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Hi, my name is Dameion Royes. I’m the president of Big-it-Up International. We’re a retail company in Toronto.
e manufacture hats and we also do some wholesaling across the country. We run two of our own retail establishments here in Toronto,
at the Toronto Eaton’s Centre and you’re at our main, flagship head office store on Spadina Avenue.
When we were kids, we used to buy sneakers and if they were plain, we’d take them to the shoemaker and get them dyed the colour we wanted.
Or we’d buy a coat from Bi-way and sew some leather on it and someone else would think, “Where’d you get that coat?�€?
When I was going to college, I was in a marketing class.
We developed products and we learned the four Ps of marketing—packaging, promotional… doing all the other details.
But then we put together a particular product, and we brought it to our marketing teacher and she loved it.
You have dreams you want to do different things, and you sort of want to be in control of your own destiny.
And we realized that we had to try something and a friend came to my aid, and we started a skin-care line together.
So Big-it-Up actually started with a lotion. That was our first product.
And we came across an old hat and it was this old hat that actually transformed this company into what you see now.
So we actually started out as some kids with an idea, and we just found ways of putting the ideas together.
There we are right there.
So here we are at Big-it-Up.
This is one of the first hats that made Big-it-Up really popular.
We call it the Gatsby style, but it’s what has been awesome for us and it continues to still work really well for us up to this day.
So, some things really do last. Something like this I say has legs. They continue to walk on their own.
It’s a full day when it gets over, I’m telling you, and they run into each other sometimes. It can consist of many things.
It depends on who I have to see or who wants to see me for whatever reason.
Sometimes I’ll be called to speak at a college or a university or to go to a community centre
to speak to young kids that people think that I can influence. I don’t know why they think that, but I guess…
What you see here is not just a company,
it’s also an inspiration to many young people. It’s an inspiration to a whole community and a whole city as well.
The company philosophy is … producing something of quality. We don’t want to produce anything that we wouldn’t like for ourselves.
And we have coined the term “It doesn’t matter if you come in with a plastic bag or a Prada bag.�€?
Everybody that comes to our place of business is a human being, first and foremost.
The most popular style in leather right now that we’ve been creating is the puffy style.
So from this, we’ll have to cut them into different sheets, different sections, and different panels and sew them all together.
Put a lining on the inside, a sweatband, a plastic peak then we begin labelling the hat and putting some character into it.
And it’ll eventually turn out to be like this. What you see here. Ready for the shelf.
What I really love, from the design aspect, is when we create a style and it runs out.
Now, we have the ability to start afresh, start new and create a new style.
So, for me there is always something new happening, and it is sort of like this whole metamorphosis.
And it continues to grow and blossom in ways that we’ve never dreamed of. So, that’s the fun thing about it.