So you wanna be a Baller?
Recently, rumors began floating around that the lifestyle fashion brand “Big Baller Brand was liquidating product. Initially I was hesitant to believe it. This is a label that is financed by an NBA player and his fairly affluent family. However, it was all but confirmed when the below image greeted me as I visited the Big Baller website:
It takes a certain type of business to liquidate their assets at a local volleyball tournament, rather than online. This meant that shirts they probably could have sold for $10-$20 they sold for $5.
But let’s be clear, Big Baller Brand was never an actual clothing line. Clothing lines do not slap their logos on blank Gilden t-shirts and change out the label. A real clothing line is a company like Erased.
Founded by Youtube skateboarder and personality, Luis Mora, Erased’s t-shirts, for instance, are designed in-house. the necks are smaller than your standard t-shirt. The sleeves are slightly longer. Everything they sell is designed in-house and then made custom for their brand. Everything is manufactured on a limited run. That means the clothes are a bit pricey, but few would complain if they charged more.
In a very short time, Luis and his friends have built a brand with a look and reputation that has led to multiple collaboration projects; primarily with Japanese fashion and lifestyle companies. That’s what real lifestyle clothing lines do. If the Ball family properly leveraged their celebrity to build a brand, that’s what they should have done.
To be fair, Supreme’s first shirts were similar. However, Supreme started out as a skate shop promoting skateboard culture. Their shirts were merch promoting their brick and mortar shop. The popularity of the shirts, meant to promote the store, led to collaborations with fashion brands, which eventually led to Supreme becoming a fashion brand. Their early runs of shirts were similar, but they were never meant to be fashion. They became fashionable organically. Also, Supreme never had a failing grade from the Better Business Bureau. That said, what can aspiring businesses learn from the Ball family’s business?
The public’s knowledge of Big Baller Brand started when three of the Ball family’s sons were offered NCAA Division I scholarships at UCLA to play basketball. Two of the three were expected to get drafted to the NBA. With that in mind, the Big Baller Brand lifestyle should have been about hard work and excellence. However, the father and spokesperson for the family decided that the lifestyle he wanted the company to promote was opulence and wasteful behavior. That allowed them to charge $50 for $5 shirts. And if their merch was too pricey, “You’re not a Big Baller.”
Initially, I liked the story of the Ball family. I wanted to support a black family fighting against the NCAA. I strongly believe that NCAA athletes should get paid. But when I heard rumors that their shirts were simply Gildan t-shirts and their logo screen printed on, I refused to buy their shirts. Not at that price. Those logos are horrendous. Recognizing that, I quickly understood that if the NBA lost interest in the family, wearing the shirt would quickly become a novelty. If expecting a higher quality product for my money isn’t “Big Baller,” then I’d have to live with that.
Speaking of the logo, You would think that a brand promoting spending large sums of money would, you know, have a logo that represented that. To put it kindly, the Big Baller Brand logo is bad. It looks cheap. Likely because it is. No professionals were hired; no consultants, no graphic designers. If I took $1000 and went onto Fiverr hiring multiple graphic designers, charging between $20-$200 every logo would be better than the original Big Baller Brand logo. Big Baller was supposed to be a high-end lifestyle brand. A high-end lifestyle brand can’t cut corners on something as basic as their logo.
When the first of the three sons was drafted by the LA Lakers, Big Baller Brand announced that they would be releasing their own basketball shoe. Finally, a product I could get behind. You can’t just silk screen your bad logo onto a shoe. I estimated that the shoes would cost between $200-$300. It would be twice the price of most Nike’s but it would be a chance to support a black family fighting the system…
$400+? For shoes that looked like knock off Kobe’s? No thanks. With that, I was done cheering for the Ball family. It all just felt like watching an inevitable car crash. Unfortunately, I was right.
First, the least talented of the three brothers was caught up in a shoplifting incident in China. He has significant flaws in his game. At 6'5" you can’t play power forward and expect to get drafted by an NBA team. He could have taken his punishment as an opportunity to red-shirt a year and transition into playing a guard role. Instead, he dropped out of UCLA in a move that appeared to be encouraged by his father.
The youngest son dropped out of high school to be home schooled. Not a big deal, he already had a commitment with UCLA, but then he pulled his commitment. Again, the move appeared to be orchestrated by his father.
The family moved from this home:
To this monstrosity:
At the same time that the company was struggling to deliver orders in a timely manner. The new home was purchased by Big Baller Brand, but I suspected that it was actually purchased by the eldest of the three sons playing basketball. It cost him more than half a season of pay. His personal condo cost him an additional $1 million+. He only makes $7 million a year, and with his broken jump shot it’s not guaranteed he will have a long career. But the wasteful spending didn’t end there.
The two school dropouts were recruited to play professionally in Lithuania. The youngest lacked the polish to play regularly, and the team regularly lost games. To showcase his sons, Big Baller Brand sponsored exhibition games that featured teams they could easily defeat. The teams were such a light-touch that their father often coached the Lithuanian side against their competition.
Most professional scouts do not seriously follow players who play meaningless games against light competition. Neither son improved their games. The eldest of the two dropouts never bothered to transition to playing a perimeter role. Despite every scout, coach, and TV pundit with sense suggesting otherwise he entered his name into the NBA draft, was offered very few pre-draft workouts, kept his name in the process and failed to get selected.
That should have shook the family at it’s core. But it didn’t, instead Big Baller Brand started their own semi-professional basketball league. Well, less a league and more a platform to promote the two Ball family members with NBA dreams. Every quality player in the league eventually found their way onto the two boys’ team.
As for the business, BBB had finally started to work with a design team that helped them create original looking shoes, but delivery time for orders was still a problem. The number of people complaining online that they never got what they ordered continued to grow. No one was being held accountable for the constant failure.
After the two dropouts toured Europe playing non-consequential games with a team of BBB’s basketball league’s best players, reality set in. The youngest of the three had fallen off most publicly accessible basketball scout ranking services. Once considered the player with the highest potential of the three, scouts no longer took him seriously. Curious of how his money was being used, the eldest of the three had a forensic audit done of BBB and discovered that his father’s business partner had been stealing from him. Which brings up an important point. This is when it became clear that Big Baller Brand was fully financed through Lonzo Ball’s NBA contract and endorsements. It’s easy to build a brand on wasting money when the money isn’t yours. But eventually, even your son will expect some sort of return on investment.
The youngest, LaMello, found a high school that would allow him to play enough to grab the attention of scouts again. A big deal, since many schools considered him ineligible. His play at SPIRE led to him being recruited to play professionally in Australia.
It appears that Liangelo’s career is ruined. He was rumored to have been offered a chance to play in the NBA’s G-League, but those were just rumors. Maybe he can catch on with a lower level team in Europe, but European coaches will likely want little to do with his father. Hopefully he can eek out a career, but it’s unlikely.
Lonzo was recently traded to the New Orleans Pelicans. He has a very young family of his own and with a limited career length, he’ll have to plan for his daughter’s future knowing that millions of his dollars were wasted on his father’s passion project gone awry.
As far as the father, Lavar was finally banned from ESPN after sexist comments.
Big Baller Brand wasn’t a complete failure. The company definitely inspired basketball players with better business acumen to create their own brands. The NBA champion Toronto Raptors have multiple players with their own gear. However, the most successful player building a brand is Spencer Dinwiddie.
His K8IROS basketball shoes are a collaboration between himself and an organization called Project Dream. They’re beautiful, unique shoes. He sells game worn, and limited edition pairs for as high as $600. But the shoe retails for $110 US. His brands motto, “Your perception is not my reality.” Is a call to those who support the brand to prove anyone who doubts them that they are wrong with hard work.
Maybe with Big Baller Brand’s failure one of these new emerging independent brands will take the mantle as the rebel brand battling against the system. But this time, they’ll be competently run and succeed.
