He Sewed the Hats Himself
In 1992, Daymond John was 23 years old, living in his mother's house in Hollis, Queens, working shifts at Red Lobster to stay afloat. He looked at a wool ski hat on a store shelf - the kind that was selling for $20 retail - and did the math. With a neighbor and $40, he made 90 hats by hand and sold every single one on Jamaica Avenue in a single Saturday morning. Eight hundred dollars. Just like that. The store had been charging for scarcity. Daymond charged for the same thing and kept the margin.
That is where FUBU starts. Not in an office. Not with a business plan. On a sidewalk in Queens with handmade wool hats and a price that made sense. "For Us, By Us" wasn't a marketing tagline someone in an agency invented - it was a declaration. The hip-hop community was buying luxury fashion from brands that didn't know their names. FUBU was the correction.
By 1994, FUBU had $300,000 in orders at the Magic trade show in Las Vegas. The problem: they had no money to fill them. Daymond and his mother went to 27 banks. Twenty-seven. Every single one said no. His mother, Margot John, did something that belongs in the entrepreneurship hall of fame: she mortgaged their house, placed a classified ad in the New York Times, and Samsung Textiles called back. The $300,000 investment that followed didn't just save FUBU - it launched a brand that would eventually gross over $350 million in a single year.
Then came the LL Cool J moment. He's a childhood friend from the same Hollis neighborhood. When he appeared in a Gap commercial in 1997, he wore a FUBU hat and worked the words "For Us, By Us" into his lyrics. A Gap ad. The LL Cool J maneuver. Daymond didn't pay for that placement. It was a favor between friends - which is another way of saying it was the fruit of decades of keeping the right relationships. The brand was suddenly everywhere.
At its peak in 1998, FUBU was doing $350 million annually. The brand appeared in music videos, on magazine covers, at the Grammy Awards. It was not a streetwear brand that crossed over into mainstream. It was mainstream. It just happened to be Black-owned, Black-designed, and rooted in a culture that American fashion had spent decades profiting from while ignoring the actual people behind it.
Where you start has nothing to do with where you can go.
- Daymond John
What most people don't know is that Daymond kept his Red Lobster shifts even after FUBU started gaining ground. He needed the income. The business wasn't profitable yet. He was sewing hats at 2am and waiting tables at noon. That particular detail - the one that sounds humiliating in retrospect - is the one he talks about most proudly. Being broke isn't a bug in the system. According to his 2016 book "The Power of Broke," it's a feature. Scarcity forces creativity. Desperation makes you resourceful. The people who have nothing to lose are the most dangerous competitors in any room.
The book sold well. Debuted on both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. So did "Rise and Grind" in 2018. In 2023, he published a children's book, "Little Daymond Learns to Earn," which also made the NYT list. Five books total. The man who struggled with dyslexia his entire life is now a five-time bestselling author. He treats that irony with the same matter-of-fact energy he applies to everything: it's not irony, it's the point.
Then, in April 2017, a doctor found a nodule on his thyroid. Stage II cancer. Successful surgery followed - but the wake-up call did not pass quietly. John rebuilt his daily routine around longevity. He built a personal biohacking lab. He changed what he eats, how he sleeps, how he recovers. He went from a guy who used to hustle through exhaustion to one who treats his body as the asset behind every business decision. The shift shows in how he talks about the future: with patience rather than urgency.
When George Floyd was killed in May 2020, Daymond John didn't issue a statement and move on. He created Black Entrepreneurs Day - an annual event at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, partnered with the NAACP, that distributes $25,000 grants to Black-owned businesses. Five years in, they've given out over $1 million to more than 40 companies. Kelly Rowland performed. Charlamagne tha God hosted. 2 Chainz showed up. The whole thing runs like a television special, except the point isn't the entertainment - it's the check that goes out the door to a business that couldn't get a bank loan.
Which brings us back to where it started. Twenty-seven banks said no to Daymond and Margot John in 1994. Thirty years later, Daymond John is the one writing the check.