We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kelonn Henderson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kelonn, thanks for joining us today. Growth is exciting, but from what we’ve seen across thousands of conversations with entrepreneurs it’s also dangerous if costs aren’t watched closely – sometimes costs can grow out of control outpacing revenue growth and putting the viability of the entire business at risk. How have you managed to keep costs under control?

This is a very great question, as many of us face these obstacles in the business lane. In my personal experience I use flash sales as a big time marketing strategy to balance out the pure cost of investing on a new product or a simple restock vs struggling to make sure each product sales out in a reasonable amount of time!

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

To start I’m a Dallas,Tx Native. I Graduated from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, and as I went through my years of college I begin to make connections with people around my age from several different states. I started to network as time went and thought to myself if I’m so aquatinted with people out in Arkansas and naturally close to tons of people in Dallas I should start up some type of business! I didn’t know what I wanted to start up at the moment but knew it had to be something people would need/want so I begin to start brainstorming in 2019.

One random morning in College, I remember having a dream about my clothing line and I woke up and remembered every detail about it unlike other dreams, from that point I begin telling my parents about the dream and also my family. They knew it was something about the way I described everything that this wasn’t just any ordinary coincidence.

Once I went on spring break my mother told me she spoke to one of her patients about a few vendors. We started playing around creating ideas, and I started setting prices for different items! When I returned back to Campus after spring break it started taking off with the support of my family and peers from the College I attended which was the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff!! I did a giveaway contest that my Aunt Josclyn helped me with and it turned out excellent!!

I took a risk promoting my brand buying 6-8 T shirts with a basic logo/image and passed them out to a few of my friends on the campus to start creating brand awareness! Sure enough it worked exactly how I thought it would, and didn’t take long for people to start asking me about it personally!

I provide a variety of urban style clothing for example:

Hoodies,Joggers,Beanies,T-shirts, Biker shorts for Women and Socks! I honestly plan to release even more products like Slides, Shades,Wallets,Belts and other popular products that are now floating around in 2024!

I would say the main thing that sets me apart from other brands is the fact that I’m not afraid to interact personally with my supporters whether that’s meeting to deliver an order or just showing genuine appreciation by shouting each client out with personal post on the official Ig story & page!

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Being honest it wasn’t easy to built up my audience/followers on social media for my clothing brand the first 2 years. As the years flowed I started to learn different brand marketing strategies that would naturally attract more people to my page and even possibly gain followers by watching different videos that were all over YouTube. I find the promotional ads Instagram and Facebook offers to businesses now to create a “boost” in the interactions you receive on certain post very useful! I had doubt in it at first but back in 2019 I would actually invest $30-$60 per post and this was before I even had true products ..I was more so investing in the idea of the brand getting it to spread across social media so once I started building inventory the products would naturally have a big audience.Most people would’ve thought it was some far fetched method to it but it was actually simple and I’m still focusing on growing my following worldwide.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

I do a mixture of both being honest. At the beginning back in 2019 I started out with a “Print to demand of order” type website that was free to the public just to try things out. Somewhere along the year of 2020 going into 2021 I started to get messages from random vendors that were all over seas and mainly located in Pakistan. I honestly couldn’t decipher what vendor was legit vs the vendors that were frauds trying to scam people. Sure enough I talked to one vendor long enough and got comfortable to the point of taking the risk to send funds over seas in hopes that my products would return and also be high quality . I think that was the hardest thing to get past before I could start to reach new heights in the clothing business and truly let my creativity show! The free websites only had so many templates so once I started to go fully custom it was no looking back! The lessons that came with trying new vendors were endless though. The main issues I kept running into was the fact that most vendors were over seas so they naturally went by a totally different size chart. To explain more in depth, all US clothes fit looser than most other countries clothing because we are “bigger”. I went through this with an order of shorts maybe 2 times and one order of joggers but after those mess ups the vendors fixed the size measurements and I’ve been having smooth business since.

In 2023 I got a Heat Transfer printer as a gift from my Aunt Josclyn and My Maw Maw , and I started to practice printing on different fabrics around the house. Since I’ve had the heat transfer printer I’ve started to add things to the products I get custom made by vendors.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.TycoonKelo.com
• Instagram: TycoonKelo
• Facebook: TycoonKelo
• Other: TikTok : TycoonKelo Personal Instagram @Kelo_Gotti Music Producer Instagram @TycoonKeloBeats Dog Breeding instagram @ConcreteBodyBullys

Image Credits
Kelonn Henderson