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Next week, I'm attending Agenda Show in Las Vegas as a non-exhibitor. It's one of the world's leading streetwear fashion / lifestyle brand trade shows, and attendance is by invite only. I wasn't originally invited to come. I asked them if I could come. To be completely honest, I had no idea what Agenda Show was until about a month ago. But once I found out what it was (thanks, Doug!), I knew that attending it someday could be a monumental step towards achieving my goals. I stumbled upon an online application to attend this year as a non-exhibitor, and it was a no-brainer...

If you know even a little bit about me, you probably know that I’m a sneakerhead. I’ve been infatuated with sneakers since I was in middle school, where I simultaneously fell in love with basketball. I was around 13 years old then. By the time I started my business in 2015 just after my 35th birthday, I had amassed around 400 pairs of shoes. A Little More Backstory On the school bus ride home, I would hope that the mail delivery that day contained something I got excited about every month. A certain publication that contained so many of my...

It's crazy for me to realize that I launched the Tinlun online store a full year ago. January 2016 was nerve-racking as I flipped the switch from "getting ready" to "open for business," and with the arrival of 2017, I can honestly say that Year One flew by in a blink. A lot happened in 2016 and I learned a ton about running a business, being a dad and husband, and being a human. The following is an informal brain dump of every lesson I learned in 2016. Stop waiting. Come up with a rough plan with quick, attainable checkpoints that lead to...

If you follow me on Snapchat or subscribe to my vlog, you may have noticed that I haven’t shown my face in quite some time. I want to explain why I’ve gone completely silent. I have massive respect for people like Casey Neistat, Charli Prangley (@charlimarietv), and Cory Miller (@corydhmiller) who can consistently put out awesome vlog content and still live their lives, but I found that vlogging changed my life too much in a way that I didn’t want. At first, it was challenging. When I first started vlogging, I had a few goals in mind. 1) Improve speaking...

I've learned a lot about lettering since I created my official logo a year ago. The more I looked at my logo, the more I saw opportunities for refinement. So I went into Illustrator and got busy. Here's a look at the evolution of the logo since the unofficial days of 2014 when Tinlun Studio was just a newfound obsession.   Since I wasn't designing a whole new logo but rather just tightening up the existing one, the iteration process was happening on a very zoomed-in level. At a glance, all of the logos below pretty much look the same, save for a...