FUBU’s Keith Perrin and Daymond John with LL Cool J. Photo Credit: CNNMoney

FUBU’s Keith Perrin checked in with Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson on the Scoop B Radio podcast. Press Play Below To Listen!

There are a few things about the FUBU clothing brand that stood out: they had the coolest sweater vests and hockey jerseys, “Fatty Girl,” a single from the clothing line’s FUBU Compilation album was and still is THE BOMB. They had women with voluptuous bodies that are actually theirs and not surgically altered. 

Additionally, LL Cool J rocked his FUBU clothing line to the fullest and it paid off big. LL also had the coolest wardrobe on the UPN hit show, In The House.

Back in the early stages of the FUBU brand in the 90s, FUBU’s founder, Daymond John, now most recognizable from the hit show, Shark Tank, had a vision.

He stuck to it: create quality clothes at a fair price.

The Queens, NY native balanced time working full-time as a manager at a local Red Lobster restaurant and investing into the FUBU brand.

He and his Queens, NY buddies J. Alexander Martin and Keith Perrin invested into that vision by actually hand-sewing hats, and T-shirts and selling them at New York Coliseum and making a pretty penny, daily.

Their hard work would pay off. But they also got a huge mainstream co-sign from fellow Queens representer, LL Cool J.

LL Cool J recorded a 30-second ad for The Gap, where he name dropped FUBU by saying “for us, by us” in his lyrics while wearing a FUBU hat.  

The Gap fell asleep at the wheel and didn’t realize it until months later. Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

“He looked at us and saw the determination in our eyes,” FUBU’s Keith Perrin told me on Scoop B Radio.

LL Cool J was at the top of his game at the point. He was transitioning from rapping to acting.

According to Perrin, companies like Nike and Timberland were looking to do partnerships with LL. But the rapper, turned actor remained loyal to the hometown guys. “He’s from Queens just like us,” said Perrin.

Perrin vividly recounts giving LL Cool J his first endorsement check while he was on the set taping the video for his hit, “Phenomenon.”

“I went out there and gave him the check in an envelope,” he said.

“And he said: ‘what’s this?’ And I said: ‘this is the first distribution check.’ So he sits down and opens the envelope and says: ‘man, we making this kind of money from clothes?!’ It was $75,000 dollars and he says tell Damon [John]: ‘I need a red Ferrari!’ And I was like: ‘L you just got $75,000, you can put a down payment on your own Ferrari.’ But it was just an amazing thing and an amazing time and he’s a great guy, The dude is 100 percent loyal and dedicated to the brand.”

What a great story. Today, the brand is reportedly worth $6 billion. FUBU is also featured at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

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The post Scoop B: FUBU’s influence on 90s & 2000s culture stems from timing & LL Cool J’s The Gap commercial appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.

ARLINGTON, TX – SEPTEMBER 3, 2011: ESPN College GameDay built by The Home Depot. College GameDay guest picker Mark Cuban with the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy on the remote on-site set of College GameDay at Cowboys Stadium prior to the Cowboys Classic regular season game between the Oregon Ducks and the LSU Tigers (Photo by Phil Ellsworth / ESPN)

Mark Cuban chatted with Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson on Scoop B Radio. Press Play Below To Listen.

Before Mark Cuban was majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks and star of Shark Tank, he flipped two investments: the sale of startups MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com in the 1990s.

To quote DJ Khaled, ‘business was booming’ for many who investors in that era. Those who stuck it out, reaped the benefits..

Cuban, worth an estimated $3 billion, believes a similar boom is soon coming. “There’s a couple different things,” Mark Cuban told me on Scoop B Radio. “There’s deep learning, machine learning, there’s machine vision, bio analytics, biomechanics, virtual reality to a lesser extent.”

English writer Aldous Huxley predicted the advancement of technology in his novel, “Brave New World.”

But the next wave? Cuban is observant and excited. “I don’t think that’s going to be quite as successful as people think,” he said.

“Sensors, you know, technology is just getting so much tinier and computer capacity; so much faster and the ability to intelligently sort through data and spit out things so much better, that we all were born too soon. It’s going to be crazy 20 years from now.”

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The post Scoop B: Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says analytics & virtual reality will mirror 90s, 2000s dot-com boom appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.