We were lucky to catch up with Tramaine Kinard recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Tramaine thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

The brand name came from a slogan SomeWhereInTheSky that my cousin “Nycc3” would use as I referenced to being fly. One Day He approached me with an idea to start a clothing called “SomeWhereInTheSky Fly.” I told him “SomeWhereInTheSky Fly” was to cliche and we should drop the Fly and just use SomeWhereInTheSky. That we agreed on shortly after I went and got the first logo made and it was a badge with all the elements to the sky in it and under it read S.W.I.T.S with SomeWhereInTheSky in script under it. I told my cousin the people are going to recognize as SWITS, One because it’s catchy and it’s easier than saying SomeWhereInTheSky.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Growing up in Brooklyn, I was inspired by fashion and clothes everyday. From shopping at stores to seeing different people on the train, I always felt that style and clothing was a huge part of my life.

SWITS was founded in 2012. Growing up I’ve always had a passion for fashion and style. A lot of my inspiration for getting into my own brand, was me shopping at the Rugby Store in HS in Manhattan. That’s when I knew I wanted to start a brand of my own.

We have our own showroom for clothing that we often call The Skyroom with all of our exclusive pieces for people to see! What’s sets us apart is that our whole brand sticks to its core, which is NYC and our close supporters. We push our creativity from what we know and what we see around us and people really appreciate that, We are most proud of house much our brand has grown since the start and how far we’ve come as a business. We’ve expanded so much of our designs and our clothes and we plan to keep going.

We did fashion week LA in 2022 which was a moment we are super proud of! We had models of walking out with clouds on their heads and the feedback we got was amazing! It was out of the box and We can’t wait to do new things and show off our exclusive items in stock now

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

In 2009, I met Dustin Bratton through mutual friends. We always saw one another shopping, or somehow just in the same areas and knew we were both creatives and into fashion. In 2020 we decided to both rebrand ourselves and organically decided to work together on SWITS. We are more than just business partners, but we consider one another family and really strive for greatness as one.

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

On social media, we really grew our audience organically and recognized trends that our followers like. It didn’t matter where we were at or what we were doing, if we could we talked about our brand and asked people to follow the page. Now, we make sure we are consistently posting engaging content for our followers to share to their audience and continue building from there.

Contact Info:

• Website: SWITS.nyc
• Instagram: Swits.co
• Facebook: Swits.co

Image Credits
Elisa Merilan