John knew it was time to capitalize on the growing buzz surrounding his brand, so in 1994 he and his partners took FUBU to an industry trade show in Las Vegas. The group was inundated with more than $300,000 in orders. But no one paid up front, and John’s group had no way of producing the clothes on such a mass scale. John went back to New York and mortgaged the house he and his mother owned. With that $100,000, John turned his home into a makeshift clothing factory. He could still only fill a third of his orders, so he went to banks in search of financing.

“I got turned down by about 27 banks, and I was turned down because I was poorly prepared,” John says. “I didn’t know what banks needed to see; I didn’t know how to write a business plan; I didn’t know about business forecasting; I didn’t know anything.”

Desperate, John took out an ad in The New York Times seeking investors. Out of the dozens of loan sharks and prank calls he received, only two or three real potential investors contacted him. One, the president of Samsung’s textile division, was especially promising. Samsung watched John and FUBU over the next several months. Within a year, he and the company had a distribution deal. Soon FUBU was in department stores and malls across America.

:lol: