Dwight Entrepreneur Makes The Hustle Work

Thanks to a combination of foot traffic and web traffic along with deep neighborhood roots, the newest entrepreneur on lower Edgewood Avenue is about to hit his 1,000th customer and has a new six-month lease in hand.

That entrepreneur, Rashaan Boyd, breathed new life into a vacant storefront at Day and Edgewood with his A Hustler’s Vibe clothing outlet and is going strong.

He is among the merchants the Independent is interviewing who are figuring out how to make small business work along largely residential stretches of Edgewood Avenue.

The single large room at A Hustler’s Vibe is immaculate, spacious, and sun-lit. The floor is black, with grey undertones, and shiny, the walls all white except for green eruptions of carefully curated graffiti. The never-crowded racks of high quality clothing are easy to browse, and, in a way, an after-thought.

It’s as if you’ve stepped not just into a luxury streetwear and accessory store — which you have — but also into a space oscillating between high fashion boutique and art gallery.

That’s the ambitious store he opened in the spring at 162 Edgewood Ave. and Day Street, in the Dwight neighborhood where the 28-year-old grew up.

In many ways Boyd’s business story is both old and entirely new.

After graduating from Hillhouse High School followed by a decade hustling the luxury hoodies, shirts, and other clothing from his peripatetic Jeep Cherokee at markets and pop up fairs all over the northeast, (the store’s motto is ​“All hustle, no luck”), he invested last May in renting a brick and mortar store.

That’s a fine story, as old as the hunched-over, dogged peddler with a sack on his back who ends up owning Macy’s, or the fast-talking boy band and anvil-pitching salesmen in The Music Man, who then move on to establish, well, that’s the movies.

What’s new is that throughout his travels Boyd has developed a devoted clientele on his super-active social media presence, his website, his postings on Instagram and Facebook, and a successful spot high on the the all-important Google search engine.

“Now people who see it [his site, his new offerings, his changing designs] now can come in here. They’ve been looking for me so long, now [here I am!]”

So he can be both doing business half way around the world and on the corner where he used to hang out as a kid, all at the same time.

And there is a surprising amount of foot traffic too, on Edgewood near Day, Boyd reports.

In the not quite half year he’s been open Boyd says his point-of-sale data tells him ​“there have been just about 900 sales [in the store itself]. And new customers are coming in on a daily basis.”

And that’s only a fifth of his business, as 80 percent originates online. 

In the six months he’s been open Boyd reported that he’s gone from one online sale per month to about ten a week. Those include buyers from nearly every state in the union, and with a lot of business originating from Los Angeles and Atlanta, among other cities.

One recent sale he was particularly proud of combined the finding of the business online and then walking into the store on the same day.

It was a Yale couple, Boyd said — that is, parents from Italy who had just dropped their kid off at the college. They were looking for a clothing store in the environs of Yale and A Hustler’s Vibe popped up for them, near the top of the list that the search engine generated.

That was no accident as Boyd works his workspace on Google vigorously posting pictures of new items and new info, and this couple had discovered A Hustler’s Vibe that way and became intrigued and made their way over to 162 Edgewood.

“Italy is a place that knows quality, and they knew quality,” he said. They checked out Boyd’s racks that include hoodies and shirts made not of regular cotton but the thicker, softer, more absorbent French terrycloth. The lettering, ubiquitous on his items, is also not only screen-printed, but many are puff-screen printed, so the letters are rounded to the touch and pop out at you. 

If that’s the look you want, Boyd’s got it, and the luxury version. The couple, he reported, bought a lot of clothing.

Although they are hardly the only Yale-connected people coming into the store — there are lots of students and others, he said — Boyd was particularly proud of that sale, he reported. ​“They know quality. I gave myself a pat on the back for that one.”

As Boyd spoke to this reporter, he also was interacting with the many friends of his who he grew up with, who were hanging about in the front of the store, with his blessing. And that is also very much part of Boyd’s story. Staying in touch with those he grew up with, and even honoring them.

“It’s unusual around here for someone like me to open a store,” he said, ​“but that’s what I do. I connect the dots.”

That’s another feature of the peddler-to-store template that Boyd is innovating. 

When the classic itinerant, American 19^th and 20^th century salesmen (at least in the success stories) finally open their establishments, it’s rarely right where they grew up. In fact, it was often far away, maybe thousands of miles, and even countries away from the birthplace. 

Not so with Boyd, not so and not even necessary, it seems, in the era of the internet.

And the spirit of the neighborhood where he grew up continues to run deep with this young entrepreneur.

Boyd’s closest childhood friend, Sean Reeves Jr., was killed in 2011 by a stray bullet at age sixteen, and Reeves’ spirit is still very much with him. ​“He would have been an ideal partner,” Boyd said, and you could tell emotion still ran high a decade later after the loss to gun violence.

That in part is why Reeves’ image, along with the logo, are part of an elaborate mural that Boyd engaged a Bridgeport artist to paint on the eastern side of the store exterior. 

It seems, at least to this reporter, as if Reeves is indeed a kind of partner, with Boyd, in A Hustler’s Vibe. ​“I want to keep his name alive, and there’s also a lesson,” he said, that he’s trying to exemplify: ​“Pain [of loss] is always there, but it can be turned into something positive, it can lead you.”

Another life-long friend, well, they met at age thirteen, is Markese Clark, who Boyd was happy to let sell his own developing line of clothing from a table in front of the store. Boyd is a mentor to Clark who is working on establishing his own site to sell clothing and, in effect, to follow in Boyd’s footsteps.

“I’ve never known anyone to work so hard,” Clark said. ​“It was only a matter of time before this [the store] happened.”

What does the future hold for A Hustler’s Vibe?

Boyd said he has just signed a five-year-lease for 162 Edgewood. While there is a large inventory space in the basement, Boyd says he is on the look-out for a warehouse where he can begin actually to produce, with machine and seamstresses’ hands (he employs several) right here in town.

“Since I’ve been here, I’ve quadrupled the number of items I’ve ordered,” he said. While originally he had those produced by fabricators in the U.S., now, for cost reasons he has been sending out for production to China, the Philippines, and Vietnam. But the warehouse plans are a step in trying to bring that too back home, back into the old/new neighborhood.

Describing himself as completely self-taught in business, as someone who hung around older guys, especially small business guys, like barbershop owners, he asked them questions. But not only questions, follow-up questions if he didn’t understand how you do this or that in business. That’s the way he learned. After Hillhouse, he worked only a few months at a salaried job in retail to gain some capital, and then Boyd hit the road.

And did so with a lot of motivation from childhood and growing up with a single parent. As the son of a single mom, he said he deeply remembers how his mother had to purchase school clothing for him on the lay-away plan, funds were that tight. That memory too runs deep. He always wanted to do something to help. 

But to go into business for himself? 

“I saw my mom, a single parent, after ten years [on a job] just get laid off, she was expendable. It’s much better off,” he thought, ​“working for myself.”

In that, Boyd also said, he’s not unusual. These days, 70 percent, he’s read, of young people want to work for themselves.

“I’m always working on something, I plan ahead, I know what I’m going to do in every quarter, I’m already in 2028, I never get comfortable, never content.”

Near-future plans include a trunk-or-treat event for neighborhood kids this Halloween, and Boyd is also planning on providing turkey and Thanksgiving provisions for single-parent families in the neighborhood. Oh, and last month, he gave away backpacks and, of course, some very fashionable back-to-school clothing.

And that, in part, is how in the internet age a business on a street in New Haven, removed from the usual commercial corridors, appears to be doing very well. You have to call it home.

See below for other recent articles about small businesses on Edgewood Avenue:

• Possible Futures Looking Bright On Edgewood
• The Corner Store Re-Imagined, On Edgewood
• Black Corner Students Study For Financial Freedom
• ​“A Hustler’s Vibe” Comes To Dwight
• BLOOM Blossoms In Buy-Local Holiday Spotlight