Daymond John sewed 90 wool hats at home, sold them for ten dollars each, and made 800 dollars in a day.
From his mother’s house in Hollis, Queens, Daymond John built FUBU, a clothing brand that has earned over 6 billion dollars in global sales.
Daymond John was born in Brooklyn in 1969 and raised in Hollis, Queens. He started working at ten, handing out flyers for two dollars an hour. After high school he started a commuter van service and waited tables at Red Lobster.
The hat trick
When he noticed wool ski hats selling for 20 dollars, he went home and sewed about 90 of them with his next-door neighbour. They sold the homemade hats for 10 dollars each on the corner of Jamaica Avenue and made 800 dollars in one day in 1992. Then came screen-printed T-shirts, sold on consignment and at big events across the Northeast.
He started FUBU, short for “For Us, By Us”, in his mother’s house, which she let the business take over. His mother taught him to sew. He kept his Red Lobster job and worked on the brand in between shifts.
The big break
The brand got a lift from rappers who wore it in videos, including LL Cool J. In 1994 John and his partners received 300,000 dollars in retail orders at a trade show in Las Vegas, but needed money to make the products. Turned down by dozens of banks, his mother took out an advertisement in the New York Times, and the resulting deal with Samsung Textiles let them fill the orders.
FUBU has earned over 6 billion dollars in sales and is featured at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. John became a regular investor on Shark Tank in 2009.
