Meet Dareum Bell

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dareum Bell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dareum below.

Hi Dareum, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Growing up in Chicago the toughness and resiliency is somewhat inherited in a way. It’s something that’s instilled in you early on in life. Combing that with me being raised by a single mother who was prior service and seeing how she handled the challenges life out in front of her, my resiliency is something that I pride myself on.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Growing up my grandfather used to always chastise me for having so many clothes and shoes. He’d always say “you only have 2 feet” or “You’re always wearing these name brands, wear your own clothes “ I never understood then but as I got older it made more sense to me. Around during the time of Covid, I have the idea to create a logo for people to recognize me while I was DJing events. The logo was. A simple D with four stars, the stars were to remind me of back home in Chicago. Later on that logo became more and more significant to me day and day out, so I had the idea to get a few T-shirts and masks for myself just to have something to be proud of. As time went on, I realized that it could be something more than what it was, so I decided that I wanted it to become a brand. The brand was known as The Dare Brand(A play on my name as well), the basis behind it was daring to defy, to be different, to set your own expectations and not only meet them, but exceed them. Growing up I’ve always loved hats, they were an extension of me. It was like my outfits had to match the hat, not the other way around. So with that, I started off with hats. They were amazing, the colors the quality etc. once I saw the potential the brand had, I decided to dedicate my time to it, I went through countless YouTube videos to learn how to design my own mock ups for merchandise rather than pay graphic designers to do it and have to explain the visions that were in my head of how I wanted certain pieces to look. Now six years later, I’m proud to say that I have my own brand with various fashion pieces in the works. It’s a great feeling that I never saw coming way back then.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

If I would have to pick three, I think my first area of knowledge that was most impactful on this journey would be seeing others around me, overcome obstacles in order for them to achieve their dreams whether it be a large or small accomplishment. I’m a firm believer that you’re a product of your environment so being surrounded by friends college and even family members being able to reach goals that they set their mind to what makes me any different? The second would definitely be resiliency like we talked about previously. It’s something rewarding about setting your mind on something and not only meeting those expectations but surpassing them. It’s like climbing a mountain during the process. It’s hard it’s rough. You’re tired. You want to take breaks you know there’s times where you wanna give up and go back but once you get to the top and you’re able to turn around and see that sense of accomplishment and tell yourself, man, I really did this that’s one of the greatest feelings in the world. And lastly, I think for me, I wanted to satisfy the desires of my inner child in a way you know there’s those childhood dreams that we all have and I think as I got older, there were things that I was able to think back on that I wanted to do as a child or even had the slightest bit of interest in, and I feel like as an adult we owe it to ourselves to mark those boxes or to make that childhood version of us happy. My advice to anyone who’s early in their journey or haven’t even started due to feeling reluctant or nerves or self doubt, it’s a reason that Nike has the motto of just do it. Sometimes that first step is really all you need to get yourself going once you start doing something and you have that small sense of pride. It only grows as you progress in your journey, so my advice to anyone out, there is to start just start just do it you know just put down that first steppingstone in a way. But also with that to be consistent consistency helps you find your discrepancies in what you need to work on. It helps you hone your craft. It also fuels your passion in a way so to just start and once you start just be consistent, you know, you’re going to have ups and downs and there are definitely going to be those days where you’re going to want to give up you’re going to want to stop you’re going to feel like you’re behind but everyone’s timeline is different so just start and be consistent.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I am most definitely interested in partnerships and collaborations. As we talked about earlier, it has just been me from start to finish. I’ve been able to gain insight from college friends, my frat brothers and things of that nature, and I feel like in order to grow and be successful a solid network is always important so I am More than happy to soak up knowledge from other people that are a little bit further ahead than I am or where I would like to be. They say you never stop learning and that’s something that I can truly attest to and I would love to further my knowledge from people who have more experience in this industry than I do. They can reach out to me through social media or emails. I have a tendency to check my messages quite frequently so I am not a hard person to reach or at least I try not to be.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thedarebrand.store
• Instagram: The_darebrand
• Facebook: Dareum Bell
• Linkedin: Dareum Bell