Lanny Smith can’t believe how quickly Actively Black has grown either
TheGrio...
The founder of Actively Black sits down with theGrio and opens up about the brands booming success and how they pour into Black culture.
In September, when Ruby Bridges, famous for integrating New Orleans schools under federal marshal escort in 1960 stepped onto the runway during athlesiure brand Actively Black’s New York Fashion Week show—along with the daughters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, and none other than photographer Cecil Williams, who was famously photographed drinking from a “whites only” water fountain in 1956—attendees and folks tuning in online were moved to tears.
The public was so moved that it became one of the most talked-about moments of New York Fashion Week last year, not for the fashion but for how the brand was demonstrating all that Black culture had been through on such a global stage.
“We introduced multiple collections, but nobody has said anything about the clothes,” Actively Black founder, former NBA player Lanny Smith told theGrio over Zoom on Friday.
“To me, it’s like we accomplished what we set out to accomplish because people had an emotional reaction to the show that had nothing to do with the clothes,” he continued. “I wanted everybody who witnessed that to be able to feel something, especially in this moment where I think it’s important for us to speak truth to power. I think it’s important for us to show resistance in this moment in history.”
He added, “When you see Cecil Williams, who’s famous for taking that picture in front of the ‘Whites Only’ Water Fountain, walk the runway, when you see Ruby Bridges, who was six years old when she integrated schools and had to be escorted by federal marshals, walk the runway, it makes it real that man, that wasn’t that long ago.”
For Smith, the response has also meant the athlesiure brand has become something much bigger than fashion.
“Actively Black was really an idea that I put on the shelf for multiple years, wanting to build a brand that not only represented Black culture, but created Black ownership in a space that has lacked Black ownership,” he explained before he recalled growing up and playing in the NBA while wearing many different athletic wear brands many of which that have profited from Black culture, Black talent, and Black consumerism.
“I was like, ‘Why not build our own? Why not build something that is Black-owned that uplifts and reinvests back into the Black community?’” he said.
What started during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when a nationwide racial reckoning was also occurring after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops, was an idea to create a Black-owned athleisure company that reinvests into Black communities. It has, nearly six years later, evolved into a global cultural movement with collaborations honoring Black icons, Olympic partnerships, and a fiercely loyal community around it. While Smith says he has always dreamed big, even he admits the speed at which those dreams have materialized still surprises him.
In a conversation with theGrio, Smith opened up about building Actively Black, creating “a uniform for the movement,” and why he believes this moment in America is pushing more Black consumers to rally around brands built unapologetically for them.
The following Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.
theGrio: You launched Actively Black during a moment when a lot of companies were suddenly using the language of Black empowerment. What made you feel like Black communities needed a brand created by us, for us, in this deeper way?
Smith: I think we see now, four or five years later, that [the widespread activation around Black empowerment] was performative. I felt like it was performative in the moment as I watched these brands make their statements, post on social media, and pledge what they would invest in the Black community. It felt like it was just part of a marketing strategy because from my vantage point, and from the vantage point of a lot of Black people, the events of 2020 were not new.
These things have been happening for decades in America. So to me, I was like, why now all of a sudden are these brands deciding to say something when this has been happening for a long time and Black people have been screaming about it at the top of our lungs for a long time and it’s just been ignored?”
That mentality of ‘we can keep asking them to do the right thing, or we can just build our own thing’ — and then we don’t have to ask ourselves to do what’s right because that’s what this brand is built on, to reinvest and uplift the Black community. There was a void there that lacked authenticity, that lacked something real that was truly about us. It was beyond time for Actively Black to exist.
theGrio: Actively Black has grown from athletic wear into something that feels much more cultural and archival too — from the Cecil Williams capsule collaboration to the Michael Jackson drops to collections tied to Black history and legacy. How do you decide what stories are worth turning into fashion?
Smith: Before Actively Black launched, I had this list of figures in Black culture and Black history that I felt embodied what it means to be actively Black. I had Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, the Obamas — these different figures that I felt personified the brand.
I remember reading this story about Rosa Parks being threatened with eviction in the later years of her life, and that story gripped me because I’m like, ‘Man, this is an icon of the civil rights movement. How could she be in a position where nobody was taking care of her?’ So I started looking for living civil rights activists and legends who we could support now.
That’s how the John Carlos collaboration came about. The heart behind it was really like, we could create a collaboration and sell this product, which allows me to financially support John Carlos through the revenue that is generated. That’s kind of where it started, paying homage to the people who paved the way for us to even be able to be in a position where Actively Black can exist.
We’re not just an apparel brand. The clothes are just a uniform for the movement. We express who we are and what the movement is about through the clothes.
theGrio: From quarter zips dropping seemingly overnight to a “Love Black Women” collection arriving as renewed conversations about the well-being of Black women have been reignited (with proceeds benefitting UJIMA no less) to even a line of “Tenderism” grill aprons just in time for Father’s Day — one thing people really seem to respond to is how quickly the brand moves with the moment. How intentional is that responsiveness for you?
Smith: Part of it is that we are the culture. I think there are a lot of brands that try to capitalize off the culture, but they don’t ever have the culture in decision-making positions or ownership-level positions, so they’re always kind of behind because they’re trying to wait to see, ‘Okay, what’s happening in the streets? What is the culture like?’ and then figure out a way to capitalize on that.
Being part of the culture, I know what we’re talking about. I know the topics that are relevant to us, so it’s really just an expression of what the culture is already talking about or dealing with.”
With social media and us being a lean team, this startup that’s not this huge corporation where there’s a lot of red tape, we’re able to react in real time to what’s happening in society. Other companies have to figure out what’s going on in our communities and then create a campaign around it.
A lot of times, before things even become topics on social media, this is stuff we’ve already been discussing in our homes, at the cookouts. It doesn’t necessarily have to be planned. It’s just a natural reaction and expression of what we’re already feeling and thinking.
theGrio: Right now, a lot of Black Americans feel frustrated, exhausted, and powerless politically and socially, especially as protections around things like voting rights continue to be challenged. As someone whose entire brand is rooted in uplifting and investing back into Black communities, what do you think it means to stay “actively Black” in a moment like this?
Smith: I mean, it’s interesting because when I was first launching Actively Black, I got a lot of interesting pushback around calling it Actively Black.
Being pro-Black does not mean that we’re anti anybody else. It’s really just expressing the love that we have for our culture. I have customers that are white, Hispanic, Asian — customers of all different colors and nationalities.
What surprised me was a lot of the pushback I got from other Black people about us naming the brand Actively Black and being so bold about that. There were people who thought we were alienating a large amount of the audience and preventing ourselves from being successful by saying ‘Actively Black.’
But with this current administration and a lot of things that are happening where it’s clear that Black people are under attack in this country — over 300,000 Black women being forced out of the workforce, Black history being taken out of museums and libraries and books, the Voting Rights Act being gutted so many things with the Civil Rights Act that are being pushed back on — what’s actually happening is it’s drawing this line that you can’t ignore anymore.
And now that that line has been drawn, and now that it’s so obvious, where you gotta pick a side, I’m actually seeing it galvanized people around actively black more.
The same people who were like, ‘I like the brand, but I don’t want to wear something that says Actively Black,’ now they’re like, ‘You know what? We’re being attacked.’ It’s actually causing people to galvanize around it. So I kind of feel like we’re standing in a space in this time that’s actually perfect for our brand to exist.
Everything that we are either getting ready to experience now our people have experienced before, and have fought before, and have survived before. I think knowing that can help give us some sort of confidence that whatever frustration we feel, whatever anger, whatever, whatever we’re getting ready to face, our people have faced it before and faced worse, and we still survived.
It’s just our generation’s turn for that fight.
theGrio: When you look at where Actively Black is now — the growth, the collaborations, the community around it — what’s next for the brand, and what do you most want people to understand about what you’re building right now?
Smith: Everything that’s happened in the past five years has felt like a nonstop snowball. Sometimes it’s hard for me to step outside of it and look at it because I’m always in it, working on 10 to 12 projects at once.
We outfitted Team Nigeria in the Summer Olympics in Paris, and we never had a moment to actually sit down and grasp what that meant. It’s crazy for this little Black-owned brand that has less than five employees and was launched out of my apartment in Los Angeles to think that we were on that global stage.
We have plans to expand this onto the continent in Africa. This is a diaspora brand. It’s not just for Black America. I really want to build a global brand where, five years from now, people can look up and say, ‘Man, they really did it.’
I want to prove to ourselves that we can do it. Our culture creates so much relevancy and profit for so many of these multibillion-dollar brands, and everybody asks why we don’t have something of our own like that. I’m taking the stance of, let’s be the ones to do it.
I believe that we have to be active in our own liberation. Everything that we have to do on the social justice front, for equality, for all the things our people have been fighting for, that’s not passive. That’s something we have to actively be fighting for every day.
The tagline is, ‘There’s greatness in our DNA.’ There’s greatness that already lives inside of us. We just have to tap into that. Our story as a people does not begin with slavery. It doesn’t begin with oppression. We come from greatness.