Brandon O’Connell lived under a bridge, and hadn’t showered in six months.
For the last seven years of his life from the time he was 17 years old, not a day had passed when he wasn't heavily sedated by narcotics. Every day, drugs acted as an escape from his reality, until one day he woke up and thought about what his life had become.
“At a certain point I just remember the drugs just no longer worked.”
— Brandon O’Connell
“At a certain point I just remember the drugs just no longer worked,” O’Connell said. “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I never could imagine my life to be as big and beautiful as it is now. I remember thinking if I could just have my own room with my own bed and sleep there in the same place every night, that’d be amazing.”
O’Connell has an affinity for clothes dating back to his teenage years. For years he learned about the merchandising and the process of screen printing, along with other techniques like direct-to-film printing (DTF) and direct-to-garment printing (DTG).
“Merchandising is something that I’ve had a deep understanding of since I was a little kid,” O’Connell said. “I was in screen printing when I was in high school. We would go to the swap meets, get shirts, pay a really high price and print on them. Then from about 18 to 30 I started accumulating all this knowledge about the industry.”
Now after celebrating more than seven years of sobriety, O’Connell runs his own fashion brand called Young Gods of LA that sell their own apparel ranging from trucker hats to joggers and a content creation branch that posts fashion content like where to find the best garments for one’s business.
The inside display of the Vision Stitch interior.
In an effort to pay forward all he’s learned about commerce, O’Connell started another company called “YGPress,” a screen-printing business that teaches people how to create and start their own clothing line for people who battle addiction post-incarceration.
“Merchandising is this never-ending bustling industry, there’s many facets involved in it,” O’Connell said. “Where I think we set ourselves apart is we’re a creative merchandising company, and then we concentrate on marketing. So I knew I could teach people who start with nothing a way to create their own brand.”
O’Connell credits the creation of YGPress to saving the lives of so many that also went through rough patches in their lives where they experienced homelessness or trouble with the law.
“When I started getting sober…I had this calling,” O’Connell said. “When you go through something like that I had this calling to be like ‘I have a really good life now, I feel like I should help give this away.’”
For O’Connell, the term “Young Gods” and the company holds a much bigger meaning than just a clothing line, or printing company. It carries a message that O’Connell will hold on to for the rest of his life.
I always say when people ask what is ‘Young Gods’, I’m like it’s just for the underdogs.
“I always say when people ask what is ‘Young Gods’, I’m like it’s just for the underdogs,” O’Connell said. “It’s for the people who didn't have a chance, who thought they’d never have a chance, and we’re there for them to support them.”
In terms of support he received en route to starting his own business, O’Connell credits the intersection of Main Street and Pico Boulevard otherwise known as the Fashion District. This staple of Downtown Los Angeles O’Connell believes is one of the most influential fashion regions in the country.
“If you’re talking about the last ten years, the drop-shoulder shirt that started in LA is becoming the status quo for brands,” O’Connell said. “You’ll see a lot of stuff start here. If a blank hits here then every other brand in LA has it. In my real opinion, streetwear starts in Los Angeles.”
In an Instagram reel, O’Connell posted himself shouting out two stores he frequently buys from for his own brand, Vision Stitch and Vinatex.
Embroidery machines stitch design on to fabric.
Josh Yu, Co-owner of Vision Stitch, was initially brought into this business by his father-in-law several years ago. Yu’s father-in-law was in the embroidery business for more than 30 years, and created Vision Stitch back in 2009.
“Before this area really became the garment and fashion district where everyone comes to do custom embroidery and screen printing, he was actually one of the first ones on this block," said Yu. “We are probably one of the oldest embroidery shops in L.A.”
Yu highlights that prior to the inception of Vision Stitch, this area between Main Street and Pico Boulevard lacked some customizability. This section of downtown was not nearly as recognizable as the Fashion District a couple blocks further down. Yu believes this strip of land is the central hub of custom clothing and wholesale garments.
“It’s cool to see,” Yu said. “It’s not that we meant to do it that way, but to be one of the first one’s here definitely feels like we have our roots put down here, and I just love to see that there’s more business that come to this area to do the same thing that we are doing.”
According to JPMorgan Chase & Co., about 48.9% of small businesses cease to exist within five years. After lasting for over 15 years, Yu claims that it is a testament to their location that draws so many people into their store along with so many others in the Fashion District. He credits the location as being a big reason why their business was able to come out the other side of a global pandemic.
“We’ve got a very unique situation in that we always have a lot of foot traffic here,” Yu said. “People from out of state, even people from other countries know this area, specifically in the garment district downtown.” As far as any kind of marketing or social media, we don’t really do much of that just because we are so busy…but we just try to treat everyone with kindness and fairness and that’s yielded a lot of benefits for us.”
Vision stitch has accumulated a loyal customer base that Yu believes is unique compared to customers bases in other markets. The “hustlers” as Yu calls them, are mostly young aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start their own business and make a name for themselves.
“Being able to see the growth, especially for some of our customers who start with maybe a dozen hats with something that they are trying, to turning it into a business one year later is remarkable,” Yu said. “I love to see the grind and see people hustling out here.”
Store manager Elias Correa joined the team over two years ago after working as a design manager at a previous company. Elias enjoyed the familial aspect of the store and loved the service that he was able to provide to others that came to the store with nothing but an idea.
“It’s a blessing,” Correa said. “Just seeing people, they walk in with a frown and leave with a smile because they don’t know what opportunities that come with working with us, but also making their ideas come to fruition. So many ideas die in the grave, so I’m glad people have the courage to come out here just to even have a conversation of how to do something or how to make it come to life. It’s such a beautiful thing.”
Any time a customer walks into a store with an idea, Yu or Correa takes the digital copy of their design and uploads it to a software called Wilcom. Once the design is to the customer's liking, the digital product is sent to the line of six sewing machines that embroider the design onto the apparel.
The machines are overseen by employees who make sure the design is printed correctly, and clean up any loose threads from the machines as well. The process of embroidering is often taken for granted by many customers that wish to place orders.
“They think that their hats will get done today,” Yu said. “Embroidery is a very long process especially compared to something like screen printing. Screen printing you could probably print 100 shirts in an hour, with embroidery depending on the size of your machine. We have a machine that can do six hats at a time. In an hour we’ll do six hats.”
Correa said the ability to help people along the way and treating everyone with kindness and respect has paid massive dividends for Vision Stitch over the years, but it goes farther than just their customers.
With other small businesses lined from block to block, Correa believes it would be so easy for both him and Yu to view all the other shops around them as competition. They’ve been an established brand for 15 years and have no reason to help out anyone else with their business. But they’ve never operated that way.
“I definitely feel like in retrospect me and my man right here, Josh, we are pioneers in our own way,” said Correa. “We set the way for people that might look up to us, people might ask us for business knowledge or how we’ve been here for so long. We have our journey, other shops have their own journey. So I just think it’s beautiful how we all collectively help one another and pave that way in the future.”
Both Correa and Yu credit O’Connell for helping them promote Vision Stitch, but also for helping others realize all that the Fashion District has to offer. O’Connell started sourcing all his garments from shops like Vision Stitch and others around the intersection of Pico and Main. He describes what separates this block of Los Angeles from any other in the world.
“You definitely will not walk down a block of any other city anywhere else and find what you will on that one street that I concentrate on,” O’Connell said. “I’m always just letting people know if you’re gonna start your brand walk this block, there’s nothing like it you know.”
