Justis Pitt-Goodson is a fashion entrepreneur with celebrity endorsements and the creator of BrownMill, a streetwear brand. He knitted and sold bow ties to his middle school peers before beginning his brand. The experience of selling crooked-seamed designs, he claims, gave him the confidence to follow his passion of making garments.
BrownMill was also conceived with two of his colleagues, Taha Shimou and Kwaku Agyemang, while he was in high school. His ambition to become a significant figure in the fashion world drove him to work as an intern with stylists and fashion brands in New York while attending school.
“I’m interning with stylists, so I’m learning different parts of every piece of the business of fashion,” Pitt-Goodson said. “I think all that mixed with going to the business school at the same time really helped shape an idea and give me a vision for what I wanted this company to look like.”
He then dropped out of school to focus solely on the business because he had already found out how to expand his fashion firm. His mother, though, was stricken with breast cancer, and his then-girlfriend discovered she was pregnant with their kid shortly after he dropped out of college to start his firm.
According to CNBC Made It, at this point in his life, he took a job as a copywriter at a beautiful hotel, but he was dismissed less than a year later.
“It was a job that was more about production and pace rather than the quality of work,” Pitt-Goodson said. “I just felt like a machine. I had a big quota every day, and I would ultimately have no time to think about what I was doing. I knew it wasn’t serving me. It wasn’t serving my spirit, and before I could quit, they fired me.”
He quickly shifted his focus to streetwear, which led him to launch BrownMill from his family’s home in Piscataway, New Jersey, and built the brand by advertising its online store at local pop-up events until March 2020.
According to CNBC Made It, the company brought in $327,000 in revenue last year. Before that, the company was not making a six-figure profit; it made $86,000 in 2020. In 2022, the company was on track to reach $1 million in sales. “This year, the firm has projected to reach $2 million in annual revenue by getting BrownMill into traditional retail stores,” he said.
What is more, he plans to open storefronts in “growing Black communities” like Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Accra, Ghana. Meanwhile, the brand has received endorsements from NBA stars like Dwayne Wade, Carmelo Anthony, and Andre Iguodala.