The story Daymond John told in Seattle didn’t begin with Shark Tank, a billion-dollar fashion brand, or celebrity investors.
It began with a can opener.
Standing onstage at the Wiresconnect conference on March 11, moderated by entrepreneur and investor Kimberly Carney Smith, the FUBU founder leaned into the microphone and described a strange object hanging above the stove in his childhood kitchen.
“My mother had this can opener,” John said, stretching his arms apart to demonstrate. “It was about three feet long. And I kept wondering, when are we ever going to open this big-ass can of beans?”
As a kid, he couldn’t understand why it was there. The tool looked oversized, impractical—almost absurd. It wasn’t until decades later, after he’d built one of the most recognizable fashion brands of the 1990s, that he realized what his mother had been teaching him.
She was thinking bigger than he was.
Like many entrepreneurs, John says he didn’t fully appreciate his parents’ wisdom until his thirties. When he and his friends first started selling FUBU—“For Us, By Us”—their ambitions were modest.
“We were just hoping we’d have a little business that all four of us could run and still keep our day jobs,” he recalled.
But the business kept growing.
And growing.
Until one moment changed everything.
The Moment Possibility Became Real
John described a turning point that had little to do with sales numbers or investors. It came from something far simpler: representation.
At the time, the global fashion industry was largely dominated by European houses. The faces behind major brands were overwhelmingly Italian or French. Then one day John saw a hang tag from another label—Karl Kani—and the man on it looked like him.
“It hit me,” John told the audience. “I saw someone the same color as me who had a global brand.”
Suddenly, the impossible felt tangible.
That realization reframed the ceiling of what John believed he could build. Instead of chasing approval from retailers and distributors, he started thinking differently about how to grow.
The vision expanded—like the oversized can opener his mother had hung above the stove.
The Long Road No One Talks About
Entrepreneurship stories often compress time. Overnight success, hockey-stick growth, breakout moments.
But John pushed back on that mythology.
“People think it happens quickly,” he said. “But the journey is long.”
Sometimes painfully long.
Even successful companies, he noted, often take six years or more before they truly find their rhythm.
“It’s two steps forward and one step back,” he said. “That’s the reality.”
Resilience, in his view, is not a grand heroic trait. It’s something much smaller—and harder.
Resilience is making the product again tomorrow.
Resilience is figuring out why it was returned.
Resilience is carrying the stress quietly.
“For entrepreneurs,” John explained, “you can’t really tell people your problems. Everybody else gets paid before you do.”
There’s pressure at home. Pressure from employees. Pressure from customers.
And sometimes, the hardest moments come when founders must let people go—people who believed in them early.
“You feel like you failed them,” he said.
Still, when the reward comes, it often isn’t financial.
“It can change lives,” he said. “Maybe your kids grow up saying their parents worked hard and were good people.”
Small Decisions, Big Consequences
When Carney Smith asked whether any early decision had an outsized impact on his career, John pointed to something less glamorous than branding or marketing.
Necessity.
“I didn’t have any money,” he said. “So I had to figure it out.”
Without capital, he had to understand every step of the business: manufacturing, retail, customer behavior. At one point he described being “seven steps away from the money.”
First he had to make the clothes.
Then a store had to agree to carry them.
Then a customer had to notice them.
Then try them on.
Then decide whether they were worth buying.
And even then the sale wasn’t guaranteed.
“The only analytics I had,” he joked, “was whether the rack was empty.”
Why Trends Can Kill a Brand
One of the biggest mistakes fashion companies make, John said, is chasing trends.
By the time a company designs a product, manufactures it overseas, ships it across the ocean, and gets it into stores, the culture may have already moved on.
“You’re a year late,” he said.
Instead, FUBU grew by evolving with its customers.
As the hip-hop generation that embraced the brand matured, so did the product line. Streetwear expanded into tailored clothing, suits, and more formal styles.
“The customer grew up with us,” John said. “So we grew with them.”
The Silent Killer of Fashion Companies
If trends can stall a brand, inventory can destroy it.
John spoke candidly about one of the most painful lessons of his career: overproduction.
At trade shows, companies would place massive orders—tens of millions of dollars at a time. For a moment, it felt like success.
But demand could shift quickly.
At one point, John said, the company was sitting on $90 million worth of unsold inventory.
“Over-inventory will kill you,” he told the room.
The problem is common in fashion: minimum manufacturing orders force brands to produce more than the market needs. What sells out in one size can leave warehouses stacked with others.
And every extra box costs money to store.
Eventually, brands are forced to slash prices—sometimes below cost—just to move the product.
AI, Opportunity, and the Next Shift
When the conversation turned to artificial intelligence, John acknowledged the anxiety many founders feel about emerging technologies.
But he sees opportunity.
Rather than resisting AI, he encourages companies to experiment with it—to let employees learn the tools and discover how they can improve productivity.
One executive he recently spoke with told him their company’s margin improved significantly after embracing AI-driven workflows.
Their revenue grew 40 percent to 80 percent, he said.
The lesson wasn’t about replacing people. It was about expanding capability.
The Discipline of Never Arriving
Late in the conversation, John reflected on something that has anchored him since his teenage years: goal-setting.
At sixteen, he read Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich.”
He’s read it more than twenty times since.
Every night, he still reads the same ten goals he wrote years ago. Some are six-month goals. Others stretch five, ten, even twenty years into the future.
“I never hit the six-month goals,” he admitted with a grin. “I set them too big.”
But that’s the point.
The exercise reminds him of something essential: success is never final.
“You never arrive,” he said.
Instead, every milestone becomes the beginning of the next journey.
The Brand That Walks Into the Room Before You
One belief John once held about business has completely changed.
When he was younger, he thought successful entrepreneurs stayed behind the scenes.
But over time he realized visibility matters.
“If you’re a CEO and you’re invisible, you’re vulnerable,” he said.
So in the early 2000s he began intentionally building his personal brand, speaking publicly and positioning himself as a visible advocate for entrepreneurship.
Today, he said, something remarkable happens when he enters a room.
“My brand walks in before me.”
It’s not easy, he told the audience. It takes time, consistency, and a little luck.
But when it works, it changes the rules of the game.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, perhaps, that oversized can opener still hangs above the stove.
A reminder that sometimes the tools for big dreams look ridiculous—until the day you finally open the can.
