Daymond John | Owner of The Global Billion Dollar Brand FUBU
by By Tom Zenner | March/April 2012
Complex formulas, equations, and properly sequenced series of letters, digits and symbols have made a lot of brilliant people some staggering fortunes over the past three decades or so. But not every roadmap to constructing a company that becomes an iconic global brand, ringing up billions of dollars in sales per year, is paved by computer code and mathematical magic. This story is about another visionary builder and dreamer, with equal amounts of off-the-charts ambition and desire to make the world a better place as any of the household name high-tech all stars we all know so much about. The difference with Daymond John, founder of fashion label FUBU, best-selling author, and one of the entrepreneur judges on ABC’s hit show The Shark Tank, is that Daymond has his internal navigation set at a frequency of cool instead of geek. His formula for building a world-class brand, and turning a street corner hat-stitching hobby into a world-wide empire known and loved by A-list celebrity hotshots and everyday people alike, can be summed up in a very un-complex equation, and it goes like this:
Substance + Style = Success.