Every brand says they have one. Here's mine, the whole thing, including the part I'm not proud of.
The First Dream
I've been making music since I was a kid. In my twenties I pushed it for real, under the name Eighty4 Fly, and for a minute, it worked. The single took Seattle by storm. Radio. Sold-out rooms.
My last album, Colors, was the best album I ever made. But when it dropped, the results didn't come fast enough for me, and doubt got in through that gap. Is this the right thing? Am I even that good?
Then one day I was on a flight to LA, headed to a Grammy party, sitting with my uncle who managed me, my DJ, and my brother. All of us on that plane because of music I made. And somewhere over the coast, I told my uncle I was done.
It didn't feel like giving up. It felt like relief. Like maturity. Like going out on my own terms.
It was none of those things. It was just quitting, because quitting was the easiest thing to do.
Here's the part that took me a decade to sit with: the album's numbers kept climbing after I walked away. For years. The dream worked, on its own clock. I just wasn't there when it did. People still reach out about that music today.
The Wilderness
After that, I turned it all off. Took a job at a moving company, then started my own. I made it work, and it taught me how to run a business. But I never fell in love with it. Something was missing, and I knew what it was. I needed a creative outlet again, and I knew I had to find a way to get it out.
The years that look like nothing are usually the middle of the story, not the end of it.
The Second Dream
It became real the second time I dusted myself off and decided to follow a dream.
Music was one of two dreams I had as a kid. The other was this. I can still remember being young, designing clothes on notebook paper, before I had any idea what to do with it. It was always in me.
I grew up in the golden era of FUBU, Karl Kani, Iceberg, ECKO, and Roc-A-Wear, and those brands were never just clothes to me. They were declarations.
So when I picked design back up, it wasn't new. I'd been at it, on and off, for about five years before I ever mocked up a real piece. Teaching myself the tools, studying the brands that raised me, filling folders with ideas nobody had seen yet. By the time the first design was ready, the work was already years deep.
This time I wasn't going to sit on it, talk myself out of it, or wait for some perfect moment that never comes. I already know what quitting costs. I paid that bill once. So this time, you get to watch the other version.
What Dreamers Only Means
It's not a slogan. It's a type of person. A creative, a doer, a risk-taker. Someone who believes they can do the hard, scary thing, and is willing to try, fail, and try again until they get there.
I know what it costs to quit on something you were meant for. I did it once, and I had to watch it work without me from the outside. I'm not doing that again. And this time it's bigger than me.
That's the whole idea behind Dreamers Only. You don't quit on your dream, and you don't let the people next to you quit on theirs. We keep each other in it. When the doubt shows up, and it will, you've got people who won't let you talk yourself out of it. That's the deal.
So if you're still chasing something, still building when nobody's watching, still betting on yourself when quitting would be the easier move, you're already one of us. The shirt is just the uniform.
Don't just dream, DO.
D