What building ACEND Streetwear™ has meant to me

People love to talk about starting a brand like it begins with a logo, a business plan, or a perfectly curated mood board. For me, it was a little different.

It likely began in the East Bay in the late 80's, with not much. I had Payless shoes all through grade school and Jr. High, and back-to-school shopping was always at Kmart, and, in a good year, maybe JCPenney or Mervyn’s. It also probably started with knowing, even as a kid, that other kids could clock your shoes in half a second and decide what that meant about you (to them). I still remember the teasing. The off-brand stripes that were not-quite-Adidas. The feeling of being seen, but for the wrong reason.

Not having a dope pair of sneakers is obviously not the meaning of life. But it’s wild how early kids learn to attach status to what’s on your feet. And it’s even wilder how long that sticks with you.

I didn’t grow up getting Jordans. I don’t think I owned my first real pair until I was around 18 or 19, after I started working. My first job was at Chuck E. Cheese. Glamorous, I know. But it meant I could finally start buying some of the things I wanted for myself. And that feeling stayed with me. Sneakers became bigger than sneakers. They became an identity. Taste. Aspiration.

My path has never been polished to say the least. I’m a college dropout. For a long time, that was one of my biggest insecurities. It felt like everyone my age was collecting degrees and wearing them like badges of honor, while I was just trying to figure out what I even enjoyed doing enough to make it into a trade. "Do what you love!" they'd say. Which, to me, felt like a middle finger at the time because I considered anyone who found a degree or a job doing something they actually LOVED was just an asshole masquerading as a model citizen. (I don't really believe that so much anymore, btw). I was just trying to keep moving while figuring myself out. But I somehow made my own path. Retail led to corporate retail. That led to inventory planning, marketing, and eventually product development/content design in tech. I spent the last decade building a career I was pretty proud of. I made more money than I ever imagined I would when I was younger. The kind of money that makes you think you finally made it.

And then life did what life does.

Divorce can wreck you in ways people do not prepare you for. Not just emotionally, but physically, financially, mentally — like it reaches into every corner of your life and starts pulling wires out of the wall. One minute, you think you know who you are. Next, you are standing in the middle of a life that does not look or feel like yours anymore. For me, it did not look poetic. It looked like too much unhealthy eating, too much stress, too many court dates, too many things hitting at once. Going from thinking, I’ve made it, to wondering how I ended up here.

Around that same time, I was laid off from my fancy tech job, my dad passed away, and I got hit with two things I knew almost nothing about: type 2 diabetes entering my life, and my daughter being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Both changed me. Both forced me to wake up fast. And both arrived during a season when I already felt like everything around me was falling apart at the same time.

I was married for about seven years, and even though a lot of that story is complicated, two extraordinary things came out of it: my kids. They are, without question, the best part of my life. The tallest roses in the garden. Proof that even out of something painful, something beautiful can still exist. These kids are magic. Truly. I didn’t even really like kids that much before I had them, if I’m being honest. Now when they’re gone, I miss them in a way that completely wrecks me.

And the truth is, I do not have some neat lesson wrapped around all of this. I am not writing this from the mountaintop. I am writing it from somewhere in the middle — still tired, still worried, still trying to figure out what starting over is supposed to look like. Bla bla bla. 

But when you have kids who are counting on you to keep them safe, you keep moving. Not because you are sure you are okay. Sometimes you keep moving because stopping feels worse. Sometimes you keep moving because they are watching, and because some part of you believes there's got to be more to all this than being dealt a bad deck of cards. That's not the identity I want people to remember me for, at least.

So what does starting your own brand mean when your life has been all over the place? 

I believe it means you build something you've always wanted to do, (that thing that actually might mean you're "doing what you love"). And ESPECIALLY build it when you have people doubting you. (It's more motivation, at least for me.) Besides, what better time is there to bet on yourself when you're pretty much all out of collateral?

So, that’s what  ACEND Streewear™ has meant to me. It’s the part that still cares about style, design, culture, and self-expression. It’s proof that I’m still here. Still trying. Refusing to disappear when I appear to have vanished.

It also means access. Because I know what it feels like to be outside looking in. To want the look, the confidence, the identity, the thing that everyone else seems to get naturally. ACEND isn’t about gatekeeping. It’s about bringing people in. It’s about loving sneakers, loving style, loving the culture, and making space for people who do too.

And that's why ACEND Streewear™ is personal to me. It’s been an outlet to pour my energy into something positive, something tangible, something I can actually share with other people instead of sharing a pint of ice cream with myself. I’m proud of how far it’s come.

Hope you all like it too.