We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Remington McFadden. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Remington below.
Hi Remington, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Urban Gorillas also known in short as UG, started back in 2010 when I was in college at East Carolina University. My friend, Clayton, actually came up with the name. We would always play the hit game Call of Duty and run it as a team. One day we were killin’ it and he just blurted out “We’re running this like a bunch of Urban Gorillas!” I was in the School of Business at ECU and I’ve always been a bit of an entrepreneur since I was little with my owning my own mowing and car wash business. But when I heard “Urban Gorillas” I knew immediately that it should be the name of a brand! So I started researching for a graphic designer that specialized in brand logos. I knew the first major thing a brand needs is a recognizable logo. So we paid a designer out of California $100 to do the logo; he said it would take five days but he sent it back in about 4 hours with a note about how much he loved the idea and vision we had for the brand. Urban Gorillas, the vision, is to spread love and peace. And the unique way we do this is by bringing together creative freelancers from all around the world and building a community of reliable trustworthy supporters. Urban Gorillas foundation is built on the principles you would likely see in a loving family. In fact, all of our creatives and anyone within our network should know by now that we call our community the “UG Family.”
After we got the logo drawn up, we went to a local print shop and had about 40 shirts printed up. In order to get the name out around town and the college scene we started to throw “UG Parties” where we would wear and sell the UG Shirts. I do want to note that a lot of our come-up days were also before the days of Instagram. However, we did join twitter in 2011. UG originally started out with five founders – Clayton, AJ, Edwin, Sean, and Myself. Collectively between us we knew a good number of friends and connections throughout ECU so we were able to bring together a decent number of people every time. We also aligned and networked with local musicians both in the area and back in my hometown of Fayetteville, NC. Over the years, we partnered with a local club/venue called Still Life that was more of an urban style club that fit our image as well. We would help market and promote pool parties or tailgate games around Greenville, NC at local apartment complexes. As IG came around we began to showcase the things we would do around the local community – whether it was just going out as a team, taking pictures, making music videos, or going out to support other creatives and networking events; we would always roll with a camera or cameraman so we could showcase our content and our family bond across social media.
Remington, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
We (Urban Gorillas) are a unique digital marketing and entertainment company focused on entrepreneurs and freelance creatives. You can think of us as a “springboard” for underground creatives. Over the past 10 years we have cultivated a loyal and supportive community of professional entrepreneurs, models, photographers, musicians, and artist of various talents! We provide you with a quality digital marketing experience and immediate exposure to a global community and network. Our team helps to connect and find you real business opportunities that will propel your growth in the industry. We market you via our social media platforms, website, and alongside our business partners Bovtiqve Fashion Week and Pretty Fly Society. Via our website you will receive your own “Digital Marketing Card” that acts as today’s traditional business card. This allows for not only our community, but for anyone, to inquire about your goods/services offered.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
It has definitely not been a smooth road…by far. But that’s expected when we’re doing something different and new. When you’re paving a new lane, it’s to be expected that you’re going to hit some rough patches along the way. Right from the beginning, our first big obstacle was learning how to print t-shirts ourselves. We ran into the issue of the ink not staying on or peeling off after a couple of washes. I believe we printed our own shirts for maybe about two years before outsourcing our entire shop to spreadshirt.com. This allowed us to cut down on the shirt cost and also have the ability to have shirts purchased whenever and shipped wherever in the world! And since we were wanting to have “shirts on backs” in various cities and markets, this became the solution for our current infrastructure. Keep in mind throughout most of the time of the building of UG, my business partner Sean and I both work full-time jobs as well. So every day is a long day haha.
Some of the more recent obstacles we’ve had to overcome and work through would be IG algorithms and maintaining a social media presence in the “Freelance/Photography” online communities. A lot of the creative communities and outlets online have a far bigger fan base and reach than we do…but the wildest thing and most humbling is that when you look through the “tags” of who these freelance creators are tagging…we make the cut. There’s only a handful on collective online communities that we see tagged on a repeated basis, and to be among the top elite and respected online communities, is just an indescribable feeling. Truly blessed and thankful for all our creatives and supports for making that happen! I believe the obstacle we face now is establishing a presence in Atlanta.
How did you build your audience on social media?
You can call it perfect timing, but we were able to build our social media audience during the early days of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But the “Photography Boom” of everyone looking for outlets and places to showcase their work drove a lot of online traffic our way. With this also came the boom of the use of hashtags. One of the other remarkable and unbelievable things to me is the fact that we have not one but two trending hashtags, #urbangorillas and #wearegorillas, that thousands of creatives and supporters are using to highlight their work and be included in our online community of threads. It’s wild to see an idea transcribe through social media. But as we’ve grown we’ve been able to land a couple of amazing opportunities; like this past year working with J.Cole’s Dreamvillefest and being a Dreamvillefest Ambassador is an indescribable feeling when you’re getting to work with and promote for not only one of the biggest Artist in the game but also someone I’ve looked up to over the years, especially since we’re from the same hometown of Fayetteville, NC.
Contact Info:
- Website: WeAreGorillas.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urbangorillas/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/urbangorillas
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@UrbanGorillas