Hey folks, thanks for coming to read our most recent blog.Yes , this one here that you are reading right now as this sentence comes to an end. Lol

Ok , i’m serious now .So back in November actually, Eastern Market, the famous outdoor market in DC was accepting applications for certain kinds of businesses,  one of them happened to be vintage clothing. So we filled out the paperwork and did what we had to do. We followed up over and over and of course, no one ever got back to us in time. The process literally took two and a half months…..So today, we get a reply in the email , and you know guys, i keep it real , so when i started reading the generic rejection letter that we’ve all gotten before from jobs  with all the mumbo jumbo about “you don’t fit the guidelines in the application ” and what not, i was disheartened and pissed ! How can they say that ? It doesn’t get more vintage than this, there must be some kind of a mistake or i sent the application to the wrong department, maybe they were looking for people with hot dog stands or something. So i call the  DC Government to find out what the REAL reason is. Now what you hear next was ironically an insult and a compliment, which is why i didn’t know how to take it.

So the market manager speaks to me and what he tells me was surprising. He said that in his notes as to why they rejected us was because Top Rank, the concept , the clothing, the whole deal , was “Too good to be real” or “too good to be true” , meaning to him, how could we bring all our resources, source and find all this clothing in Europe and bring it all together to the doorstep of the fashionable washingtonian with the all the quality, style , value , history and low price ! it can’t be that easy in his mind ! Vintage is supposed to be in a thrift shop , just one piece of one thing , not an entire brand !

So on one hand i was proud that i impressed him so much that he wasn’t convinced this can be done with vintage clothing. At the same time, he was calling us liars !  God , the irony is amazing ! lol . So now i have to bring hard evidence to prove that we’re bringing vintage clothing for real. Now that i remember, Etsy.com, where we sold some of our clothing also interrogated us because we had a good quantity of the vintage clothing that they too became skeptical. Maybe the manager wanted some free gear that’s all ?  So to sum it up , it was reassuring in a way to know that what we have done so far is far fetched because it’s tough to bring it all together the way we have and how we have presented the Top Rank brand. Now we have to get to work and think like lawyers to get in Eastern Market, that’s the only thing that made the manager not accept us probably. There you go , a little truth to the Top Rank story,

Until next time , like i say, it’s “Another day , Another Collar”  

-M.A.N (Mohamed Abdulkareem Nu’man)