We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Clifton Pickett Sr. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Clifton below.

Clifton, looking forward to hearing all of your stories 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.

The idea was created from a character that I drew some years back in my teens so I decided to take partial of the logo of the character that I drew and create a clothing brand. That way the clothing brand starts off with history of that I drew over 30 years ago and I changed the spelling of the word Swanky to Swanqee which means being positive discipline, and having fun to start my own clothing brand that represents positive fashion

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got into the fashion industry because I like to dress and I was always creative so I used my fashion sense in my creativity to form the clothing brand.. I wanted to have a clothing brand that represents something, especially when you wear the garment…. The goal is for all clients to feel good when they have on the Swanqee garments the goal is to introduce the world to being Swanqee. We want to bring positivity to fashion so when you wear a Swanqee garment, you feel positive discipline, and still have fun.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I decided to change careers when I start actually studying and believing and changing my mindset to be more positive which introduced me into wanting my own business, and not work for anyone else, I decided I need to start my own business and the best business that I believe I could achieve is something that I love to do, which is dress, so that’s why I started clothing brand…. And as the clothingbrand expands, I would love to venture out and create different types of clothing styles not just jogging suits, T-shirts hoodies, but actually dress clothes as well.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

So starting a clothingbrand I’ve decided to do a lot of pop-up events in my local areas…. until the one day I did a pop-up event at Navy Pier town Chicago. and I contact one of the managers there to see if I can open up my own space At Navy Pier and fortunately I did so the thing with the space at Navy. You have to be open seven days a week and do 9 to 10 hours every day and you’re not guaranteed pay or sales so I had to be resilient and buckle down and I just do what I had to do until my sales got better and I started to grow and learn the ins and outs of owning your own business, especially a brick and mortar establishment

Contact Info:

• Website: Swanqee.com
• Instagram: Swanqee
• Facebook: Swanqee
• Twitter: Swanqee
• Youtube: Swanqee
• Yelp: Swanqee

Image Credits
Some of the officially Swanqee people