We recently connected with Jordan Poirier Whelan and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jordan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

Over the years I have had my eyes open to the industry and the ways it works. In the fashion industry, we see fast fashion at a rise, where extremely cheap, toxic and harmful chemically filled products are put on the market, and advertised for 8x the value, made illegally in sweat shops around the globe, doing nothing but furthering global pollution at a scale faster than anything we have ever seen. In our fashion division HONESTGANG, we strive to always offer the highest quality of products, hand chosen and tested by myself before release, with an over 80% organic eco-friendly catalog, all at a competitive price in comparison to the major brands and designers.

At HNSTmagazine, our fashion magazine, after years of being a published model myself, I noticed that most of the modelling industry is hidden behind tactics and paywalls that seem to scam desperate models, only leaving room for companies or managers to control 90% of sales and direction of the industry. Due to the economy and currency exchange, slots in magazines range from 100-500$ and sometimes even higher, leaving many countries and its citizens unable to compete with the western world, we foudn this to be extremely unfair.

As such, we aim to offer opportunity to artist and entertainers from around the world, offering paid slots to managers and corporations, and free opportunities to international artists that I personally enjoy, watch or have come across and decided to promote, making our publication a unique experience where you are always guaranteed to find atleast one creator to add to you weekly watch routine.

Jordan, 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?

I started my career as a recording artist, as most do, a young teen in my mothers basement before leaving at the age of 15 years old due to extremely unhealthy circumstances at home with my mother being very ill in bed at the time. I took my desire to become an artist full time to college in Montreal in 2016 where I studied Engineering, Music Theory & Production, and really fell in love with the industry as a whole.

At 18 years old I discovered I would become a father, this made me take music much more seriously as I didnt find myself having any better options at the time. This ended up working out in my favor as Radio play, shows and spending every single day online on Instagram was able to amass me my first million streams on my music. This pushed me into new eyes around the world, with magazines and articles that started to be posted online, years later, this would become my full time career, currently at 5 million streams.

I took all the knowledge and connections I had built over that time to launch my fashion brand & published magazine HONESTGANG & HNSTmagazine respectively. HONESTGANG at the time was a record label in which I managed a total of 12 artists, which reached hundreds of thousands of streams respectively. Everything I did in those years bounced off eachother, fueling a growth that most had not seen from an artist from my city.

As a disabled father of 3, the world usually looks down on me, even now, but music and fashion were something I always had a passion for, my safe space, I think its important for everyone to have one of those in life.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

At 15, after years of abuse, I left my family home, having to learn the realities of life very quickly at a young age, rent, heat, hydro, cellphone bills and internet were normal to me. Going thru high school homeless outside on the streets downtown, or couch surfing at a different friends house every 2 weeks…. built me into a machine. Not many things can take me down, as things seem very insignificant to me in comparison. I will always appreciate going thru this as it taught me extremely valuable lessons along the way, lessons I could not have learnt otherwise.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The Covid-19 pandemic put extreme strains on every aspect of business in my life. Prices in shipping and distributors skyrocketed causing my fashion division @HONESTGANG to make major changes, as well as a break of over 1 year in 2022. HNSTmagazine had to take a pause in 2023 due to the writer strike and we are resuming production as of February 2024.

Most businesses were impacted during the pandemic, some may never recover, we can only thank everyone that placed orders and help spread our name during this time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://hoo.be/iamjayhonest
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/iamjayhonest
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jordanjasonpoirierwhelan/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamjayhonest/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK4grsY6FOiIqmyYOCfzzwg
• Other: https://honestgang.us (Website is down between season releases) LIMITED QUANTITY SUPPLY

Image Credits
Images provided by HNSTmagazine in partnership with HONESTGANG. Owned & Operated by Jay Honest/Jordan Poirier Whelan.