Complaint Review: Kevin Hall (Conscious Community Wear) - Richmond Virginia

First off, I’m not a 'get on the internet and try to be something I’m a not' type of guy. I’m an artist by profession and have been since 1997. I just want to expose art thieves because there are a lot of shady characters and virtue signalers stealing from the art community and claiming to be "conscious" or "woke" via internet. 

That being said...

When I met this guy, we were both in the military. He would beg me to help him with a clothing line because he’d heard about what I was doing before the military. He bothered me every day about it for weeks until I finally decided to help him out. At first, I thougtht he may have been shell-shocked from PTSD or something because he would ask me the same questions everyday like a special needs child does and couldn't understand things that most adults his age do. 

Artists need to start being aware of these types of people who don’t want to pay you for your skills and they’ll talk about coming together and how woke or pro-black they are, then expect you to go above and beyond for them because they happen to be black too, etc etc. 

 He had some corny name for a clothing line, some garbage pencil drawings and I basically told him, I’m not going to put my name on something like that or work on his idea for free. 

So then he starts bugging me at work to come up with a name, every day like a child. I think is just said the first thing off the top of my head because I had a song in my head. 

Long story short, I agreed to do business with the man if I could use our wholesale license to put out my own personal clothing line, separate from what I was helping him. 

 The problem was that this guy did nothing to promote his clothing line that he couldn’t even think of a name for in the first place. So I ended up working on ideas for the both. 

Over time, he jumped on my wave and started acting like my clothing line is his, impersonating me on the internet, trying to pass my artwork off as his own. I moved out of town after I left the military, got married... one day, I signed on to Instagram, only to find out that he had been misrepresenting my brand and not promoting his own and was basically stealing money by bootlegging my designs and selling them online.

Bottomline, he just didn’t want to put in work for his own brand and my stuff was selling, so he tried to hijack my brand. We agreed to partner up on a DTG printer purchase. I gave him $500 and he did not even have the intelligence to operate the equipment. Every time I bought a client to him, he would take a month to print simple 12-24 t-shirt orders, costing me money and relationships. He would always have a lie to tell. Every time I would send him artwork to print, he wouldn't print it on time. Later, I found out that he was sitting on my designs and bootlegging them and bootlegging my clients' designs as well. 

But this is just a tip of the iceberg. I had to part ways with him after I saw that this guy does not know what he is doing. He lied about having a business degree and lied about having ran a successful business before. I asked him to write a business plan and when I read it, I realized that he could not even spell. I didn’t see how a grown 30-year-old man says has a business degree when his grammar and spelling is only on a 4th-grade level if even that. 

Basically, the guy is a fraud and a scam, all around. He now has a T-shirt line, named Conscious Community wear and misrepresents himself as some type of community leader, yet they piss off the people in their own community by vandalizing various storefronts in Richmond, VA, yet they have no storefront, themselves. There is even a reddit thread and several sub-reddits started by actual business owners who are pissed off about them vandalizing the community. https://www.reddit.com/r/rva/comments/8a48kh/why_is_conscious_community_wear_committing/

Since then, I’ve written children’s books, I’m a designer for an actual clothing line named Art & Co Brand, not a T-shirt line and I've basically been an artist for the better part of my life. I’ve done graphics for record labels, etc. You can go to my online portfolio and see that I'm legit. It's https://www.behance.net/me163.  My instagram is https://www.instagram.com/me163/ 

When this clown resurfaced as Conscious Community Wear, at first I was kind of relieved that he finally came up with his own ideas... and then, I saw that he had been using MY artwork and bastardized versions of my old artwork and arbitrarily appropriating it to his stuff. 

I contacted Conscious Community Wear and asked them to stop and got no response, so now I'm going this route.