could carry the brand.

#152But the record operation didn't last.

#153Knowing how to make clothing work inside hip-hop culture wasn't the same as knowing how to run a record label.

#154And that failure actually makes FUBU's original strength easier to see.

#155The founders weren't successful just because they “understood hip-hop.”

#156They understood a particular product, a particular audience, and how to put the two together.

#157FUBU's biggest American years passed.

#158International licensing continued, and the brand later made moves to reach younger consumers again.

#159The people who wore FUBU in the 1990s got older.

#160Hip-hop and streetwear didn't stop with them.

#161Another generation picked them up.

#162Which makes the old name worth looking at again.

#163For Us, By Us.

#164At first, “Us” could mean four friends in Queens and the people around them.

#165Then the clothes traveled across the country.

#166Then across borders.

#167But the beginning never got any bigger.

#168A mother taught her son to sew.

#169He made clothes with his friends.

#170They didn't have a factory, so they used a house.

#171They couldn't afford ads, so they went to artists.

#172Banks wouldn't finance the orders, so Margot risked her home.

#173A few years later, the same founders could stand in a Macy's window.

#174And a few years after that, the company would learn that getting too big could create a whole new set of problems.

#175So the most useful image in the FUBU story may not be the peak sales figure.

#176It's the sewing machines inside Margot's house.

#177At that point, nobody knew how far the clothes would travel.

#178They already knew what to call them.

#179For Us, By Us.