The Story

Every designer they hired heard "Slowbucks" and drew exactly what it sounds like. A clock, a dollar sign, turning it into more of a pun. The brand they were actually building had personality, cultural fluency, and a specific Queens identity that no execution had captured yet.

I sat down with him and listened first. Asked where the brand came from, where it was going, and who it was for. The audience part was easy. I grew up in hip-hop culture, no research required.

"Slowbucks" isn't a description. It's a character. The mark had to have its own personality…something that could live on a shirt, a fitted, a chain, and be recognized across all of them without spelling the name out.

What Happened

Slowbucks exploded. Snoop Dogg wore it, Rick Ross wore it, Chris Brown wore it. The brand signed a distribution deal with Marc Ecko in 2014. Getty Images has over 180 photos of the brand and its founders. The logo showed up on stages, in music videos, across hip-hop media.

I wasn't just the designer, I was in the trenches early on doing hand-to-hand sales, moving product, building the brand from the street level. In 2012, I met the second partner at a print shop, which led to a phone conversation with Nipsey Hussle. That one project had opened doors I didn't know existed.

The brand went through its own chapter after that but the logo never lost its footing. It's still recognized, referenced, searched for. One logo, designed in 2009, generated a distribution deal, 180+ Getty images, coverage across 9 major publications, and is still driving inbound client work 15 years later.

Design Decisions

The first decision was how literal to go. I decided early that the mark had to be a symbol, something that would occupy space on a shirt, read from a distance, and hold up across colorways. In 2009 streetwear was running a lot of color variants based on upcoming sneaker releases, and I knew a brand with real legs had to move with that, to fit into what different people wanted to build around it.

Three animals came through before the snail landed. A piggy bank, a turtle, then the snail. I wanted the letters to live inside the animal itself, to have the name embedded in the figure. The snail shell gave me the geometry for that. The shell became a dollar sign. The snail covered "slow." The dollars trailing behind it covered "bucks."

Those dollars are lifted directly from a 7-Eleven visit. I went in during a break between design sessions and got stuck behind someone running lotto at the counter. I kept staring at the scratch-off display behind the register to pass the time. The arrangement of the bills on that sign stayed with me. When I needed a solution for what was floating behind the snail, that image came back.

A design student looking at this in 2026 might question it — the bezier curves are from where I was technically in 2009. But the reason it worked then and still gets referenced now is that it didn't follow the pattern. In 2009 most brands put words on a shirt and called it a logo. Slowbucks had a character with built-in personality that the wearer could make their own. It was recognizable, it scaled, and it spoke to the brand name without spelling the story out. That's what a logo is supposed to do.

The Lesson

Every designer they talked to before me went literal. One conversation changed the direction. I asked the right questions, paid attention to who they actually were, and built something from observation. That's the RFL method years before I had a name for it. Listen first, design second.

Impact

• Worn by Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Chris Brown, Nipsey Hussle, The Weeknd

• Covered by 9 major publications including Complex, Vibe, The Source, HipHopDX, Rap Radar, and AllHipHop — with 18+ individual articles across the 2013–2014 cultural moment.

• Founders featured on The Breakfast Club (Power 105.1)

• Distribution deal with Marc Ecko (2014)

• 180+ licensed images in the Getty Images archive — the same index used by editorial teams at the New York Times, ESPN, and Rolling Stone.

• Organic comment engagement in 2026 from Jim Jones, Young Thug, Fabolous, Quavo, Meek Mill, Rich The Kid, Juelz Santana, Playboi Carti, Eliantte, Nav, and the brand's original founders — 15 years after the logo was designed.

• Eliantte — jeweler to Drake, Cardi B, Travis Scott, and nearly every major artist of the last decade — is both a client and an organic commenter on the brand's 2026 resurgence.

Press