We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Murphy Paschall. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Murphy below.
Murphy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
Growing up in Baltimore City Murphy saw his fair share of urban plight and how it effects the people that live in certain environments. With a burning desire to get involved in community activism he joined a group of high school friends to create a ‘rights of passage’ program to provide manhood training for African American males. My assignment within the organization was to research Black Economics. Black People spend over 1.2 trillion dollars in the United States economy annually. A race of people with this kind of spending power should not endure the impoverished conditions we withstand, the under educated reality we breathe nor should we suffer the overly incarcerated conditions we live under. My thought was to incorporate this message within clothing as a way to reach the community on a large scale. Allow our collective dollars to manifest OUR true destiny. How we spend OUR paper effects policy and wields power in our favor. When you wear Black Paper StreetWear you are telling the world that our lives matter and watch how our paper proves it.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Growing up in Baltimore City Murphy saw his fair share of urban plight and how it effects the people that live in certain environments. With a burning desire to get involved in community activism he joined a group of high school friends to create a ‘rights of passage’ program to provide manhood training for African American males. After having sons of his own he joined the Baltimore City Police Department as a way to provide for his family and serve as a role model for other young Black males. During this time he also became involved in youth sports coaching football and baseball teams. After an eight year stint on the police force Murphy decided to dive headfirst into his first passion which has always been business. Attempting to combine his love for business and his desire to uplift people in his community he created Black Paper StreetWear. BPSW is a clothing brand that sheds light on the collective spending power of Black people in this country. Initially, a lack of financial resources limited the development of the BPSW brand until Murphy discovered the “dropshipping method” of running a fashion business. Dropshipping allows garments to be produced with very low overhead and without having to warehouse said garments.
Currently, Murphy has a partnership with Shoe City stores in Baltimore where Black Paper StreetWear is carried in six locations. In his spare time he teaches young African American students how to create their own clothing business operated directly on their cell phones. His next venture is to formulate a structured program (T-Shirt University LLC) in an effort to teach future groups of students by partnering with Omar Muhammad (EDAC) of Morgan State University.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
As it comes to building an audience on social media the rule of thumb is to have a presence on several different platforms at once. Meaning, create social media business pages on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok and post at least three times a day. It is very important that your pages all look the same. Meaning, your color scheme, images and post need to be the same to help in “BRANDING” your business. Notice how McDonalds uses the same red, yellow and white colors every time you see one of their advertisements or commercials. You have to look at branding your business the same way. Instagram offers analytics that shows the best times to post on a given day. For example, your first post on a Monday might be 8am when people are usually gearing up to go to work but on a Tuesday it might be best to post at 9:30am. Play with the times to see what works best for you.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
One thing you have to unlearn is expecting your family and friends to immediately support or patronize your business. Since I create t-shirts my thought was my family wears t-shirts so I am sure they will wear mine. But the reality is, your family sees you as their relative only. Your best customers will be people that don’t know you.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://blackpaperstore.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackpaperstore/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blackpaperstreetwear
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/murphy-paschall-sr-b2772327/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/BLACKPAPERstore
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn56d73HfaJapUU7qrXwubg