Pedro Vasconcellos, Hilary Roberts and Hilary Thomson produced a slideshow about Bosompra's success.
One night in October 2009, Chief Bosompra was lying in bed in his Carleton residence room when an idea struck him: he wanted to start his own clothing line.
Now 21, Bosompra says he got the idea when he started shopping in Ottawa and couldn’t find any clothes he liked.
“One day, I couldn’t find anything I wanted to buy that was worth the money, so I thought, ‘Why not start my own [clothing line]?’ because I thought I knew what people liked,” Bosompra says.
At first, Bad Habits started out as a blog, where Bosompra posted music, videos, skate news and basically anything he thought people would want to know, he says.
Through the blog, Bosompra was able to get the name Bad Habits out into the open, he says. As a result, he was able to promote his first season of shirts, which dropped in June 2009.
Bosompra says his inspiration for the name Bad Habits came from a poster in one of his friend’s university dorm rooms.
“The poster said bad habits and it had all these crazy pictures of kids doing really crazy things,” he says. “I found it really funny and obscure.”
On a personal level, Bosompra says bad habits are something everyone can relate to.
“Everyone has a bad habit,” he says. “Short, tall, rich, poor, no one can say they don’t have a single bad habit.”
The brand also has two slogans: “Bad Habits, No Regrets” and “They'll never believe you’ll make it until you’ve made it.” Bosompra says he’s received good feedback from the theme of the brand and people can really relate to it.
The name may seem negative, but Bosompra says once you get to know more about the brand you see that bad habits aren’t totally negative.
“People might seem negative, but there is always a positive side. There is a reason to why they might have done the things they did,” Bosompra says.
Bosompra comes up with ideas for his clothing through his own life experiences and through collaborating with others, he says.
His newest line, he says, is a play off of an expensive French brand called Comme des Garçons. The line is called Comme Des F*ck Down and it features a manipulated version of the Comme des Garçons logo to show that people don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to be fashionable.
Bosompra says he was drawn to entrepreneurship from a young age. Even in high school, he teamed up with one of his friends and sold blank DVDs and CDs to his classmates.
“It grew from small, pretty random things and kept evolving and evolving,” he says.
He also says he learned a lot of the skills he uses to run his brand in his first-year communications class.
“I learned a lot about how to control an audience and how people act and react to things,” Bosompra says.
Since starting the line, Bosompra has used many avenues to promote the Bad Habits brand, including stickers with the brand’s logo hidden in plain sight around Carleton. The brand has been mentioned on other blogs, in music videos and in a skate magazine, Colour, which is distributed across North America.
It’s now been almost three years since he originally started the brand, but Bosompra says he’s always looking towards the future.
“When I graduate I am going to take it a lot more seriously and try and increase our products,” Bosompra says.
He’s looking forward to an arrangement with Top of the World, an Ottawa-based skateshop, to create and sell new snap back hats, he says. He’s also excited about an upcoming web series that will feature Bad Habits clothing. The series is currently being filmed in London, Ont.
Some days, Bosompra says he really feels the pressure of being a full-time student and running his own clothing line, but it’s his mindset that keeps him going.
“Everything, especially in entrepreneurship, is like climbing a mountain at the beginning,” Bosompra says. “I’m the type to not really give up on anything.”