The Creative They Called At-Risk
Before anyone ever called me an athlete, a coach, or a founder, I was a creative. I've been drawing since I was eight years old. Ninja Turtles. Bart Simpson. Lowrider cars. Whatever I could get on paper. Creating was the way I made sense of a world that didn't always make sense to me. The classroom never had a place for that. The system looked at me and saw a problem. They labeled me at-risk, and eventually I walked away from high school altogether. On paper, I was a dropout, and that's where most people expected my story to end.
But the creative in me never stopped looking for a way out, and for a long time it found that way on the football field. Football was how I expressed myself back then. Every snap, every read, every interception was me saying something I didn't yet know how to say anywhere else. And I said it loud. All-State in high school. All-American in community college. All-American again at the collegiate level, and a contract with the Canadian Football League.
Built in the Fire
Then football ended, and the one place I had poured all of myself into was gone. I was lost. Not for a day or a season, but in the kind of way where you don't recognize your own reflection. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I picked up the pieces, slowly, one at a time. I went back to the paintbrush, back to the love I had before the cheering ever started. And as I created, something began to happen. Creating started rebuilding me.
And the work kept growing. The kid drawing cartoons and lowriders moved to portraits, and over the years my skill sharpened into something people were willing to invest in. For more than fifteen years, I've been commissioned as a professional artist, creating original work for clients who wanted something no one else could make.
Fifteen years. Portrait by portrait.
Drawings, paintings, murals, custom shoes, and wearable pieces, created for the people who trusted me with their story.
Tap any piece to see it up close.
Commissioned work, delivered to the people who trusted me with their story.
I owned a brand, and like everybody else, I outsourced the printing. Then I realized I was handing someone else control of my own product. So I took it back, one step at a time.
It started in the living room. I bought individual screens and pressed shirts by hand, with my mom right there beside me helping pull every print. Then I graduated to a Yudu machine. Then an entry-level press, where I learned the basics the hard way, one mistake at a time. Every step taught me something the last one couldn't. Once the skill was there, I invested in a professional-grade, six-color, four-station press. Now I own the complete process, from the screen to the shirt.
Then I bought the building.
3,000 square feet. Ours.
Today, every one of my creative abilities lives under one roof: the Conquer House, our 3,000-square-foot headquarters. C2C apparel and custom orders come off the press, and it's where I draw, paint, customize shoes, and repair custom signs. I never stopped at one form of creative expression. I expanded every one of them.
That rebuild didn't stop at the studio either. The same high school dropout the system had written off went back to school and, years later, earned a master's degree.
Somewhere in that rebuilding, I finally saw what had been missing all along. It was never talent. It was Leadership, Identity, Ownership, Navigation, and Structure. Every project I took on demanded that I lead it. Every day I showed up and created, I learned more of who I was. I had to own my actions, my consistency, and my approach, with nobody to blame and nobody to carry it for me. Every roadblock a project threw at me taught me to navigate instead of quit. And to finish anything worth finishing, I had to build structure: sequences, systems, protocols. Creative expression gave me all five.
LIONS wasn't drawn up in a boardroom. It was built in the fire that tried to consume me.
