How (and why) I started working for Ye (formerly known as Kanye West)
The year was 2018 and to my dismay I was waking up at 5am. That might not sound all that terrible to some - 5am is the hour of the entrepreneur afterall. It's widely known that a number of successful people wake up at ungodly hours of the morning in order to "seize the day". Nonetheless, I was waking up at ungodly hours for a much less exciting reason - coffee making. Yes, like Tyler, the Creator, I was once a Starbucks employee serving coffee as a barista to the tirelessly busy London commuters every morning and afternoon. And I had what my friends called "the graveyard shift". The "graveyard shift" took place at 6am and finished at 2am. I hated every minute of it.
I decided to make a change. After 4 months of serving coffee on the front line of London, I would hand in my resignation. It was in my contract that I was to give at least 2 weeks notice. So I did. I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do, but I knew what I wanted to do. And that was to work for Kanye West (as he was known at the time) instead.
My friends advised me not to quit, explaining it was a terrible idea because I didn't have any money saved. Even though this was probably good advice to the average sensible human-being, I wanted to be anything but average. Not only that, I knew exactly how I was going to make a ton of money while I set out on my quest to be Kanye West's creative director.
I had graduated a year prior to working at Starbucks with a Bachelors Arts degree in graphic design. And I figured, that must count for something. So I decided to design some download cards with the help of Bandcamp. I set a goal in my head that I'd sell 16 of them in day at £10, giving me a daily budget of £160 - and I'd use these funds to finish an album I was writing at the time (the album is called 'Primary Colours'). Most of my friends were extremely sceptical, urging me not to try it. They said things like "if you were capable of doing something like this, you wouldn't be here". Call it stubbornness, call it a "burning desire", I was not in the state of mind to listen to any criticism, be it reasonably constructive or downright negative. I told my friends, "you'll just have to watch me do it".
The week I finally left my job, I won a flask due to selling the most promotional packs of Starbucks Coffee, so my ex-boss and colleagues knew I was destined for greatness. I didn't sell 16 albums at £10. At least not on the first try. On my first day of sales, I was riddled with anxiety and even though I aimed to be out on the streets of Camden selling my first studio album "Summer With The Wolves" - I didn't make it out of my bed until 6pm. Nevertheless, I still managed to sell 4 albums at £5 each. And that's when I knew it was all possible. Even more so considering the fact that I hadn't even managed to print out the Bandcamp download cards - I was straight up selling codes from an excel spreadsheet.
That year in 2018, from July to October, I would sell 1,500 download codes to the people of Camden. And then it happened. I was on my way home, completely exhausted, my lungs running on emergency oxygen from all of the talking I was doing to make sales. When I finally got back to my studio in Tottenham Hale, I realised the strangest thing had happened - Kanye West was following me on Twitter. I thought back to all of the potential actions I could have taken to have turned my dream into a reality (I was only 22 at the time). Then I remembered....In the two weeks prior to handing in my resignation I had tweeted Kanye West 3 times a day for two weeks. But then I also remembered that one time I pretended to be the late Virgil Abloh's social media manager in order to get a backstage pass at one of his gigs. Could it have been one of those things? Both of those things? Whatever it was that convinced Kanye West to follow me on social media, I was being followed by my childhood idol, and nothing in that moment (or for that entire year) could have made me happier.
I was already on my way to Los Angeles to sell my record in the states (I had bought a plane ticket one week prior to Ye following me). I wanted to see if I could replicate the same success I had in Camden over in America. My journey started in North Hollywood and ended abruptly somewhere in Downtown LA. And for some reason I was addicted to Starbucks Iced Mochas. When I realised I couldn't sell albums fast enough to cover both travel and accommodation I made my way back to London.
Fast forward to the summer of 2022, my commercial debut "Primary Colours" now well over 1 million streams, I found myself this time on my own stall in Camden Market selling an innovation of the download cards I was first selling before I jetted off to LA. This time, what I was selling was completely my own invention - I called them "digital vinyls". I got the call in September 2022 that I would be appointed Ye's creative director - and the rest, quite literally, was history.
Words by Benjamin K. Daniels (Founder @ Poridge)
