Jamiersen Green of Leader Quality Gets Candid on His Busy Life as an Entrepreneur and Upcoming Avia Legacy Collaboration
Jamiersen Green is no stranger to new beginnings.
With aspirations of a career in sneakers and streetwear, Green moved from his hometown of Flint, Mich., in 2015 to New York. In the years since, he has established himself as a go-to creative, with a resume that includes stints at Staple Design, the creative agency founded by Jeff Staple, and another creative agency, Game Seven. However, his name grew when he joined Foot Locker, spending four years with the retail powerhouse as its senior manager of influencer marketing.
While working in the corporate world, Green also built up his personal brand. For instance, he earned the co-host spot in October 2022 of “SNKRS Live Heating Up,” a live-streamed program on the Nike SNKRS app. Also, he founded the streetwear brand and creative agency Leader Quality in 2019.
In July, Green stepped away from Foot Locker to become a full-time entrepreneur. His first project away from the corporate world is Leader Quality’s first footwear collaboration, a new take on a classic Avia silhouette.
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The reimagined Avia Legacy 855, dubbed “For the Creative Game,” is dressed in orange, green and tan hues — which have become synonymous with the brand — and is executed in full-grain and tumbled leather uppers, breathable mesh lining and comfort-focused EVA midsoles.
Leader Quality will debut its collaborative Avia Legacy sneaker at a pop-up at Extra Butter in New York on Oct. 28. Early access for Leader Quality newsletter subscribers will follow on Oct. 30 and a global online release will take place Nov. 1 at 10 a.m. ET via Leaderqlty.com.
In addition to the sneaker, there will also be apparel and accessories, including a workwear jacket, two heavyweight hoodies, a T-shirt that’s exclusive to the pop-up and a coffee mug.
Below, Green gets candid on entrepreneurialism and offers insights into his Avia Legacy collaboration.
What led you to leave the corporate footwear and fashion world and venture out on your own?
“There’s only so much you can do at a corporate entity, and there’s only so much they’re going to let you do. You can have this A-plus idea, but by the time it gets through all the hands of corporate, it’s a C-plus idea. Not saying it’s bad, just what you thought of initially gets chopped down once you go through the process. Working in the corporate world, the first year is learning what you need to learn in order to do the job well. The second year is refining that because corporate doesn’t change strategies too much from one year to the next. The third and fourth year, you’re on the hamster wheel doing the same thing over and over again, unless you’re working for a progressive company that allows you to have control and they’re like, ‘We trust your vision and what you want to do, we’re going to take off some of these parameters.’ I feel like they think that way when you’re a collaborator rather than when you’re an employee. Now that I’m on my own, people treat me differently from a creative mindset than they did when I was working for them. Their view of me as totally flipped. That’s everywhere I’ve worked.”
Working for Jeff Staple, a master entrepreneur and collaborator, had to be beneficial to where you are now in your career. What was the biggest lesson you learned at Staple Design?
“How to be patient, how to be more organized. Ideas are good, but if they’re not organized and laid out correctly, then what are they? They’re just scatterbrained pieces of things that don’t get executed well. That was what they were trying to get through this thick-headed young man. And then I just watched Jeff. I just watched how he moved. I watched how he handled conversations with me, I watched how he handled conversations with people in his office, I watched how he handled conversations when going over CADs and tech packs with his ideas and his input. I absorbed everything I could from everybody there. That helped formulate that part of my brain, the streetwear, fashion, collaboration part of my brain. Also, Jeff looked out for me. There was a time where cuts were happening at the office and I ended up getting cut, but he put me in touch with my next opportunity, which was at Game Seven running the Nike and Jordan accounts.”
How does it feel to be working for yourself?
“It feels like when I first moved to New York with nothing and I felt like anything was possible. My slate was totally open for anything that was right for my career. I feel like I’m back to that clean slate but with more experience, more knowledge of how to move in the industry — and with a lot more connections. I’m happy to have that back-against-the-wall feeling again because comfort can stunt growth. I was scared to resign from Foot Locker. That kept the lights on. Every month, I knew that check was coming in, I knew how much I was getting paid.”
How are you dividing your time?
“I segment myself into two different places. One side is Jamiersen the host, the moderator, the marketing consultant. The other side is Leader Quality. That’s more inclusive of my family and my creative friends, who are all out here working together. From the forefront, it looks like it’s just me with Leader Quality, but it’s five or six of us — and that will be revealed during this Avia collaboration. That’s a hybrid between a brand and an agency. We’ll have our own campaigns, we’ll have our own merch, we’ll have our own events. We will also offer those same things to the bigger brands, people who need content, people who need influencer marketing, people who need design. We designed the merch for the Dreamville Festival last year. We designed courts for the [Detroit] Pistons, some community organized events in my hometown of Flint. I pitched them on some ideas, like, ‘These are things I’ve done with Nike and Jordan, these are things the Pistons can do that can help increase visibility outside of the Detroit area.’ We’ll be focusing on things like that and building that out. It’s a very interesting time. It’s funny because I feel like I’ve got eight arms and eight legs all working. Somebody asked me the other day, ‘How do you describe what you do?’ I’m like, ‘It depends on the day.’ One day, I can be a host, the next day, I can be directing a photo shoot or a full campaign. Or I can be designing an entire line.”
You have an Avia collaboration coming, but you’ve been the host of “SNKRS Heating Up” for a while now. What’s the status of your hosting duties?
“I’m still doing ‘SNKRS Live Heating Up,’ I’m just taking a break during this project with Avia. It was a product that came up before the Nike things started to unfold for me, so it’s on hold for a little while as I work on this project. The interesting thing about ‘Heating Up’ was I wasn’t even going to try out when they had open tryouts.”
Why’s that?
“My corporate job, Foot Locker, and I were having some back and forth about me doing outside work, and I was discouraged. I was like, ‘I’m not even going to try out because I don’t know if they’re going to allow me to do it.’ But people sent me the flyer that was on Hypebeast and were like, ‘You need to try out.’ After a video audition, after one in-person audition with 10 other people and then one more audition with four people, I ended up landing the gig.”
How has “SNKRS Live Heating Up” impacted you professionally?
“That was a turning point. People really viewed me as a host. It jumpstarted everything that is now, being able to host and do things on the Nike campus, being able to host for Amazon at the Black Footwear Forum, being able to host and do things at the Cultures and Communities Festival in Milwaukee. That was the first door that opened up for me to say, ‘Now is the time for me to step away from my job and fully invest in the talents that I’ve been given.'”
How did the collaboration with Avia come about?
“I have a friend, Chris Stewart, who works there. He gave me a pair of high-top Avias, the 830. I put them up on Instagram and everybody was going crazy asking me about them. I hit him back like, ‘People are going crazy about these. We should do a collaboration together.’ Two weeks later, they called me and said, ‘We want to work with you.’ They wanted to tap into the streetwear side of the sneaker industry. Avia has been around, but it hasn’t been directly in mainstream street culture in a long time, maybe since the ’90s. They’ve been in big-box retailers like Walmart and sold on Amazon, but they’re missing that authenticity of where they were from, when Scottie Pippen and Clyde Drexler and Joe Dumars from the Detroit Pistons were wearing them. I’m from Michigan, so that connection with Joe Dumars was there, him playing for the ‘Bad Boys’ in Detroit. Our brand is budding, we have some buzz when we drop stuff, we have a consistent following, we have consistent sales, and Avia has the infrastructure we need to be able to produce our first shoe. This proves that we can put together a collaboration that benefits both companies.”
How will you bring this collaboration to life?
“We’ve got a dope rollout. It’s probably our best work to date. The setting is in a classroom like when you were in high school. You have your rappers, your hustlers trying to make money, your artists who are quiet and shy drawing in the corner and you got your class clowns. We’ve got a few teasers, a bunch of 20-second teardown reels, and we’ve got some really dope talent. Foggie Raw, who is a dope musician, is in it. This guy Lenstrumental [Lennie Simo], he is untapped in the streetwear and sneaker market. I have Gaby Santana, a really dope Latina who makes jewelry, she has a spot in it. And there’s Tori Kirihara, Rosy [Rodriguez], Juice [Foster] and Jordan Tarnoviski. It’s authentic to my experience. I feel like high school is where people’s creativity is the most pure, right before you go to college and end up in the real world where people are telling you what you can and can’t do. This is taking it back to that raw, fun time in high school where all I cared about was what I was doing and creating with my friends.”
What are your plans for 2024?
“We’re talking to a few clients that we worked with last year, like the Pistons, Dreamville and others. From a hybrid agency standpoint, we’ll be focused on deepening our relationship with our current clients and building something more long term with them. As a streetwear brand, it’s time we focus on identity. Before, I was splitting time between working corporate 40 hours and coming home and working on Leader Quality for 40 hours. Now, we get to hone in on the identity of Leader as a brand, what our design communicates, what our brand messaging is and also building community, getting more people on board and not just being a brand that is focused on selling products but instead enriching and providing joy, happiness and insight to creators within the industry.”
