BlaCk OWned’s fall and winter collection of sweatshirts, hoodies, and jackets might blend the grit of the streets with the soul of hip hop, but the clothing line, like everything Means Cameron makes, carries a deeper meaning. “Someone wearing our products is saying, I believe that Black ownership, Black success, Black excellence adds value to us all,” he says, sitting inside his other business, BlaCk Coffee Lounge, near City Hall downtown. “And there are a lot of people who would agree with that sentiment.”
Fifth Third Bank, for one, had BlaCk OWned design a Juneteenth T-shirt for employees last year. Cincinnati Metro ordered 50th anniversary shirts the year before. BLINK collaborated on 2024 merchandise. Three years since Joe Burrow walked into a post-game press conference in a BlaCk OWned bomber jacket, the brand has designed apparel for the entire Bengals team, FC Cincinnati, the University of Cincinnati, Aiken High School, and others.
“I went into designing with no background, just Google and my gut,” Cameron says. “I think we just wanted to have impact. The beauty of our brand is at the root. It was us wanting to have change.”
“Us” were a bunch of guys Cameron hung with, influencers in the downtown hip hop scene before there were influencers. The first piece of apparel he sold was in 2011, a run of black Hanes sweatshirts bought from Target imprinted with the original BlaCk OWned logo. Cameron sold them out of the trunk of his car at clubs and at gas stations.
Cameron grew up in the West End with a mother who always worked two to three jobs to raise him and his three siblings. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” he says, “but what we always had was a mom who always told you, You can do this. And she believed that we could. There’s energy in a person’s eyes when they mean it.”
His love for fashion stemmed from his early love of hip hop music, and Cameron became a performer. He also won a scholarship to Miami University to study business and earn a degree in marketing. He moved to New Orleans for two years after graduation but returned to Cincinnati with the idea for BlaCk OWned. “I believe in representation,” he says. “I think when people see things they can dream about it, a dream turns into an action.”
By spring, his staff should be serving BlaCk Coffee inside UC Medical Center, and about a year from now he expects to open a coffee shop—this time with a kitchen—in Covington. He’s also expanding into waiting- and break-room coffee service and recently secured a coffee account with Mercedes-Benz in Ft. Thomas.
“Thirteen years later, it feels like a refresh,” says Cameron. “This chapter is about us going from just being a creative entity to being a producing entity, and that means developing our inventory, developing our wholesale strategy, and expanding into new markets.”
Photograph by Devyn Glista