SuppliedWhen Norman Danjuma Mba and Zack Cooper-Black finished school last May, starting a clothing label was the last thing on their minds.
Leaving classes behind, Black, Mba, and several of their friends launched Proper Clothing and Apparel, a streetwear brand based out of St. Albert. When it comes to the genesis of the company, Mba said it came out of a simple idea.
“We had been talking about starting a business for a long time, and we were looking to create some positive change with the ideas that we had.”
For the team behind Proper, creating positive change meant establishing a scholarship fund, which will donate five per cent of the company’s profits to Albertan students. Mba, in his final year of Business Administration at Grand Canyon University in Arizona, and Cooper-Black, a third-year engineer at the University of Alberta, both expressed an interest in giving back to fellow students.
“The idea was that we wanted to help entrepreneurs, creators and dreamers,” Mba said. “Nowadays, there’s not a lot of funding for that kind of stuff. We want to give them the hope and kick to pursue their dreams rather than holding back.”
The company — which borrows from the name of the business partners’ Facebook group chat — originally considered designing skateboards before starting a clothing company, Cooper-Black said. With the original members of the “Proper Lads” each designing one of the first runs of stickers and t-shirts, Mba said it didn’t take long for the company to materialize.
A further catalyst for the brand’s launch was the availability of a physical storefront. Proper Lads occupies a portion of The Collective, a city-subsidized space that functions as a storefront during the day and a youth centre in the evenings. Cooper-Black said they jumped at the opportunity to have a brick-and-mortar location.
“The store allowed us to sell our stuff before the website went up,” Cooper-Black said. “We can see what people like and it allows us to gauge interest really easily.”
Mba added that experience in a retail space makes their brand more attractive to other retailers. Though St. Albert isn’t generally though of as a hotbed for the latest streetwear trends, Cooper-Black said their current location has been a good jumping-off point for the company.
“No one really shops in St. Albert, that’s a disadvantage,” Cooper-Black said. “But we’re all from here, people who know someone and have heard about us come in and see the store.”
Proper Lads plans to push into Edmonton this year, as well as look to high schools and universities to advertise their scholarship opportunities. Applications will open for their scholarship this year, and Cooper-Black said they want to give away as many of them as possible. At this point it’s still uncertain how much each scholarship will be worth.
When it comes to the future of their brand, Proper has high hopes and at the end of the day, they just want to see their brand grow.
“We want to be nationwide, maybe international,” Mba said. “Sometimes what you’re into isn’t perceived as a place to invest money. Our proceeds will go to any dream capable of changing the world.”
