Fresh From Dopeville
To Gain National Notice, District Clothing Designers Push the Envelope and Themselves

By Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 19, 2007

To establish their District-based T-shirt company in 2004, the young owners of Dopeville literally turned themselves into sweatshop workers.

In one tiny room of the LeDroit Park rowhouse Olmedo Nazati shared with three roommates, he and Dopeville co-owner Deinde Dawodu met after their day jobs to create 300 graphic tees a night. Their heat press worked like a huge waffle iron, and running it was a hot and heavy job. For two years, they built up their biceps along with the business.

"We were two green dudes," Dawodu recalled. "We didn't know anything."

Today, Dopeville T-shirts are manufactured in Montreal, represented by a sales force based in New York and sold nationwide through accounts with 83 retailers, including Up Against the Wall of the District, one of the nation's largest urban clothing chains. They are also sold online and in stores in South Korea, Japan and Puerto Rico. Last year, the partners said they sold about 50,000 tees in about 150 stores.

"We are building a lifestyle brand," Nazati said.

The District is full of aspiring clothing designers who sell T-shirts out of car trunks, but Dopeville is one of the few to gain national distribution and popularity beyond the Washington area. Hoping to take it further, Nazati and Dawodu are looking to urban models like Ecko, which started as a T-shirt company and now has more than a dozen clothing lines, or Fubu ("for us, by us"), which began as a line of homemade cloth hats and, at its peak, had annual revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars.

For now Dopeville is basically a line of T-shirts, sweatshirts and baseball caps. Its graphic designs feature a series of characters who evoke the early hip-hop scene of the 1980s, when Dawodu and Nazati were growing up in Montgomery County -- days when the music was less about the bling and more about the beat, and "dope" was slang for excellent.

Each character has a personality and a backstory: "We don't just slap images and artwork on T-shirts," Dawodu said. "It all has meaning." Among the cast are Xtra Fresh Freddy, a dapper bunny rabbit with stars in his eyes who Dawodu sees as representing vanity; the entrepreneurial Money Making Marvin, a big-headed teddy bear with dollar signs in his ears; and Lil' Champ, a boxy lion who is meant to signify courage.

Nazati, who moved to Maryland with his family from Cali, Colombia, at age 7, is now 30. Dawodu, who was born here to parents from Lagos, Nigeria, will only say that he is 30-something -- because he plans to be in the industry for a long time, he said, and arbiters of urban style have to project youthfulness.

He will say that he was in his late 20s when the idea that became Dopeville was born. Working as a bartender, Dawodu made his friends some shirts with hip-hop-inspired designs, like a Buddha wearing a Kangol cap with a few hip-hop verses written on his belly.

He called the label Grand Republic Garments. He also had ideas for Dopeville and a third label called Guerrilla Golf Wear. Prodded by his girlfriend, he went to Thailand in 2002 to find a manufacturer for his samples -- or, as he puts it, "I was in Southeast Asia trying to get it popping."

He returned to the District after a month with 20 Grand Republic Garment tees with stitching and unusual patterns but had no luck getting a distribution deal. So he took the samples to a local trunk show -- where he ran into Nazati, whose family had been friends with his family for years. Nazati was working in information systems at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and as a party promoter for a group called Moro. He persuaded Dawodu to let him invest in and help build the street-wear business.

Together, they created samples. When one buyer told the guys he liked the designs but thought they needed to improve the quality, they began studying the apparel industry. At Magic, a major trade show in Las Vegas, they found sources for well-made cotton T-shirts and learned new graphic techniques -- such as caviar beading, a tactile appliqué that refracts light. On eBay they bought a high-quality printer, sewing machine and that biceps-building heat press.

"We were the masters of making something look incredibly expensive," Dawodu said. When retailers said they liked Extra Fresh Freddy and his friends better than the other lines, they dropped Grand Republic Garments and Guerrilla Golf Wear to focus exclusively on Dopeville.

In 2004, they made their first sale to a major retailer -- Up Against the Wall, where a line of Dopeville baseball caps quickly sold out. They took their wares to a regional trade show in Philadelphia later that year. They sold 2,000 pieces and attracted the attention of some New York-based national sales representatives, who began selling their products on commission. Within a month, Dopeville's orders shot from a few hundred to several thousand.

At that point, the guys were still producing most of the designs by hand, after their day jobs. They couldn't keep up. Almost half the orders expired before they were produced.

"It was somewhat of a nightmare because we had to make that stuff," Nazati said. "We needed to figure out how to manufacture and distribute thousands of T-shirts."

Slowly, they began to make it work. Last year, they found a Canadian clothing manufacturer, which now does their sewing, printing and shipping. Their New York reps established a wholesale showroom for budding urban and street wear lines called the Museum Group, which exposed Dopeville to a broad range of buyers. "They are one of the brands we run across everyone when they come in," said Carrie Campbell, a Museum Group saleswoman, who said their "catchy graphics" appeal to many different customers.

So far they're putting all Dopeville profits back into the business. To make a living, Nazati works part-time for his brother, who rehabs homes, and Dawodu holds a full-time job as a waiter. But they both travel regularly to oversee Dopeville's manufacturing and sales.

This year, they plan to step up their marketing effort, which now consists of a MySpace page ( http://www.myspace.com/dopevilleUSA). Even without a major push, Nazati and Dawodu said they have spotted their shirts on rapper Rick Ross, Justin Timberlake's crew and the rap group Three 6 Mafia.

They are also learning accounting, looking for investors and trying to streamline manufacturing and shipping. They applied this month for a loan from the District's Latino Economic Development Corp. to purchase equipment to allow them to make tees that would be exclusive to select customers.

It's not going to be easy to take Dopeville to the next level, said Lucian James, founder of San Francisco brand consultancy Agenda Inc., which studies the relationship between music, fashion and marketing. "Hip-hop kind of reinvents itself every 18 months . . . [and] street fashion is particularly fast moving," James said. "You have to stay authentic. You have to constantly reinvent yourself and stay connected."

Stuart "Izzy" Ezrailson, an urban clothing veteran and owner of Up Against the Wall, said he was impressed by Dopeville and its owners.

"They are neat guys, and I think that they will learn to be good businessmen," he said. "They are in their formative years in this project. You have to make mistakes and move forward. That's what it takes."

We want to "keep making it fresh, making it hot," Dawodu said. "We're trying to push the envelope."

Recalling the early days of printing T-shirts by hand, Nazati said they are prepared to break a sweat again. "That was a tough part, but it just gets harder. Now, we have to keep this up."