*From the archives* Written April 2022

What started as a saying between two long-time friends has evolved into a brand of its own. A vision housed in the minds of young creatives came to fruition while the world was at a standstill. 9inedouble0we’s co-owner Wisdom talks about his journey through the world of fashion before dedicating his time to growing his own company.

How are you? What have you been up to lately?

“Just been working on the brand, past couple weeks we’ve done bare stuff. I’m probably gonna show people this week but I’ve just been running around making new stuff and shooting new stuff. It’s been a good two weeks, I can’t wait to show everyone what we’ve been doing”

I think we need a little background, rewind before 9D0 was even a thought, where were you? What were you doing in life?

“Before 9D0 I was just modelling, I’d taken a gap year off Uni living in New York. I think maybe because I was young I thought ‘Yeah I’m gonna be in the next top 50 or top 10 models’ I just wanted to be in that space and then Covid happened so I came back. It was the first time I’d done nothing for months and I realised how fickle modelling is, like shit if this stops today what do I have? Modelling isn’t a [transferrable] skill so when I thought about it, I realised I had to do something. So before it was a thought, it was just months and days of doing nothing before I decided I needed to switch something up, I need to get back on something, I don’t know what. 

Before the brand, I learned how to freely edit just out of boredom. I spent days and nights just freely editing, just making random stuff. That’s where I was before, right before the brand was an idea.”

What were you doing at uni before your gap year?

“So I went from sixth form to a gap year, so I started uni after the brand but I’m studying Law”

Are you still interested in it?

shakes head “I’m about to finish but I want to just try something creative first because I don’t see myself working in an office. Not necessarily an office but I feel like if I did, I’d know it’s not where I’m supposed to be. I’d rather put my focus on something else, if it works out, it works out but at least I tried”

So you had this interest in fashion long before the brand, where did this come from?

“I think my mum because back in the day my mum used to have clothes everywhere, wardrobes filled. She even has a wardrobe in my room, the same size as my one. Also, my two sisters, there’s quite a big gap, 9 years and 11 years above me. They also used to get clothes and I’d be like “Hmm what’s that”. I had an interest but my swag was dead for a long time. I don’t think up until I met my friends like Remz when I was 13 I started to pick it up. I think when I started skating, I really picked up the style. Skating was a big part of picking up clothes and looking at how they fit. 

How did 9D0 come about, where were you when it really started to materialise?

“There are two sides to the story, there’s Remz’s side and mine. I think this was after 4 months of no sleep, I don’t know whose interview I watched, was it, Blondey McCoy? Anyway, I had a habit of watching people’s interviews on how they started their brands, I remember it was 5 am, I called Remz, and I said “Bro it’s time” He was like “ok cool” literally That’s all I said. Then the next day we Facetimed, we tried to make it mad corporate, and we made a PowerPoint with a collage of ideas and notes. Remz wanted to start a brand but I just wasn’t ready yet, my mind wasn’t there.

So how it materialised was just me making a bunch of ideas, we didn’t know how to make graphics so we just sat on Photoshop for hours, days, months and then I remember just making graphics and sending them to him, then he would make some and send them to me. Then the first few we dropped, I’d made at 3 am by accident. It was just a quick idea. We were originally going to make this other tracksuit but when we went to make the sample, it was too expensive to make so I sent him this other hoodie, the same colour and graphic and we ran with that. The samples took a while but when they finally came, it was crazy. It was crazy to have your idea in a physical copy. We were gassed! 

Without cutting out anything important, that was a 6-7 month process from ‘ok let’s start it’ to learning how to make graphics and looking at colours and fonts.

Family seems to be at the centre of the brand, it makes it feel like a really exclusive club, you’ve got the password drop and everything why did you go down that route?

“I guess for me and Remz, that was all we knew. Our friendship and our circle of friends is quite a small group of people. We talk to the same guys. On top of that, we don’t market clothes for everyone, if you like it you like it, if you don’t that’s fine but we’re not supposed to make it accessible for everyone because it’s not for everyone. It kind of just happened like that because you don’t have control over how people move. For the password-only stuff, I guess we saw how our friends were running their sites and again we’re not selling for everyone so if you’re really tapped in and if it’s an item you really want, you’ll be there when it drops. People now move like that, lots of brands can tell people ‘Run up the comments, do this and do that’ but there are very few brands that have people there at 7 on the dot when it drops. I’m thankful that it materialised like that because we’re still a small brand. On the actual page, there’s no bio, there’s no name. I feel like when people look at it they can see how it’s run, how it’s close-knit.

When you say you’re not selling to everyone, who do your core audience as?

“The core audience, it’s hard because there are yutes that are like 15/16 from London, then there’s grown men from South Africa and Dubai. The core audience I’d say are the people that are slightly younger because I guess in a lot of respects, those are the people that decide what’s hot and that’s the bulk of a lot of people’s customers. If someone does a pop-up, it’s normally the youngers that make sure they’re there, it’s the youngers that are gonna comment 5 times to make sure they have the chance to get a hoodie or whatever. So I’d say primarily younger but it’s anyone who tapped in because if you’re tapped in you know how it works”

Did either you or Remz know about how to run a brand, and the logistics behind it or were you learning it on the job?

“Everything was learnt on the spot but at the same time, my friends run brands like Syd (@yearsoftears), Bami (@Angeleslovesyou), Marino (@Cetravisions), Emay (@Jehucal), Charlie (@Dramacall), Junior Clint (@clintsinc) We knew a lot of people with brands so it wasn’t necessarily starting from scratch although we had to learn a lot ourselves, I was fortunate enough that when I got stuck I could be like ‘Yo how do you do this?’

Most things we had to learn ourselves, one of the most difficult things was setting up the delivery, it sounds dumb but the way we struggled with that. With the units for the website, the first hoodie was on pre-order and there was a limit but I didn’t know how to translate that on the site so I just put random numbers for each size, so when I had to ship everything it was mad.”

Was it not scary thinking ‘I don’t actually know what im doing, im just throwing myself into it’ or was it like ‘I’ll figure it out anyway so it’s fine’?

“It was more exciting, I think the scariest thing was dropping the first item. You never really know how it’s going to do. Social media doesn’t always relate to sales, let’s say you get a bunch of likes and comments, but it doesn’t mean you’ll sell out or even sell units. So it was scary 100%. On top of that, you have to make sure you’re registered on all the right websites, registered for tax, and all this stuff that if you don’t sort out you’re pissed. It was scary but it was more exciting and I was like ‘All my friends are doing this, they figured it out’ You have to just figure it out at some point”

What has been your favourite drop or moment so far since starting?

“My favourite moment hasn’t happened yet, well it’s happened but no one knows yet. It’s in the works. Maybe my favourite moment so far was getting the billboards and shooting an advert because it was the first time we outsourced someone to do something for us, up to that point it was just me and Remz doing everything. Shooting the advert, directing people and then having the billboards of the brand was one of the best feelings so far. We have one in Brixton and a massive one in Manchester right next to Old Trafford. Seeing those was like knowing we have something crazy here, let’s just keep it going”

What was the transition like from modelling for all these other brands to being the face of your own brand? 

“It felt kind of different because a lot of the time when a model does something else, especially on their own Instagram people think ‘Oh he’s trying to do this when he’s not qualified’ It happens a lot of the time when models who only post themselves modelling try to do something else, they’re not taken seriously at that time. So when I started the brand I didn’t post anything on my page, even now I don’t post any shoots because I wanted people to take it seriously. It wasn’t bad because when I posted the 9D0 stuff people did take it seriously because we had the screen prints, the embroidery, we had the hats and rugs. It was kind of weird because I had to explain to some people that I couldn’t be in front of their cameras because I have a brand now. I still shoot for all my friends because I know how it goes but my digital footprint had to be cleaned up because I have a brand and the brand is its own entity but people will still attach it to me.”

Where did the name come from/ what does it mean? 

“You know what’s crazy? Remz and I had been saying 900 since we were 15. It was one of those things where we just said it, we had it in our bios. 

In a quick summary, it means family, and staying close to your people. So when we started the brand it was always gonna be nine double 0 or 900”

Do you have someone you look to for inspiration or mentorship?

“I don’t look to anyone for design inspiration because I think everyone doing their thing now is hard but if I look to someone for design it’ll have some influence in what I make. But for mentorship, all my friends because they’re just sick and im very blessed my friends are who they are because they all make stuff. When I went to Manchester, I went to see Charlie from Dramacall and I went to his warehouse and thought ‘This is sick!’. We watched it from the beginning to now so I look at all of them, Syd and Bami, I’m with them every other day. Everyone that I know that creative I look up to, and they subconsciously make sure I stay on that level. My Mum and Dad too because they’re from Nigeria, I think a lot of kids whose parents aren’t from here, they’ve figured out that their parents moved here with nothing and just toughed it out. To me, that’s just crazy so I’ll always look up to my parents as well”

The last time I spoke to you, you were losing interest in modelling, you wanted to travel, and see the world, are you still on that?

“I’m not on modelling Nah, I still do it here and there but it’s not a dying urgency because I have things that I need to figure out. Travelling, Yes and no because what happens is, when someone tells me they want to travel I’m mad hesitant because I have to sort this or I’ll have to do a drop while I’m not here but when I’m actually travelling I enjoy it. It’s a balance because I can’t stay anywhere for too long. Last year, I went back to New York for the first time in a while, I was supposed to be there for 3 months but after a month and a half I decided I had to go home, I had to sort out business. I’ll still encourage everyone to travel, but it’s a little bit more technical now with the brand because it’s still quite small, it has to be hands-on for the moment. But modelling, I’m over it”

What’s next for 9D0? Do you see a collaboration in the future or anything like that?

“What’s next for the brand is to keep growing, there’s a lot of stuff I want to do outside of clothes. I want to do some charity drops in the summer. If everything goes right, I want to do a fund for small businesses or a fundraiser for anything creative so they can buy what they need to buy. Collabs are technical because Remz and I feel the brand isn’t as… When I do a collab I want it to be equally beneficial, they gain something and we gain something. We’ve been offered collabs but I don’t wanna ride someone else’s wave and I don’t wanna do it too early. When we do a collab I want 9D0 to be more established. So for collaborations in the near future? Probably not. You might see some crossovers but they probably won’t come out. 

I also want to venture away from clothes, I want to make furniture and a bunch of other random stuff. And just give back to the people who support the brand and the community, I wanna do a lot of charity work.”