FAMU grads making waves in fashion world

Nestled in the heart of downtown Miami are the offices of the emerging designers behind Complex Apparel Ltd. Brand. The quaint design space is neatly stacked and organized to showcase the company’s three apparel labels that include Dungeon Forward, Two Hundred Forty Two and Delilah Johnson House of Fashion.

After giving an overview of the three lines, Complex Apparel’s chief executive officer, David Castro explains how the company began as a way for him and friend David Wallace, who is now the company’s chief operating officer, to look fashionable without breaking the bank.

“David and I were talking about how we wanted to look stylish and rock the latest gear,” says Castro. “But we were on a serious budget so we had to do it on a shoe-string. That’s when we got creative and began making custom T-shirts that we designed and hand-painted.”

The friends, who were both architectural design majors at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU), soon found that they were getting requests from others to create custom designs.

Just across campus, another FAMU student was also flexing her creative muscles.

A business administration major, Delilah Johnson was always sewing clothes for herself. After she and Castro ran into each other on campus one day and admired each others’ work, they formed a fast friendship and remained in contact as they finished up their degrees.

Following graduation, the two Davids received jobs at architectural firms in South Florida but couldn’t shake their desire to test the waters to determine if their T-shirt business could become a profitable venture.

Wallace convinced Castro that they should do a test run at Miami Carnival. So the two men purchased a booth, invested in T-shirts, and created each T-shirt as a custom, hand-painted piece.

After the investment in products, the cost of the booth space and the extremely labor- intensive process of hand-painting each tee, the project barely broke even and left the duo feeling pretty dejected. For several months, they decided to abandon the project until Wallace reached out to Castro and said, “We just can’t give up.”

Castro added, “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to move forward at first, but when we look back on that event now, we realize that that failure was really the best thing that could have ever happened to our business.”

With a renewed determination, Castro and Wallace went to work to fine-tune the business and get it back up and running in a more efficient way.

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