Before his streetwear brand BrownMill launched, Justis Pitt-Goodson designed, sewed and sold his own bow ties to his middle school classmates.
In high school, Pitt-Goodson and two friends developed the idea for the streetwear brand. After two years, he dropped out of college to devote himself full-time to his business. About half a decade later, he is co-founder, creative director and CEO of Newark, New Jersey-based BrownMill.
The company attracts NBA players as customers and had $327,000 in revenue last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
“From a young age, I’ve always been a hustler, an entrepreneur,” Pitt-Goodson, 26, tells CNBC Make It. “I don’t know where I got it from. Mom says I got it from my father, who was also an entrepreneur. So maybe it’s something genetic.”
Current and former NBA stars such as Dwayne Wade, Carmelo Anthony and Andre Iguodala have given BrownMill national street cred. The brand’s “Think Bigger” mantra and its upcycled patchwork clothing can be found all over Instagram and in major cities.
But the brand’s success didn’t skyrocket overnight. When Pitt-Goodson first tried to pursue BrownMill as a full-time job, he unexpectedly had to switch gears and support his family instead. In 2020, the company still generated less than six figures per year.
Here’s how Pitt-Goodson and his partners eventually made BrownMill a household name:
A childhood dream
When Pitt-Goodson looks back on his first flies, he says he can’t believe he was able to sell the designs with the crooked seams. But the experience gave him the confidence to pursue his dream of designing clothes.
After becoming friends with his two future business partners, Taha Shimou and Kwaku Agyemang, in high school, Pitt-Goodson studied business administration at Rutgers University-Newark. While juggling classes, he interned with stylists and fashion brands in New York.
“I intern with stylists, so I get to learn different aspects of each part of the fashion industry,” says Pitt-Goodson. “I think all of that, coupled with going to business school at the same time, really helped develop an idea and give me a vision for what I want this company to look like.”
After two years, Pitt-Goodson dropped out. Since he already knew he wanted to expand his clothing line, he figured his time would be better spent doing just that.
But shortly after he dropped out of Rutgers, his mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer – and his then-girlfriend found out she was pregnant with their son.
To stay afloat, he took a job as a copywriter at luxury broadcast company The RealReal for $17.50 an hour. He was released after less than a year.
“This job was more about production and pace than the quality of the work,” Pitt-Goodson says. “I just felt like a machine. I had a big goal every day and ultimately didn’t have time to think about what I was doing. I knew it wasn’t serving me. It didn’t serve my spirit, and before.” I could quit, they fired me.
Eyes on the price
Without a full-time job—and with unexpected caregiving demands—Pitt-Goodson began running BrownMill from his family’s home in Piscataway, New Jersey.
He and his partners grew the brand by promoting their online store at local pop-up events until March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic caused in-person meetings to be halted. To fuel the opening of a brick-and-mortar location, the co-founders raised money through crowdsourcing, subscription packages, and socially distanced outdoor pop-ups.
The subscription model was a product of the co-founder’s audience analysis and his need to generate revenue. He says he noticed repeat customers buying about 12 items on the site each year, to which BrownMill responded by offering clothing packages in various tiers, ranging in cost from $200 to $1,000 per year.
Customers still spend about the same amount overall — a subscription gives people monthly credits to spend on the site — but BrownMill gets the money up front and uses it on new machines to grow the company, Pitt explains -Goodson.
The brand grossed $86,000 in 2020, which allowed the founders to put down a $7,000 deposit on a Newark store that opened in June 2021. They chose the location because of Newark’s strong shopping culture, which Pitt-Goodson discovered while working at a nearby sneaker store in college, he says.
“That was an eye-opening experience because … I didn’t realize how often my people, the Black people, buy shoes,” Pitt-Goodson says. “I recognized a shopping culture in Newark that I didn’t (yet) appreciate.”
Newark is a popular filming location outside of Hollywood, too, and stylists often cycle in and out of BrownMill looking for unique clothing, Pitt-Goodson says.
“That’s how the Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade thing came about,” he says, noting that the three-time NBA champion posed for a photo in BrownMill’s “Think Bigger” line in July 2021. “The stylist came in and bought a whole bunch of stuff, and Dwyane Wade ended up liking it and starting rocking it.
The art and rewards of over-preparation
Pitt-Goodson says he doesn’t stick to a minute-by-minute routine, but he likes to over-prepare. He arrives at the BrownMill store every day at 8:30 a.m., two and a half hours before store opening, to work on clothing alterations, plan the next collection and coordinate communications between the BrownMill team.
Pitt-Goodson said the company is on track to hit $1 million in sales this year. In 2023, he hopes to reach $2 million in annual sales by bringing BrownMill into traditional retail stores, he says.
In the next five years, he wants to open two more stores in “growing black communities” like Atlanta, Los Angeles and Accra, Ghana. He’s cautious about over-expansion, adding: “We don’t want to get too big because then we lose some quality control or a certain level of coolness.”
Locally, BrownMill sponsors community basketball games and an urban garden in Newark, and Pitt-Goodson says he wants to be seen as an example of entrepreneurial success in his neighborhood.