i had a sunglasses brand with real demand at 23 and turned it into free merch back when i was deep in tour life, i wore colored shades 24/7. airports, green rooms, hotel lobbies, 4am after the show. they never came off i got them at a flea market in LA that i hit every sunday. nothing fancy. but everywhere we went, people kept asking where they were from one day post looked at me and said "you could make a brand out of these" so i did. and so strasvision was born i was 23 with basically no business sense. no plan, no team, no idea what i was doing. i just knew people wanted them i ended up producing 500 pairs and started selling them then reality hit. you can't run a brand from a tour bus. inventory, shipping, customer emails, all while living out of a suitcase in a different city every night so the business slowly turned into something else. i started handing them out. friends, crew, fans, whoever asked you'd almost never see me on the road without a pair on my face. and that was the whole thing: the marketing was already done. i was the billboard, and people were asking before i ever tried to sell them anything that kind of demand is the hardest thing to create, and i had it for free i just didn't look up long enough to see it. i was so caught up in the life i was living that i never used that vision to look 10 years ahead if people keep asking where you got it, pay attention. that's the business