The aspiring entrepreneur waited in anxious silence in the lobby of a New York City high-rise.
It was mid-June. In less than five minutes, the founders of a fledgling small business would stand before the executives of a $31 billion global franchise and deliver a crucial product pitch. Jordy Santos had been reluctant to accept his lead role in the team’s presentation because speaking to live audiences left him agitated.
It was understandable: He was only 17 years old. All of his partners were teenagers, too. And this was the make-or-break moment of their effort to devise, design and develop a streetwear fashion brand from scratch — all before they had even graduated from high school.
Jordy knew he couldn’t afford to botch his lines. So, he sat down alone on a cushioned bench, slipped in white earbuds and laced his fingers between his knees, his concentration unbroken.
The 11 business partners had arrived at the office tower on a muggy morning after hourlong subway commutes from working- and middle-class neighborhoods in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. It is where most of them grew up, and where they all attend the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School.
The public charter school had become the headquarters of their operation.
Lined with posters highlighting tips on grammar and essay structure, classrooms served as war rooms to brainstorm social media and sales strategies. A crammed closet in the school gymnasium was transformed into a makeshift storeroom for inventory shipments. And the teenagers began to introduce one another as more than classmates.
They called themselves chief executive officer, lead designer and treasurer. Jordy is the company’s vice president.
As their long-awaited launch date neared, they landed a golden opportunity: the chance to win prime placement in the official N.B.A. Store on Fifth Avenue, the world-famous shopping strip in Midtown Manhattan.
Now it was showtime. The executives sent notice that they were ready to meet the young businessmen. The team proceeded to a 14th-floor boardroom in Hudson Square to meet the top brass at Fanatics, the dominant force in sports merchandising.
“You ready?” one of the teens asked upon boarding an elevator. A successful pitch could mean the beginning of a better life for all of them.
“Absolutely,” Jordy replied.
Big dreams
The U.S. education system has wrestled for decades with an endemic problem: Boredom is pervasive in high school. A disengaged teenager is a teenager in danger of dropping out.
Dan Klores, the gray-bearded, Brooklyn-raised founder of the Earl Monroe School, wanted to chart a new course.
He launched the school four years ago as a way to turn one of the most popular youth sports into an inspiration for students. Rather than on-court stardom, a curriculum designed around basketball and career paths related to the game was the focus, from marketing and sports journalism to nutrition and analytics.
Early on, Mr. Klores conducted a survey of the 110 students in the inaugural ninth-grade class, posing a simple question: “What more do I want out of school?”
He pored through the responses. An unexpected answer repeatedly emerged.
“To learn how to make money.”
So Mr. Klores created a program to teach exactly that. There would be no grades, pop quizzes or even textbooks. And he quickly had a revelation. “We should just have them start a real business,” he told a teacher.
After the regular school day ended on Wednesdays, three school staff members — volunteers themselves — defined profit and loss statements, and reminded the class to introduce themselves with a firm handshake. A white-collar lawyer gave a lesson on trademarking and limited liability companies. The class walked three blocks to a TD Bank branch to open savings accounts with $25 initial deposits.
But on corporate matters, the students took the reins.
Khary Williams, then a reserved 14-year-old freshman, was thrilled to learn more than algebra and American history. His seventh- and eighth-grade years were marred by pandemic-era remote learning. He felt lost and checked out of school.
Yet when the class was asked for start-up ideas, Khary stayed up late into the night studying “Shark Tank” reruns, inspired by entrepreneurs on the hit ABC show who, like him, were Black.
He scrolled through an online thesaurus and jotted down potential company names. With a mentor’s assistance, he drew up a streetwear line of T-shirts and hoodies with vivid designs that would appeal to young buyers.
It was an instant hit with classmates.
“People aren’t usually invested in kids’ ideas,” said Khary, who is now 17 and was appointed the team’s chief executive. “But I was dreaming big.”
Yet it seemed a long shot that the aspirations could materialize. The program launched with 15 or so students from separate social circles and most neither knew — nor particularly liked — one another. One overconfident member was suspended from the class for six weeks.
Even most of the students were skeptical their efforts would amount to much. Some missed deadlines and forgot Zoom meetings. Mr. Klores once told several teenagers that if they could not meet expectations, they would be fired.
“Are you going to go into a business meeting and sit there with your phone on?” Mr. Klores asked a room of inattentive students during another class. “Yes or no?”
In brainstorming sessions, the group drew upon their childhoods in the Bronx, where the toll of gun violence is greater than in any other borough.
Keyahn Schand Jr., a writer for the school newspaper and aspiring sports broadcaster, often recalled playing with his uncle on the porch. One day, his uncle left to go to the store and was fatally shot in the street. Keyahn was with him when he died.
He was 3.
He described the freedom from exposure to gun violence as a privilege. “Because for most of us inner-city kids, that’s not really the reality,” Keyahn, 18, said in one meeting with a clothing manufacturer.
The team made orange, a symbol for gun violence awareness, the signature of their enterprise. They perfected their logo and clothing designs on lively FaceTime calls, extended text message chains and late night Discord chats during the next year.
And the class quickly settled on a name for its brand: EVNTLLY.
It was a catchword that Khary created to reflect their upbringings. We all start from somewhere. Eventually, we can make it.
Little confidence
On a Wednesday afternoon in April, three of the young businessmen waited for their cue in front of a classroom whiteboard. They would need to persuade retailers to stock racks with their apparel. They had spent months crafting a formal business pitch — and were eager to show Mr. Klores their work.
It did not go smoothly.
Jordy tripped over his words while sharing the brand’s slogan. Keyahn missed a cue to begin speaking.
A third, typically exuberant student, Xavier Melendez, 17, mumbled as he described playing video games one summer night when he heard three loud shots and saw a young neighbor had been struck by gunfire near his apartment building.
Their classmates were candid: They had rushed and failed to command the room.
“You have to find it within yourselves to bring out more confidence,” Khary said.
“You guys all have the potential,” a classmate chimed in.
The presenters nodded, but looked dejected. Mr. Klores told them to leave the classroom for three minutes and try again. He turned to their teammates. “Take notes on this and fix it yourselves,” he said, before acknowledging in a gentle tone, “I think they’re nervous.”
He was right.
It was especially daunting for Jordy, who paused to take a large sip of water before leaving with his peers. He had transferred to Earl Monroe in his sophomore year from another Bronx charter school.
“They didn’t teach me about life,” he said. “It was totally boring.”
He joined the business program a little later. Yet he was not passionate about entrepreneurship at the time; he could barely tell the difference between a debit card and a credit card.
He showed up for the free pizza.
He was raised without a father figure, so the class felt like an opportunity to learn more than corporate lingo — it could help him grow into a leader and a man. By 12th grade, Jordy, who like Keyahn had lost an uncle to a shooting, had become a conflict manager, note-taker and shot-caller.
The one task Jordy was keen to avoid was speechmaking. His classmates were convinced that he could lead the team’s product pitch, telling him he was a natural showman.
He wasn’t so sure. The tense lead-up to presentations was paralyzing, and his delivery could be derailed when he misremembered a single line. Long evenings spent rehearsing were doing little to ease his nerves.
“I dread it,” Jordy told Keyahn at one point. “I do it. But I dread it.”
The team’s troubles were not confined to nerves. On one Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Klores reminded the students to stay abreast of local and national news, warning: “We’ve got an issue. You know what’s going on in the world?”
“Tariffs,” several students shouted.
They had arranged for their merchandise to be made in China. But the federal government’s steep tariff rate on imported goods could raise the cost of producing their earliest shipments of clothes from $2,200 to more than $4,700.
The class collectively gasped.
“Oh, my God,” Xavier said. “We’re going to be in debt forever!”
An unexpected lifesaver
It was one thing to create designs for a theoretical brand. It was another to produce and sell clothing.
The students needed help.
Mr. Klores leaned on the lengthy Rolodex he had built through a successful filmmaking career and eight-year journey to open the school. Early on, he took the students to gather with the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, and the league’s creative and marketing leaders to talk about branding and design concepts.
To mark the occasion, Mr. Klores brought the class to the Redeye Grill, an upscale seafood spot across from Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. One of the boys pulled him aside.
“That was the first time in my life I’ve ever had a waiter take my order in a restaurant,” he said.
Toward the end of 2023, Mr. Klores invited another acquaintance to the class, the chief executive at Centric Brands, a multibillion dollar firm that manufactures and sells attire worldwide and whose portfolio includes the apparel brand of the soccer superstar Lionel Messi.
The teenagers handed him their business cards and shook his hand after peppering him with questions about his career path.
The executive, Jason Rabin, was so impressed that he invited the students to his company’s offices in the Empire State Building for a peek into the operations of a major business.
Several months later, the group arrived in brand-new suits and ties from Men’s Wearhouse. They even presented their pitch to his team. There were still rough patches.
But Mr. Klores shed a few tears.
And to the Centric leaders, it was evidence of real promise. “I’ve been doing this now over 30 years,” Mr. Rabin later remarked. “I’ve never seen something like this.”
It was the first moment that many of the teenagers believed in their work. The team spoke regularly over the next year with Centric staffers who agreed to help them produce their apparel, and guided them in managing a corporate Instagram page and researching the price tags of similar brands.
Jordy grew emotional during one meeting as he realized he had made progress.
At another point, he sought advice from one Centric associate, who encouraged him to stop relying on a memorized monologue and to speak from his heart.
“Make the room yours,” she told him.
Back at school, fresh shipments of orange and black T-shirts and hoodies arrived in May.
Khary and Xavier rushed to pry open the boxes.
‘I have what it takes’
As the team congregated in the Hudson Square high-rise before their crucial pitch, Khary cracked jokes with the group’s lead designer. Xavier watched a video on his phone. Jordy was blocking it all out with his earbuds.
The students had been carefree earlier in the morning when they toured the Fifth Avenue retailer that could showcase their apparel.
They were awed by the store’s district manager, who escorted them through a restricted area filled with endless shelves of shiny jerseys. He was raised in the Sotomayor Houses, a Bronx public housing complex three miles from their school, but — eventually — landed a trainee role and forged a fruitful career.
Now, though, the young entrepreneurs took on an industrious disposition as they walked out of an elevator and filed into the Fanatics office.
Keyahn spoke first. He shared that launching a business had broadened his horizons beyond his gun-troubled neighborhood.
“It helps us to see a future bigger than the problems we face,” he said.
“That,” Jordy added, without missing a beat, “is why this business was founded.”
Jordy performed his lines while marching around the room like it was his stage. He banged his hands on the rectangular boardroom table for emphasis as he arrived at the finale of the team’s 10-minute address.
“That was awesome,” one of the potential buyers said.
A Centric leader who accompanied the group addressed the elephant in the room: Was this simply the labor of the established professionals who consulted with the teens? “That is not how this project worked,” she said. “They guided and directed. Made every decision and rose to every challenge.”
Bill Coffey, a high-level retail leader at Fanatics, offered feedback: It was great that the team could rattle off details about the cotton quality and weight of their garments. Next time, though, bring some samples for prospective retailers to feel themselves.
“We actually do have some!” Keyahn said, prompting Xavier to help another student hand out T-shirts.
The meeting culminated in the biggest triumph of many of the teenagers’ high school careers: Their brand landed a coveted spot in a section of the N.B.A. Store for emerging designers.
Before the team left the boardroom, Jordy took a moment to say his piece to the executives. He admitted that he used to be uncomfortable with public speaking, but his time in high school had given him a newfound confidence.
“You were very, very shy,” Keyahn chimed in.
“But you found your voice,” Xavier interjected.
“It feels different now,” Jordy added later. “I know I can do it. Like, I really learned that I have what it takes.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
Troy Closson is a Times education reporter focusing on K-12 schools.
The post They Created a Streetwear Line From Scratch. In High School. appeared first on New York Times.
