(For the full story, watch the video above)

Origins - Pt. 1

After a couple of years of just wanting to be a rapper, I began wanting more. I had all these ideas and one of them was to start a clothing brand. Up until this point, late 2019, the only project I was involved in, besides my own music career, was trying to make Rowdy Regime into a legit record label. I had the artists and a dope logo. People would tell me that the Rowdy Regime logo was $$$.

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The Logo

The original two logos were designed by the homie BillE back when we were both students at Ohio Wesleyan University. We had come up with the name Rowdy Regime for the record label one night while "studying" at Slocum Hall. BillE then came up with the designs and we ran with it. We even made some shirts that we would wear around campus. That's when the other students began telling us that the logo was $$$. I call it The Face but other people have different interpretations of it. 

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Origins - Pt. 2

When I decided to start the clothing brand, I was going to turn Rowdy Regime into a record label / clothing brand. However, at some point I got the idea to separate the music from the clothes. That's when I came up with Stay Rowdy. I had this idea of creating a whole Rowdy movement. Stay Rowdy, Rowdy Regime, and eventually Rowdy Clan Gaming came into the loop but that's a different story. The idea was to make a new logo for Rowdy Regime and keep the "Face" logo for Stay Rowdy. I then asked the homie Diego to modernize it and flip the color. Stay Rowdy was now in full effect and my excitement began growing.

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The Concept

Around the same time, I began studying Marketing & Branding. This research eventually led me to the question, what makes this clothing brand different than the rest? I knew that because of the name, I was going to attract a certain energy and audience. This was going to be a clothing brand for the streets but there are countless of brands who are already doing that. The logo itself, as cool as it looked, could not be the whole business plan. That is when I found 2 answers to my question.

1.) Clothing for big people

I myself have struggled to find clothes over the years as I've gotten bigger. All the nice shirts have always been too small for me. That's when it dawned on me. Why not focus on providing dope and comfortable clothes for the big homies? I looked up multiple streetwear brands and saw that most of them stopped at 2XL. I wear 4XL and knew people who wore 5XL and higher. 

2.) Stay Rowdy video content

One of the marketing & branding experts I came across was Gary Vaynerchuk. One piece of advice he recommended businesses follow was to view themselves as a media company. With the rise of social media marketing, older marketing tools such as TV advertisements were losing their appeal. Content marketing was and is the way of the future. Content wasn't just for Youtube anymore, most social media platforms were now focusing on video. TikTok was ascending at a rapid pace and Instagram began moving away from focusing primarily on photos. This is how the idea of creating "shows" was birthed. Stay Rowdy was going to have a Youtube channel and be on multiple platforms where we would host shows that would cover topics such as cannabis, skating, graffiti, music, and more. We also had a blog and as part of each drop, we would hold a photoshoot and film a 30 second commercial. "The Rowdies" was our vlogging series that was meant to capture behind the scenes moments of the team participating in Rowdy activities. We had to prove that we live and breathe the name.

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Why I Stopped?

When you're living the Rowdy life, at some point your body begins to cry out for help. My body began to feel the effects at the age of 27. I was called The Rowdy One / Big Rowdy for a reason. I had established that I was Rowdy even before the clothing brand was a thing. After years of abuse, I couldn't be Rowdy anymore. Once I realized that, I lost interest in the brand. I didn't care about the image anymore, I had to take care of myself. The Rowdy life also takes its toll on the mind. My mental health was in shambles which meant I wasn't locked in. I lost momentum and soon enough my ambition. I retired the brand in 2023.

Wrap Up

The vision and the concept works, I just wasn't ready to be the one to push it to it's full potential. We had a team, investors, models, and customers. I had an idea and made it work to the best of my ability. I can't sit here and regret anything or wish it turned out differently. It wasn't meant to be. The "Face" logo has now become the Rowdy Regime logo once again.

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