Replay: How Daymond John built FUBU

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/3c816172d718b033

The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems.
They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet
When it comes to their own wealth.
Most are running a disconnected stack.
A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.
Creative planning was built to fix exactly that.
One integrated team of tax professionals, state planners, investment specialists, all coordinated by a dedicated wealth manager who sees your full financial picture and keeps every piece working together.
Proactive tax efficiency, state strategy, investments all under one roof.
Creative planning where wealth works together.
Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.
Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit.
This may be our biggest stage yet.
Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more.
Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great,
We want you there with us too.
Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six.
That's mastersofscom slash apply.
Twenty six.
Hey, folks. This week we're revisiting one of our favorite episodes. It's the entrepreneurial origin story of Shark Tank's Damon John.
He shared the fascinating tale of how he founded Fubu.
For us, by us, with host Reed Hoffman.
back in twenty twenty two.
We hope you enjoy it.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in Halloween Queens where they believe something's in the water because there's gotta be thirty hip hop artists to come out of that area.
And L could look in the neighborhood.
That's Damon John.
He's the founder of Fubu and one of the original sharks on ABC Shark Tank.
But in nineteen ninety four
He was a man from Queens trying to find El Cool Jay.

In the early nights, Huba was a scrappy street wear brand.
Selling mostly hats and t shirts.
they had a small but loyal following in the hip hop community.
Damon just needed the right high-powered celebrity endorsement.
James Todd Smith.
Better known as LL Cool J fit the bill.

I remember going over to his house.
And he was leaving, he's moving to LA.
because he's gonna go shoot a show call in the house.
I didn't know him that well.
Well I waited out there with my partners for about four or five hours.
Damon and his partners didn't have a pitch deck.
Or a lengthy endorsement contract to sign.
They had a T shirt.
And they wanted LL to put it on.
came outside and I asked him could he wear the shirt and take the picture and
He said he couldn't because he was going on to a show where he had sponsorship opportunities from Nike and Adidas and all these people. And then if he wore my shirt, he's gonna have to turn down millions of dollars.
In hindsight, this was a perfectly good reason to say.
No.
Fubu was small.
And totally unproven.
But they were part of the same community.
Raise just a few blocks apart.
So L Cool J reconsidered.
He said that he saw me being a hard working guy. He felt that.
He couldn't look at his customers, all the people that support him from the neighborhood in the face if he didn't take his picture for me.
LL took the picture.
And Damon sprang into action.
I spent every time I had.
I took out an ad in the Source magazine, the Hip Hop Bible to Time.
Everybody saw that app.
That ad would give Kubu the credibility and leverage to secure thousands of orders and make their first big scale jump.
And later, Bo would give LL Cool J a piece of the company.
It was a partnership.
That was both strategic
And authentic.
That's where I believe.
The best partnerships are built on authentic alignment.
And the more aligned you are
The more creative these partnerships can get.

You gotta have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can we believe it? And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what it's doing. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right.
Oops. Working out of a three bedroom apartment. Ten years later I'm like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it. Just how you do it.
This
is masters of scale.
I'm Reed Hoffman.
Co founder of LinkedIn.
Partner at Greylock.
And your host.
And I believe.
The best partnerships are built on authentic alignment.
In fact.
The more aligned you are
the more creative these partnerships can get.
Take a moment and think about your favorite food pairings.
Like
chocolate and peanut butter.
Or
Peanut butter.
And jelly.
And depending on where you grew up and where you live.
Your favorite food pairing might be different.
Just listen.
To a few of the answers we got when we asked our masters of scale team.
Better cheese and tomatoes. Mango and sticky rice. Cappuccino and brioche. Bangers and mash. Bubble and squeak.
Rice and kimchi, chips and salsa, spam and eggs, chocolate and chili, schnitzel and spetsle. Chicken and waffles.
Gin and Tonic.
There are chemical reasons why all of these combinations work.
Or why a briny vinegar?
Will brighten up your fish and chips.
Yet ruin.
Your cappuccino and brioche.
But you don't have to be a flavor scientist.
To know when something tastes good.
I want you to keep that in mind when we start to talk about partnerships.
Specifically the strategic partnerships that can help your startup reach scale.
Instead.
Gin and Tonic.
Think.
Ikea
And task grab it.
Or.
Microsoft and OpenAI.
Or even Starbucks and Barnes and Noble.
These are companies that recognize in the other
Something essential they bring to the table.
It's an authentic alignment of complimentary assets.
And the result is much greater than the sum of their individual parts.
You'll often hear this expressed as one plus one.
equals three.
It's bad math.
But great business.
I wanted to talk to Damon John about this because partnerships have been core to his business strategy.
From the beginning.
As the founder and CEO of Fubu, Damon scaled an iconic streetwear brand with an innovative series of partnerships that broke the mold for how fashion brands collaborate.
He parleyed that success into a career as an author.
A brand expert.
And perhaps most famously.
As an original cast member of the ABC series Shark Tank.
Where he continues to mentor and invest in the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Damon founded Fubu in nineteen eighty nine while working as a waiter at the seafood chain Red Lobster.
But it wasn't his first business.
Not by a long shot.
It was first grade. Everybody needed those number two pencils and all the kids always lost the pencils or they are broken.
Yep.
In the first grade.
Damon was looking for business opportunities.
It was a scrappy operation, to be sure.
I would take the pencils and little knife shaved the paint off the pencils and then I would paint the names of the girls in school on the pencil.
His initial strategy was to sell to the boys in class.
Who we saw rough housing with the girls they wanted to talk to.
Well, what happened was instead of beating the girls up, they started to beat me up and try to take the pencil from me. So
I decided to pivot and I started to sell the pencils to the girls.
with their own names on and then I got to talk to the girls.
It was a classic lesson in aligning your interests with your customers as an entrepreneur.
But Damon wasn't the only entrepreneur in his family.
His mother Margot created multiple business opportunities, even while working full time as an administrator.
In my community is something called dollar bands.
And what they do is they go up and down the bus route and they pick people up.
Think Uber Pool.
Long before Uber.
My mother used to have a really old El Dorado and that thing could fit four people in the front and five people in the back.
She used to have me, you know, sitting cuddled up next to her and she used to charge people 25 cents or 50 cents to take them from the subway all the way down to their house.
Once Damon was old enough to drive, he went into the dollar van business himself.
There was a van that I bought 15 pass for a van, it was probably about 20 years old.
And I would go up and down the bus routes and do the same exact thing, but I would try to also create a customer out of it, a dedicated customer. I knew that if I was at the station much later, like 12 30, one o'clock at night, that a lot of the customers wanted to go home, but they didn't live right on the main strip. So I'll try to.
two dollars, but I will go down the strip and then I will take you three blocks in.
four blocks. So I would double my fare and it would probably only add an extra fifteen percent of time per trip.
Damon's interests were aligned with his writers.
They knew he'd go the extra mile for them.
Literally.
And those writers had something of value as well.
And these customers were often people who were professionals. They were attorneys. They were working in the city.
I got to know these people and later on that pay off as strategic partners where I can ask them for some advice.
Building on these early partnerships, Damon might have gone on to great success as a transportation mogul.
But his dollar van business hit a couple of major roadblocks.
Number one, I didn't have much credit. I didn't really know how credit works. So I couldn't afford to get a new van. And if you have a twenty year old van,
I was paying for a transmission. I was paying for this. It ended up costing me way more than a new van would cost me.
Number two is I also didn't have the allowances from the Department of Transportation, kind of like how
You have livery plates and various other things. If you got pulled over in a bus stop picking up somebody,
That was a twenty five hundred dollar ticket.
So
I was only
Grossing.
twenty five hundred.
A week.
I was netting probably.
Two hundred. My time of paper, gas, insurance, uh fixing a transmission.
Food.
So two tickets put you out of business.
By the time I had my sixth ticket, I said um
Uh, this is probably not worth it.
Damon's troubles stem from some challenges many entrepreneurs will recognize.
Lack of access to capital.
Being one of them.
But he also discovered the challenges of going it alone.
When you have partners, you can leverage their skills resources.
Imagine if Damon could have partnered with Mechanic.
Or if he had other van drivers to split a livery license.
But these kinds of relationships are not always easy to cultivate.
And more important, they take an alignment of vision and passion.
All partners should all be pulling in the same direction.
Driving a van.
Wasn't Damon's passion.
That was something he found in hip hop culture.
And he happened to live in Hollis, Queens.
One of the epicenters of this new art form.
Hip hop was so new and it was something that we really loved and it was starting to get a little commercial. The bigger companies were starting to profit off of it because the kids wanted to dress a certain way. Nobody was supplying to the kids themselves. They were supplying their own goods and we were taking it and reinterpreting it on the streets.
These high end brands were slow to embrace teens remixing their styles.
Ralph Loren.
Tommy Hill figure.
Timberland.
These were high status labels in Damon's community.
But the brand themselves stayed aloof.
we will start to hear that they just don't like us, whether they didn't like hip hop kids or like African Americans or inner city kids, or you know what, I made a pair of thirty-two pants to be worn with a 32 waist. Why are you wearing a pair of 36 or 38? But whatever the case was, we felt a little insulted or neglected or actually disrespected.
And I remember saying who's ever gonna just value and support and respect and love the people that buy these clothes who believe in this culture.
As much as I do.
And that's the day I came up with fool.
Forest bias.
Damon had a concept, a strategy.
and alignment with his intended market.
But how he landed on his product.
involved a bit of serendipity.
It started with a rap video.
I had liked a hat that I saw on a Day La Saux video.
The hat look like a ski cap.
But instead of a ball on the top, there was a tie on the top.
Little string like a shoestring.
And I couldn't find a hat anywhere.
Дейман ват серчинг протислужив деласол хат all over Нью-Йорк.
Finally track one down and that happens.
But when he came back to show his mother,
Margot was not impressed.
When I found in Uptown Manhattan, I remember coming home and showing my mother the hat and telling her I paid twenty dollars for the hat.
And she said, I can't believe you paid that money for it. So she said, take four dollars and go to the store and bring my four dollars worth of fabric.
Damon did, as his mother asked.
and came home with a roll of fabric.
She then introduced him.
to the sewing machine.
Instead of it being a black or blue or a solid color, I bought a like a striped color because at that moment I wanted to match my sneakers.
She showed me how to sew hats and I sewed eighty hats that night.
It was fun because I was sewing them to learn how to sew them.
But then I woke in the morning realized I had eighty hats that look all like the same exact striped candy cane and I only had one hat.
You may see where this is going.
Damon had some unexpected inventory on his hands, and he wanted to repay his mother's forty dollars.
Nineteen eighty nine Good Friday, three o'clock in the afternoon. I was standing on a corner and I sold eight hundred dollars worth of house in one hour.
Damon was a highly adaptive salesman, tuning into each customer's needs and demonstrating the value of his product.
What was the value of the custom?
Could be well massive stinkers. It could be it's gonna keep your head warm or people gonna think that the same stuff they lasso has.
But I was able to pitch enough.
sell eight hundred dollars worth of hats in one hour and I realized at that time that that was my call because I really enjoyed it. I not only enjoyed the making of the hats I enjoyed the value to the customer and I enjoyed of course
Knowing that
I was in charge of my destiny. It was my ability to either sell them or not.
It was up to me.
Damon had found his calling.
His product.
His customer.
And his authentic mission.
Everything.
was aligned.
But at this stage, much like his dollar van business, Damon was more or less on his own.
He did have a silent partner.
His mom.
And yes, he did give her back that forty dollars.
But
He was effectively a solopreneur.
He soon expanded his offerings from hats to T shirts.
But Fubo was still mostly a side hustle.
I would close it down three separate time because I was not thinking as a business. I was thinking
Yeah, I can buy a couple of shirts and put Fubu on and I can go to the expo and sell them, but it was really around ninety-two.
But I said I wanna make a go at it.
For Damon.
This would mean finding partners.
На часто.
But also strategic partners who could help him with targeted needs.
That search led him back to the executives he'd met driving the van.
They gave him advice on things like how to incorporate.
And
How to raise startup capital.
I opened it up as a DVA doing business as, and then I needed money. So I had about three thousand dollars I saved up.
I put about five thousand dollars on my credit card and my friend had just came back from fighting Desert Storm and he said, Well, I want to help you.
Damon and his friend.
J. Alexander Martin soon added two other childhood pals as co founders.
Keith Perrin.
And Carlton Brown.
And they set out.
to get their product into the world.
We started to sell a couple of shirts at Nexpos.
Screen finishers.
And then we invest in actually getting some real shirts made that we can actually put on music artists instead of the cheap ones that we had.
The Fubu founders knew that music artists would be their lever to scale.
Think about how fast Damon's hat sold.
His very first day in business.
Those hats were coveted because the style appeared first in a hip hop video.
So if Fubu products started showing up in those videos, they would be coveted too.
But Damon and his partners knew they had to be strategic.
LL Cool J aside, they couldn't just go around petitioning rappers to wear their logo.
They wanted rappers to notice that
Them.
So they thought about the other people in a musician's orbit.
We invest in both.
50 shirts, they all cost about$50 a piece. We took those 50 shirts and instead of giving them music artists, we made them 5X and 6X.
And we gave him to all the big guys.
Those big guys were in front of the red ropes at clubs, in front of the music artists, because they were bodyguards, or they were just big joys people where you could not
deny that billboard.
In essence.
Boo boo engaged these.
Big guys as their first brand ambassadors.
And they didn't even have to convince them to wear the product.
Our reasoning behind that was
that if we gave them to all the cool hipsters, the whole thing about being a hipster is you don't wear the same thing twice.
But if we gave them to the guys who only had options like Rochester big and tall.
Well now we're giving them something that's higher quality.
Those guys would wear it 10 times a month.
Twenty times a month.
They would take care of it because they were wearing it so much.
I want you to pay attention to the idea Damon just laid out.
Fubu wanted their shirts to last.
They wanted their customers to feel great.
So they would wear the shirts again and again.
That's exactly what the big guys wanted too.
We often talk about this as win win.
That's a phrase that can quickly lose meaning.
So let's think of it.
More as a test.
One you could use on basically any strategic partnership.
If the partnership didn't exist.
Would the parties be doing this?
Anyway.
If the answer is yes, on both sides, you have a win win partnership that works.
Listen to how this principle plays out in another crafty marketing tactic who we use early in their scale journey.
Damon wanted more of a visual presence for Fubo around the neighborhood.
But they barely had enough money to make fifty shirts.
They definitely couldn't afford
Bus stop ads or billboards.
So Damon and his co founders hatched another plan.
They went around to local businesses.
Not just clothing stores, but electronic repair shops, bodegas.
Any establishment.
with a metal security gate.
We went to all the stores that pulled down nasty storm gates and said, You have graffiti there or profanity on there. We are a local company.
We wanna spray paint your gate with our name and keep it beautiful and white. We'll always upkeep this. We'll make sure nobody puts profanity on your gates. And by the way, the kids locally are gonna know that you're supporting a local company and we're gonna come and point kids towards you. So we spray painted 300 gates from New York to New Jersey, put authorized food dealer.
We didn't care what you were selling. I don't care if you were selling furniture or Chinese food. You were an authorized food wood dealer.
Because those gates would pull down during one rush hour and even a rush hour, and all those pedestrians passing by, that was about three million dollar worth of advertising.
This is a brilliant use of strategic partnering.
And a great reminder.
How much room there is for creativity in building relationships.
You don't always have to go the expected route.
And often
It's better not to.
What's important is that you share a goal.
A line on brand.
And C.
an opportunity.
And that's just what Damon and his team did to move to their next phase.
Remember those big guys?
That strategy worked.
After the big guys were while they were in front of the music artists, the music artists started to say, Well, can I get some? So then the big guys started to tell me where the videos were happening.
Now that musicians were asking where they could get Foo.
Damon and his team were happy to oblige.
They'd head down to the video shoots.
Shirts in hand.
Like volunteer costume designers.
I invest in another ten high quality shirts and I would go down to the videos and I'd put on the wrapper.
As a stylist would
And I would take it back.
Because
Once I learned that the stylists generally were not giving the rappers the clothes because they were getting them from high end designers. So why can't I do that?
I would take that same shirt and then give it to another rapper and and I did that for about two years.
Two years of seeding Fubu into rap and R V videos using the same ten shirts.
Soon acts for Mariah Carey.
To bust the rhymes or wearing their logo.
And the more music videos Fubu appeared in.
The more omnipresent they seemed.
Despite the
the company having almost no inventory.
What happened was uh created this swell in the market where people thought that fool was a huge clothing company.
Notice what Damon just told us.
By partnering with these musicians, Fubu had created the illusion of a massively scaled brand at a time when it was almost impossible for a customer to get their hands on it.
And that product scarcity would drive demand.
It was a feat.
of marketing sleight of hand.
But there was nothing inauthentic about the creative alliance itself.
These music artists.
Wanted.
to appear in Fubu and represent the Creedo.
For us.
Bias.
Doing so.
Help them seem and be more authentic.
This tension.
Between authenticity and illusion.
goes back to something we talked about on our Masters Scale episode with media inventor Trevor McFedrees.
To build an authentic connection with your customers, you need to do some things that may feel artificial.
Here's Trevor on how he
Got his start as a DJ in LA.
The first character I built probably was myself. It was creating a MySpace page. It was
getting on friends' computers and kind of stealing their mailing lists and setting up a mailing blast to them, probably illegally saying, Hey, just got off tour of Europe. I'm looking for some local gigs, only a few slots available, just faking it until you make it, trying to create this air of importance. Such that I could hopefully book a thousand dollar bar mitzvah or something to make it to the next month.
I think the thing that I figured out early on was that learning how to differentiate yourself
is massively important. Like one of the cereal boxes in the cereal aisle. If you were to approach them, they all look the same, might not pick that up. If I could figure out a way to stand out, that would be great.
Just like Trevor.
Damon and his co founders were differentiating themselves in the market.
They weren't authentic.
Black owned brand that respected their community.
They were on their way.
But they would soon discover that scaling a brand
means scaling up the mechanisms behind that brand.
Which would demand an entirely new type of partnership.
All together.
Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.
There can be two types of companies.
Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?
That is human centered.
I'm Rana El Chayubi.
And on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more.
As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.
Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.
Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.
Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely.
From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.
I hope to see you there.

We're back.
With Damon John of Fubu.
When we left off.
Damon and his co founders had managed to scale awareness of Fubu.
Before they had almost any product.
They'd made their way into high profile videos.
And onto the bodies of rappers like Buster Rhymes and Old Dirty Bastard.
They'd also scored an unofficial
But very influential partnership with the superstar rapper L L Cool J.
They had bought an ad in the Source magazine featuring L wearing the brand.
But Damon.
Wasn't done leveraging that picture.
I went to a trade show, something called the Magic Show. It's a trade show in Las Vegas that happens two times a year.
Magic.
stood for the men's apparel guild in California.
Damon and his partners which stores would be attending the convention in Vegas.
About three hundred of them.
I mail this picture of L O K wearing it to all those stores. And then I go to the magic show. I don't have enough money to exhibit the magic show. So I take a small hotel room at the Mirage Hotel a couple of miles away.
Despite not even having a booth at the convention.
Damon and his partners were able to work the floor.
They connected with the retailers they'd mailed materials to.
They've talked about their brand.
Their vision.
And referenced the thirty or so hip hop videos Fubu could be seen in.
The sales pitch worked.
All these stores come in and they write three hundred thousand dollars worth of orders.
The magic show had been a raging success.
Damon and his co founders had struck up partnerships with retailers around the country.
But when they came home, a new reality hit them.
They would now have to
Phil
Those new orders with money they didn't have.
I come back home, I go to twenty seven banks and I get turned down by twenty seven banks because I have no financial intelligence.
I go to my mother and I tell her I don't know what to do anymore. And then she says, Well, you know, we have a house, and my mother goes out and takes a hundred thousand dollar loan on our house. And that was all we had, because honestly, I think the house is worth seventy five.
So I don't know how she got a hundred thousand. I gotta tell you.
The interest rate was not great.
Getting access to capital to fill that first big order is a make or break moment for startups.
Especially in the realm of physical goods.
Damon couldn't find a bank that wanted to bet on him.
Even
With three hundred thousand dollars of orders in hand.
So just as he had with his very first hats.
He partnered with his mom.
Now I would turn my house into a factory. I would sleep in sleeping bags next to sewing machines. I would burn all the furniture because I needed a factory. I hired a bunch of seedresses, I had a bunch of sewing machines in my house, bunch of materials in the house.
And we had a factory and we started to really make a lot of noise. People started to see the product and we were selling sweatshirts and polar fleece, polar fleece was selling out in July.
and June in small specialty shops, and a lot of people started to recognize us.
There was no question that Damon and his biggest investing partner
His mother.
were aligned in their goals.
She wanted him to succeed as much as he did.
Not just because they were family.
Her house was on the line.
But David soon realized that this partnership alone
Wouldn't say Fubu.
The hundred thousand dollars went away in three months and I was three months later on the mortgage.
Remember, this is all we had. It wasn't all
I'm about to lose my mother's house.
Damon had ingenuity.
Passion and tons of grit.
But he was missing some basics on manufacturing.
And financing.
I was paying for raw goods ninety days ahead of time.
I was paying for a staff, I was paying for shipping goods, and I was paying for equipment. And then my accounts receivables were 30, 60, 90 days out.
I wasn't smart enough to say that I'm not a bank, so you need to do a C O D.
Damon can be forgiven for not asking for cash on delivery.
It has long been the convention.
That retailers can take weeks or months to pay manufacturers for their goods.
So while Damon was waiting for invoices to come in, expenses were flowing out.
And without capital to scale capacity.
Delivery on those three hundred thousand dollars worth of orders fell behind.
The stores are starting to say
All right, now you're in the big time and I'm allocating space for you. And if you don't deliver those goods, I'm not sure if I can trust you anymore.
Not only were Fubu's finances in jeopardy, but
So too were the relationships with retailers he'd work so hard to cultivate.
Years of building up brand equity.
was on the line.
Fubu had represented themselves as big enough to handle demand.
If that facade fell apart.
Their reputation as authentic dealers would suffer.
And trust.
Is something that's very hard to win back.
Luckily.
Damon's mother could spot the missing piece Fubu needed.
My mother said, you know, you need a strategic partner.
No one knew where to find such a thing.
But Margot had an idea.
She took out an ad in the New York Times that said million dollars in orders need financing.
That's right.
An ad in the New York Times.
It was unconventional.
But when your back is against the wall.
Unconventional can be your friend.
And believe it or not, thirty three people call that it.
Now most of them were, you know.
Lone sharks. Not
type of shot that I am on TV, but three of them were actually real. One was the textile division of Samsung.
If you didn't know Samsung had a textile division.
It was news to me too.
All of a sudden you go from the scrappyest of scrappy, sewing machines in a house, sleeping next to it.
To dealing with massive corporate giants. What was that like?
Uh
Well, thank God, you know, the partners that we found, they were the ones that technically had to deal with Samsung, but Samsung worked more like a financing arm, you know, as you know, these big multinationals, these conglomerates have a hundred divisions.
But it was fairly easy because now I had strategic partners who they were the buffer between us and Samsung and we all knew our role. We knew what we would do.
Their job was to deal with the finance with the LCs, clearance, customs and quota being able to make goods. And our job was the marketing sales design.
celebritors, strategic partners, interviews.
So everybody knew their lane and what they were supposed to do.
Samsung was doing what large organizations often do.
Which is scout for small startups with a specific area of expertise.
Samsung knew how to make goods at scale.
Damon.
knew what kind of street wear sold and what people wanted.
In Fubu.
Samsung saw a company with authentic buy in from a community of fans.
the terms of the deal was that I had to sell five million dollars worth of clothes in three years because if they set up all these logistics in the supply chain, how are they gonna get their money back? And they consider that a wash.
Five million dollars in three years was the floor Fubu had to clear.
For Samsung.
The partnership was a relatively low stakes gamble.
To Fubu?
It was life.
Or death.
So
Did Fubu deliver?
We sold thirty million dollars worth of product in three months.
It was exactly the strategic partnership they needed to scale.
Foo.
was on its way.
Remember that day?
Outside L L Cool J's apartment.
Damon and his partners convinced him to take a picture wearing their brand.
He felt that he couldn't look at his customers, all the people that support him from the neighborhood in the face if he didn't take this picture for me.
That picture.
help Fubu get on the cultural map.
It kickstarted relationships with retailers.
And the culture.
It was seminal.
It was formative.
And it didn't end there.
LL Cool J had continued to be associated with the Fubu brand.
In nineteen ninety five, he wore one of their caps in a video with the RB group Boys to Men.
A little later, he appeared in a Fubu ad when the brand came to Dillard's department store.
And as we heard earlier in the show, he would come to own a piece of the company.
But in 1997, LL Cool J took the relationship to another level.
He got called from a gap.
do an ad and he asked that he wear a hat.
At that time LL was known for never taking off his hat.
LL told the gap.
that he had a custom made hat he'd like to wear.
That hat, of course.
was Fubu.
It was a more subtle version of their logo.
Just the F and the B in looping cursive.
White letters.
On Grey Canvas.
But it's clearly visible throughout the thirty second spot.
This branding placement was by itself a sly bit of guerrilla marketing.
But L wasn't finished.

The spot features him freestyle rapping.
By himself.
against a plain white backdrop.

It has everything you might expect from a wrapper extolling the virtues of casual clothing.
I know you like your outfit stylist, any other line, but the gap is childish. Everybody working is a personal stylist. You fallin', once you hear the gap calling. Then
Exactly 15 seconds into the ad.
He says this.
Put us, buy us on the low!
He says for us by us on the low.


What uh
Oh.
On the low.
What a
Falls
on the low
The meaning of that slipped past some viewers.
But to those that knew.
That one phrase.
What up
What us
On the low.
Rang out like the shot.
of a starter's pistol
I remember in the office just
watching this commercial every day going, when are they going to pull this commercial?
Why did it take so long for someone at the gap to notice what had happened?
Damon has a theory.
Because the gap didn't have any diversity, whether it's African American or whether it's white people who like hip hop this emerging music, they end up spending thirty million dollars hearing that ad.
To Damon's recollection, it took four or five weeks for the Gap to finally pull the spot.
Now the funny thing and the great thing was they did their analytics and they realized that the target market they were trying to hit increased three hundred percent because the kids thought they could get boo at the gap. So they ran another sixty million dollars worth of that ad.
This is the power of an authentic partnership.
If you tried to map out all the contours of the relationship between LL and FUBU, it wouldn't look like any contract.
you've ever seen.
But the structure.
is irrelevant.
Partnerships.
can be utterly strategic.
And mathematical.
A fifteen percent stake for X amount of work.
Or
Improvisational.
Like an LL Cool J Freestyle.
They can be based on sweat equity.
Or
Financial equity.
Or
All of the above.
They can grow over time.
Or
Find a natural ending point.
What's important.
Is that each party is authentic aligned.
Pulling toward the same shared goal.
I'm Reid Hoffman.
Thanks for listening.
Masters of Scale is a Wakewhat original. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our senior producer is Jordan McLeod.
Our supervising producer is Jave Punjabi.
Our producers are Adam Skuse, Catherine Clark Gray, Hiley Bonbi, Marie McCoy Thompson, and Christina Gonzalez. Our editor at large is Bob Safian. Our music director is Ryan Holliday. Original music and sound design by Eduardo Rivera.
Audio Editing by Keith J. Nelson, Steven Davies, Andrew Naught, and Mike Gallagher.
Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh.
Special thanks to Chris Yay, Alisa Schreiber, David Sanford, Saida Sapieva, Greg Biato.
Adam Heiner
Emily McMahoness.
Kelsey Capitano, Tim Cronin.
Anna Pizzano, Ben Richardson, Mina Kurosawa, Sarah Tarter, Charlie Menesis, Chaneme Ezequena, and Colin Howard.
Become a member of Masters of Scale to get access to a year's worth of courses and content on the Masters of Scale Courses app.
Find out more at masterscale dot com slash membership.