WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB AFTER LEAVING UMES?

Scooty: I worked at Foot Locker in high school. If you worked at Footlocker back in the day, it was the upper echelon of all things. There was a Footlocker near UMES so I would transfer there and back during school, but when I finally got kicked out of school, that became my full-time job. What brought me back to a positive place was that I ended up leaving the city in 2005. I had been through a lot of other situations and ended up moving to New Jersey to be closer to New York. My father was like, “ Listen, I just want to give you a piece of advice. Things aren’t working out for you but you have to do something. What do you want to do?” I told him I just really want to study fashion and marketing because at that point I was back and forth between Nike and being a merchandise specialist and and really getting into fashion. I was always into fashion but never thought about making it a career. It was always a teaching and education thing that I wanted to get into. He saw that I kept getting derailed for whatever reason. I told him “I think I keep getting derailed because I really like fashion, my passion is working with kids, but I keep trying to chase a dollar. I keep going for all these other jobs and not even just ending up unhappy, but God would pull  the wool rug from under me.

Five years went by when I was going through ups and downs and I moved to New Jersey, was there for 2.5 years, ended up getting myself back into school taking classes in business and interning at a boutique. In 2006, I started my first clothing line, Citrus City, with one of my business partners, and it was a great experience because it felt really good to establish something as a foundation. Things didn’t work all the way out with my business partners with that particular venture but I learned a lot. It was enough to catapult me to another clothing line with another friend of mine and what I learned from it was pop-up shops. It was in a store down the street called District 51. It was my first pop-up shop in 2009. Pop-up shops were a new concept but I was coming from New York and New Jersey so people in D.C. didn’t know what a pop-up shop was and weren’t into it. The first pop-up shop I ever did was sponsored by Scion because at the time Scion was trying to reach out to a younger demographic. They were like, “If you’re doing something cool, we want a part of it!” They sponsored the first event and that opened up the floodgates.

HOW DID YOUR COMPANIES COME TO FRUITION AND WHO YOU WORKED WITH AT EACH BRAND?

Scooty: Rock Creek Social Club started in 2010 and was the idea of my business partner, Jerome Baker. He wanted to put together a group of individuals who were the “others” in the city. When you think about Black people in the city, everything is always compared to urban but there are many different types of Black people. He just had an idea that creatives-artists, designers, and people that in general embrace culture could put together a supergroup. It was myself, Jerome, Geronimo, Lamine, and Modi, who started Trillectro. We had a launch party, even though we didn’t think we were going to do parties,  people loved it. There was no dress code, we weren’t charging people to get in, we had an open bar, or anyone pressed for bottle service. It was just like” “If you come in here and show us love, if this table is open you can stand on it,  we don’t care.” I’ve always been super popular and people always knew that I was doing cool stuff, but it was just the fact that the two situations I was in were situations that I didn’t necessarily start. I just came on the tail end still doing what I was doing in school, just trying to help somebody with whatever it was that they were doing. I didn’t have as much influence as I should have and the decision to shut these companies down wasn’t mine. I had the vision but you can’t show it to someone else and even if you do, they won’t be able to see it the way you do.

The second company,  just had other stuff going on. At that time, two of my business partners at the second clothing line had multiple kids so it wasn’t like they could be in the streets pushing the business. Fast forward from 2010 to 2013, I just happen to be online researching fashion stuff, and ended up coming across Premium Co. which was already an established brand. They weren’t doing clothes, just men’s accessories and jewelry pieces. I would make comments on things that I liked and someone on the opposite end would respond and I thought that was dope because most brands wouldn’t do that. I had been following them for a couple months and I noticed that they had posted the Broccoli City flyer on their IG page, so I go to the page and read the bio…we ended up talking over the phone, agreeing to meet up at Thunder Burger in Georgetown, with no intentions of being where we are now. It was really, “You have some dope products, I know everybody in the city, and I know that I can help introduce you to people and get your stuff out there.” After two months, we were traveling on the road together in Vegas and I thought that if the two of us could survive the time in the room together, we’d be good. We started traveling everywhere and from the traveling he saw how many people I knew that were outside D.C. We had to transition from accessories to a full clothing line.

WHAT’S THE VISION FOR DIET STARTS MONDAY?

Scooty: Diet starts Monday is a brick and mortar because that’s how we chose to launch the brand but it’s just our second clothing brand. My partner Davin, and his best friend John Geiger, had been talking about starting a second brand outside of Premium. The talking went on for a long time- hence the name “Diet Starts Monday”, which has nothing to do with health or food, and has everything to do with  procrastination that was happening between the two of them. Once they came together to figure out what they wanted to do and named the brand, it was brought to the table and I was just honored to be a part of it and have the opportunity to be an owner. From their hard work coming up with the vision of what the brand was going to be, the only I could do to complement that was to come up with a concept for a retail restaurant/bar so we could launch the brand.using my connections from Rock Creek Social Club and the relationships I had built through Premium Co. in order for us to be able to get this spot. Business has been great. It’s a lot more work than we’ve ever done. We’re talking 16-17 hour days.