0:00 [Music] and welcome back everybody to another awesome episode of the careful boys and today we have a very special guest mr andy wing is in the building and correct me am i wrong if people don't know you uh you are the empire builder of after's ice cream love that place yeah that's what that yeah that's what people like to call me big fan big fan but before after his ice cream you were in the clothing industry right yep yep i did a clothing brand called i'm king for seven years before that our paths crossed in the early 2000s when um the whole like asian youtube world was barely coming up and then i realized like there was a lot of asian like dudes in the streetwear game that was doing dope ████ and in the early ages of youtube
0:50 we didn't know anything about sponsorships and ████ like that so we went to this place called orange county you might have heard of it um so off camera western medical center specifically thank you for that information welcome so off camera we were talking about like these different brands and i just connected the dots like oh ████ dude like you were um so i named one of the companies i am king and you're like that was me i'm like that was you that's so ████ dope he said i am queen with me all right orissue orissa because i remember that brand because it sponsored our friends ████ um fairies movement ████ like that sponsored quest crew too quest crew yeah and then and then we weren't officially sponsored but all the stuff they couldn't sell they gave to us that was so civic that was so amazing we
1:42 actually worked really closely with uh franco shade yeah with joe and chris yeah and they gave us all kinds of ████ gear and then uh also a triumvir and they would give us all kinds of gear too and it was just crazy that like oc was kind of like the breeding ground of all these brands there's a video i got when we visited trying um trying veer and then they had a box of like stuff they couldn't sell because they wasn't going and then you put it on all you did was put on the ████ red jacket and they sold out of it that's crazy richard which is the co-founder of time bear we still work together to this day and when we're three right now i remember reaching away yeah yeah he's that tall asian dude yeah yeah yeah damn how um so was i am king the first business you started no i i i dropped out at 19 and my best friends convinced me to become a real estate appraiser and i had no idea what the hell wow crazier
2:33 no real estate i didn't know entrepreneurship meant and i didn't know what real estate meant the only thing was i was already in probation in community college and i was like yo my best friend was like hey let's go start our own company i was like are you talking about like we're 18 years old it's not possible he goes well we just do what this guy's doing i'm working for him right now we'll just learn what he does and start our own brand so we ended up starting a real estate appraisal company and at an early age i was you know learning how to make you know we're making three hundred to three thousand dollars a day so you're you're 18 19. yeah 19 years old when i dropped out first job what do you just appraising homes do you need to be like certified to do that to uh you got to take all the courses take the real estate appraisal courses and the appraisal test was was one of the hardest real estate tests at that time oh what year was this this was 2003 2004 when i was so the boom before the crash yeah and i think i officially
3:23 got my license in 2005 uh but i left around 2008 but at the time of the crash because all the regulations changed so how long did you run that for until uh about three years three years so you see so 18 19 you already have seven figure business technique around a little bit with devices you're spending it at the time i'm learning how to spend it dad you were balling at like 19 20 when i wasn't keeping up that money wasn't going in my pocket i was going back into the business and that's the goal dude and the ████ wait you psyched you just cycled back so an appraiser appraisal company i'm interested like three grand a day right like if you're making that money how like what are your costs like to build there's not really much cost clipboards yeah mostly clipboards and pencils we were working in my parents garage at the time because i didn't i didn't know how to even go
4:13 acquire get an office space at least i didn't know any of that wow and had this real estate appraisal license and going out doing these files and looking looking like this and you know learning about business lingo how to build a business you know getting people to trust us to do it and one of the one of the loan officers we worked with happened to be chris no so chris was a loan officer and he was giving me files and i was working back and forth with chris um and crystal leveraged chris no he was like he was in ████ real estate officer what the ████ why does that name sound familiar so he uh when we work that so he's like a apparel manufacturing mogul now in the oc but when we were working with franco shade he was just the sales guy there yeah oh he left sprinkle shade and went to work under um king as a sales rep and i'm king so he's he's he's like now in the the now he runs the apparel game he's
5:04 just wow like ████ like he has a giant big-ass warehouse with like 30 different brands that go to like department stores and all kinds of crazy ass places wow that's tight so then what changed from doing that to clothing um so michael who was the founder of urisu one day he had he had a different brand before that before reese's called accentuate and he needed someone to be in the lookbook photo shoot and he asked me to do it i was like no i'm not doing it the hell no and he goes i'll give you free clothes i was like okay fine what are you like to model and then look in the lookbook i was like and then after that he's like i need to get an office space and i was like you want to get off the space together so we end up getting this tiny space like this size of the room this part of the room right here and he's doing his clothing thing start getting ready to start racing one side and i'm doing the real estate thing on the other side whoa you can see my attention span just like i was like hey
5:55 he's not making money but what he's doing is way cooler than what i'm i'd rather be doing that looks more fun huh yeah and i was like even though i'm making money i'd rather be working in this clothing thing with you so then when did the real estate thing go like you you're gonna stop this and you're gonna go full-on like clothing the crash changed everything because oh the the banks started requiring appraisers to have to go you have to work under banks and then all these regulations so you can already see everyone stop you using us and we're like okay well we have to go full force into the clothing down figure this out i see because it was like way harder now to be like a certified appraiser or whatever damn so out of force you're just like well ████ it and there's like all these houses that no one's buying anyway because of the crash so then you're like well let's get into close we're just like teetering like our foot when what one in the out the other so
6:46 we're just doing both at the same time as we were getting less and less files we were just trying to ramp up the clothing side oh damn specifically at that time i was already transitioning to i'm king at that time at that time and that's your brand like you made i am king yeah so first you partnered up with your buddy for a reason i worked i worked for him i just helped him as an oh okay and we're in the same office while doing my real estate thing yeah so we're just in this one room and then you built your own brand i am king is this 2008 2009 i started the i'm king brand in 2007. 2007 2007. oh wow that's when jk started that's crazy 2007 yeah that's when most like asian ████ started like all day we weren't that serious though we were 2007 serious either thought in 2007. they were invented damn that's tight dude what what happened to i am king so i'm king we did
7:36 that for seven years you know we're selling to the tillie zoomies you know with metro park did it get in there metro park didn't pay for a like a large six-figure order yeah they fought chapter 11 and they were going through some ████ right geez being that early on and not getting that six figure check is is it hits you and we're sitting with all this like product in the world like what do we do with this and trying to figure it out how many brands were you a part of during that time um i just owned that i'm king brand at that time that's all that's all i focused on for that time period but you know in apparel you see brands come and go and trends like change so fast and i think trying to chase that and being dictated by stores on how to design um kind of turned me off after a while you know after you do it for so long like hey i need to figure something else out and as a clothing as a streetwear brand
8:26 owner though you learn so many different skills right you're not just designing now you're marketing branding logistics sales shipping um storytelling because everyone's blogging every brand had a blog yeah that was huge yeah i had to learn pretty much learn how to become a writer dude 500. he started made us like bobby's like set the tone like hey y'all everyone has to learn how to be a writer now how's that okay well i guess i have to be a photographer and ████ man i know the thing is bobby is a writer so he sets the bar really high because he's a ████ journalist copywriter and then so now he's ████ writing all beautifully and ████ and then he got everyone else got ████ out of school it's like ████ we're like i did a zanga before buy my clothes cause it's cool dawg d-a-w-g
9:17 dog look up to the streetwear event i wasn't invited to i took some photos check it out bobby's actually gonna come here soon yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yo i tried to copy your blogs word for work tight man so what happened with i am keen did you end up selling or just like this i sold it i sold it a year after i launched uh after ice cream so i was doing both the same thing again doing both at the same time um and the reason why i even went into so i have no background food before that i've never worked a day in my life in food i don't know how to cook till this day i still don't know how to cook yeah i don't know how i'm even here but i was vlogging all the time i pretty much had to figure out things to talk about so i just got writing about lunch all the time here this is where we're eating at throughout little saigon these are my top places i like to eat at and then people started sending emails like hey those are the that's the best places i've ever eaten
10:07 yeah so i just became this food discovery person over time last time we were on your blog so it became more of a food blog a lot of different stores but food just became a hot topic on that page and then as i started traveling and discovering more food i started noticing like hey all these there's all these stores outside of orange county that have amazing artisanal flavors right those things i've never seen but i was like i didn't know you could turn these flavors into ice cream so i was like okay well this is not approachable to me i'm just gonna draw some ideas i have in my head and things that are flavors that i think i grew up with are more approachable and and come up with this concept so i kind of pitched what were some of the flavors vietnamese coffee vietnamese coffee that's one of our favorites we love this one yeah jasmine milk tea cause i drink boba yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we did you know we did this cookie monster with the blue ice cream yeah oh i saw that one um that was a delicious one so we made that became our number
10:57 one flavor by far by our partner who who was working on it didn't want to make it blue for the first week he wouldn't even make it blue why because he's like i don't think it was any blue ice cream i'm like i'm telling you you need to make it blue that did hella make your mouth blue afternoon it's like the best yeah oh there's so many blue yeah i just ate that at k-town night market like a few weeks ago dude that one's hella long last week how about that dude oh yeah i ate there tomorrow all right dude all right making it blue was like a genius move because it made it funny too like especially for kids oh yeah kids love that ████ especially for adults yeah i love it but unless you see someone on instagram and they're like what yeah what is this when you go in like i want the blue one that i saw that ties a lot into the street the stuff that we picked up from the street where right things looking good on camera yeah instagram friendly and we're a lot of those things that were bringing in lifestyle into food and no one was doing at that time so
11:47 that that flavor ends up selling 10 times more than any other flavor to this day like and he was like i don't want to make it the first week he wouldn't make it like you need to make it blue like yeah that's it can i ask how much you sold i am king for uh soda for a mid six figure mark at the time just to just to just get out just get out of it just get out so they just bought all the inventory or whatever yeah they just took all the branding they didn't take any inventory we actually um inventory we sold off already um was it a um franchise or did you own all the shops for from king yeah oh no sorry i mean i was thinking about afters yeah i'm not saying king oh okay okay i'm king so they just they just picked up the pretty much the the logo and the brands of the hang of it hang on like all the ip they're they're supposed to to this day they still haven't done anything with it so this button just held on to it was it like a clothing controller
12:38 no it's just a private group that wanted it that thought that like a vc group was it karma loop regular pro no private loop like a private asian group of friends friends of friends that we knew that what they just bought it they bought it and then did nothing well they wanted me to come back and re direct director for a year i was like okay i'll help for a year but then they couldn't get their team together so i was like that's pretty is that that's pretty common huh that like some asian thing just buys your ████ and just don't do anything yeah they still don't know what to do with it or they don't hop for i know there's major companies like uh my friend was a part of um uh black flies remember that uh sunglass and he was telling me like yo i don't know how they're keeping this afloat because it it loses money every ████ year and then i was like like i thought that brand was a bunch of like white dudes that are skaters they're like nah it's actually a japanese company that owns it and it's this massive conglomerate that's been around for like a hundred years right
13:28 and then like they just ████ buy businesses internationally and he goes like i think this is a wash like i think they just buy business for other reasons like they don't care about if it makes money it's just the data or whatever it is and i was like damn you do that with a lot of restaurant concepts too in the um right here in the middle east they'll just buy it just to flex on each other and then they'll so put the put the signage up on the store but they never opened it just there yeah that's dope how do they find you or do you find them the people that buy your companies i think it's a little i think over time it depends on where you're at like if you have a hot the hot concept everyone's reaching out to you oh so you're just getting offers through yeah everyone's like all the vc guys all these these private equity groups are just reaching out trying to talk to you trying to find out you know yeah have you sold another company outside of iron king i recently exited out of afters so oh you did yeah just like about two months
14:18 oh before how much is that how much blue ice cream i'm living okay right now that's good that's good my kids will be okay damn you want my kids to be okay too [Laughter] were you soul or did you have a team crafters yeah there's there's five of us amongst the company oh okay there's a lot a lot of us the reason being was uh you know i started with two of my friends one of my partners ron king another person i grew up with and then the partners that we end up teaming with they own the ice cream original ice cream shop before we came there so they're like these two older white dudes so they're called afters ice cream no they were called lola's ice cream and deli before oh and until you bought the concept with them or how did that we originally tried to buy them out because we're like hey you guys are open once every other week can we just like take over your store yeah open this
15:08 wait they're only open once every other week yeah they had money right there there's just once every other week so they were scheduled so they did it for fun it's just different fun they did it for lola yeah yeah lola's grandma so that's what i did that's why oh yeah and then um it took like six months to negotiate this deal trying to convince these old white guys that we were going to change the game but why why this is it because they already had a network or like you could have just started your own concept i think we were trying to keep the risk as low as possible because we didn't know the ice we didn't know that so you wanted partners that knew what they were doing we didn't team up with them for that we teamed up with them because they knew they're like we still want to make ice cream and we're like i don't want to make ice cream i don't know how to do it oh it's not what i'm i'm not that's not my expertise you figure this out i'll just tell you what i'm looking for what i want you you create it and that's the guy that didn't want to make it blue yeah well they're old you said yeah they're older
15:58 what's the um how did you guys come up with the after's name the actor's name well we're looking for a dessert term we found this term like in some parts of europe they call it like after a meal like dessert like the word after is like after after anything after eating out but absolutely after so we just named it afterwards what about the branding because it's like it's all black and like sleek looking so it's almost like anti what you would think appetizing but it works so good yeah so we we actually picked that up from where the elements of streetwear all over again at that time period was um street golf was popular right kanye all black leathers um us following the east laurent stores the apple store is minimalism so that's why we try to keep that look we have like a lot of black walls with like funny quotes on it like our first store had gucci mane loves afters when we you know we put that on there because you have the ice cream oh yeah we're like hey he's not gonna do anything he was in jail
16:49 but use it while he's in jail that's ████ funny dude just martha stewart loves this is after chopper loves it is it was it a franchise no we we we uh it was all privately owned all privately owned all of them and we built that first location or what we turned it around for like using like 15 grand how many locations do you guys have holy how many there's 20 28 locations in california or mostly south southern california and then one in los angeles and how many mobile operations are there there's three trucks that run wow see i i know one it's a cool location but it's never opened in pasadena it looks like an old derriere gastric that location kills nah it's always open dude kills it is it that's about my crib
17:39 that's where he goes that's his local one i was like when are they gonna open and then maybe it's the time i'm i'm there it's always packed too really really is that alhamdulillah still open my still open mystery yeah yeah we ████ shut that block down all right god we shut that down oh yeah you guys are gonna collapse that's right how did that come ops had to pull up and stuff like that and there was like a helicopter stop the ████ what was it like a king james after his collab grand opening after so i think that was already a huge buzz right everybody on main street it's ████ amazing who put that together that was a good idea so they already had the store grand opening and then i think we were in talks with him with ben because i know that you're close with ben uh so we were talking for a long time about trying to figure something out and then when the main street uh location was about to open up that just made the most sense and once everything started to come together you know we
18:29 created the flavor we had our boy chef rob rob came in oh sure with the flavor and stuff yeah there was like a kindest flavor right yeah yeah yeah just flavored like black sesame flavor thank you thank you i support it um but no it's all that we had a t-shirt capsule and a hat as well that all sold out that was done i didn't buy the other stuff i just bought that timing was perfect though because it was right after you guys been to the show yeah the timing was crazy i was gonna come by and then i heard it was still packed like i'm like it was like it wasn't you know the long lines it was like long and thick and all the way down wrapped around the corners it wrapped on the block and i was like i didn't know that like cops would actually pull up to this thinking that it was like a ████ would they come in like you want to show support they're coming by they're like where's the blue one
19:19 they just light up and start doing the trick we didn't have i don't think any of us have the expectation of being like that because we had to push back the performance like yeah like did we just do it in the middle of the street now it's too crazy that's great you guys performed uh at the store yeah just a couple guys had to like like ████ move a small little crowd and then everybody's literally just freestyling the video's still up uh and it's just that's tight and ████ i just might text man i was like hey you guys need to get here because it's getting crazy and there's a helicopter's flying around right now that's just dope man they're freaking the city's freaking they didn't know what's going on i didn't know right dude you know um we recently did um we did a jk news on this nft restaurant and then um i was like i'm gonna go visit it right and it was so crazy because like i didn't know so your your partner kevin we're friends and i had no idea that that was his place too
20:10 yeah because he doesn't like like i mean like you know like kevin's just like oh just doing his thing with food and ████ like he's not like a big like look at my ████ you know he's so humble right so i saw him um at a plaza one day and he goes oh yeah yeah that's uh that's you should come to my shop and i'm like your shop goes yeah it's an nft shop and i'm like that's yours and then so i find out that you two are involved with it and i see like i i i click the page i check it out snoop dogg's down like what the ████ is all of this going on and i went and did a food review there it was ████ delicious i was it was pretty cool it felt it was like mcdonald's and in and out had a baby that's how it kind of tastes like yeah yeah but yeah man is that your like main project right now the nfts and the the restaurant yeah we're we're we're trying to save the restaurant industry and and a lot of things that we learned in the last year and how to implement a lot of new this blockchain
21:00 technology into what we're doing that sounds crazy you just said save the restaurant industry what does that mean uh what i learned through last year was last september when during the pandemic when everyone's still getting free money right i thought when you when you're going out you saw now hiring signs everywhere yeah this is crazy i'm in the hospitality business and i can't even provide good service to the customer anymore this this is i don't want to do this for the next but there's no way i can continue to do this this is going to happen and september hit i was like hey everyone's going to have to start working applying for jobs and working again september hits it gets even worse i was like man those people are working this is this this sucks that's not what i want to do i was like hey i need to i get i need to figure out how to get an influx of money so i can really really like uh do cool ████ i was like i've already done things uh bottlenecked because the budget's always been super tight but if i could have a little bit more flexibility i'd
21:50 go crazy and i started learning about like how people raise money in tech and in tech you have these tech investors go hey i'm gonna throw hundreds of million dollars ten ten different companies if nine of them failed they're like whatever yeah do that ████ i was like there's no way you can do that there's no way unless i start doing like an app for right now i'm not doing i don't want to do an app i don't like raising money it's not my thing let me figure something out and then kevin comes to me and goes you can do everything that you want to do with nfts that's that's what i think you can do and i was like what are you talking about and once i started going down this rabbit hole this web 3 thing i learned about community brand building marketing i was like i'm already doing that in the physical space but now if i bring this to the digital space like you know some crazy things that happen yeah and that's you know seeing what gary v did with his fly fish restaurants like dude this guy just raised 21 million dollars for a restaurant new york and it's not even open yet that's not fair man that's not
22:41 fair man you don't even want to start a restaurant in terms of like like you're like you're competing gary's restaurant he can open the best real estate best build out he can pay he can overpay his staff and not even serve a single dish and still be just fine profitable because he already has the money i get that and i'm raising through customers and building brand community if i can do that through this this space then and if i can take i'm the guinea pig and i take the league lead and this works out it's going to change it for everybody yeah so it's being funded by board ape and like nfts no so that that's just part of it our food fighters nfc is another project that connects to it oh morton hungry thing it was just to make a statement it was only to it was only supposed to be a pop-up for 90 days oh okay is that because you know we
23:31 didn't web 3's they're very sensitive in this world right there's so much money involved like there's a lot of scams going on so we created board and hungry because we wanted to if we jump into the nfts i don't want to just walk in the industry and be like ████ that andy you already make money why are you coming into art industry okay i was like yeah i'm going to provide a gift to you guys this is i'm going to build an in real life experience because everyone's always talking about like can you do something in real life with these nfts and board ape was the most popular thing at the time everyone in the world and our celebrity was getting one every other week you saw it right i was like i'm going to go buy this thing i'll buy this thing and i know i what i learned is you can use the ip and you can put it on whatever you want anything yeah you have to pay any royalty you have to ask any approvals and i already because yours personally i don't know about how to use that utilize ip already because i've done a lot of brand collaborations it's like it's like pretty much saying like if i bought a nike shoe and now i can go open a nike restaurant you know
24:21 how valuable that is so i was like i'm gonna do that with this board ape thing so how does your restaurant work is it like you eat monkeys like do you so you have the board ape and then do other people have to own it or have a piece of it to eat at the restaurant or no so um you know we're using a lot of the the the characters um to put on the store and packaging to build a brand of ip but you can also pay in crypto payments which you know no one's really doing so you can accept um ethereum and eight point we're the first uh first business to accept eight point period yeah i mean uh board april's even doing that they didn't know what to do with that yet so they were calling us like hey how'd you guys do that whoa yeah so and then um you're helping the whole industry by being like adopt like early adopters and then trying to get people to utilize it for you to like all
25:12 that absolutely and then if you're a holder in the grand opening day if you were a holder uh you had your own ape if you verified it then you got a free meal that day you know so different perks that you can play with what's your iq like 500 yeah kicked out of high school i was filling all my classes in high school i was probation condo oh my god academics is definitely not my thing that's ████ ████ oh man that's so cool and sometimes people just need to have a good enough idea but the more so the balls to get out there and i feel like andy does a great job of like just getting in front of like the pack you know what i mean that's tight that's a big ball and sometimes it's not about like yeah that's a brilliant idea sometimes it's like damn that's idea maybe somebody could have thought of but didn't have the ability to do another trigger on it yeah you know front runner of that kind of stuff so that's dope man yeah the asian thing is trying to be first in the asian community before we stop can we
26:03 talk about food fighters universe food fighters universe is our nft project so we are the first nft backed restaurant group that's where we start you know we're trying to um open a lot of different restaurant concepts within the nfts that we've the money that we raise but we're always trying to do cooler concepts and also be able to help people that want to start up their own restaurants like some people like they go to they spend tons of money going to restaurant school right culinary school yeah and they come out thinking i'm gonna go open my own amazing restaurant but they end up working in these kitchens and they're just chopping salad up you know doing salads like three four years and they're like what did i sign up for but that's what you get ████ when they're on kitchen nightmares exactly like we're culinary school's a scam but go chop some cabbage but we're we're around so much talent and we we do have we do have a platform and voice that we can help you know help people launch their careers that's ████ cool man that's tight dude
26:55 we're into food too but this video is about you you
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