In the mid-2000s, there was an immense streetwear boom percolating on the World Wide Web. With a few silkscreens, some Guildan tees, and a little bit of cool sprinkled in by being in a big city, or having photos of the just-about-to-pop rapper posing in them, people were making t-shirt brands out of their garages and selling out pop-up shops with limited release drops in a matter of weeks after inception. Streetwear was in a wild west phase at the time and there was gold in them, thar hills.
I was always into fashion for as long as I can remember. But being from Oklahoma City, I couldn't even fathom a starting point. I began my graphic design studies at SDSU in the spring of 2006, and in that very semester, I met a girl in a digital media class to learn the software required for all design majors. I told her how I loved fashion and she showed me the website of a friend she knew who was already doing what I envisioned. She introduced me to the sites that published all of the underground brands. She showed me what streetwear was.
Sleeping Giant was birthed shortly thereafter. The name came from a WWII documentary I saw that had a quote from a Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." Today, Streetwear and high fashion are synonymous, but at the time, street fashion did a lot of parodying of high fashion —particularly when it came to logos. I wanted to mimic the C's of Chanel to make the logomark one word. I always found myself drawn to brands that utilized animals, so I chose to harken back to my lineage roots by depicting a silhouette of an African bull elephant. One of the most feared and dangerous animals on the continent.
This idea came to me very early as a broke college student as I sat on it and refined it over and over as the seasons and the fashions changed. I created a visual blog via Tumblr that served as a brand mood board for five years and amassed over 5,000 followers (that eventually became shadow-banned to the public after the Yahoo! merger). After nine years of Sleeping Giant, my style and taste for graphic tees were changing. I finally had the money to finance the project, but one foot was already out of the door mentally.
Regardless of the fact, I released my first collection in the spring of 2015. I did it for the Ben who checked hypebeast.com and highsnobiety.com every day as part of his daily routine. The Ben who only wanted to have his own brand for years on end.
I think he would be proud of the way it turned out.