Meet Bryan Phillips of Swell Guy Customs in Long Beach

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bryan Phillips.

Bryan, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I’ve always been creating art in some way. When I was a kid, I would create my own Pokemon and Star Wars characters. I loved making my own characters that I could see being in my favorite cartoons. As I got older, I mostly just doodled in my notes during class but didn’t really consider myself an artist because everyone around me was so much better. When I got to college, I needed to take an art class for credit. It was the first time in my life I really took my art seriously and tried to learn to be a better artist. After that class, I continued with more classes in digital art, illustration, and sculpture. I was still uncertain with what style and direction I wanted to go with my art but I mostly connected to graphic design.

A few years ago, I was struggling with finding the right Christmas gift for my brother. I came across this article about how professional athletes get their own custom sneakers. I had always figured Nike and Adidas were supplying these unique designs to the players, but as a matter of fact, it was just a bunch of artists hand painting them. I thought to myself, “Well, I can do that.” So for the next month, I worked on my very first pair of custom shoes. After giving them to my brother, we took photos of them and shared them on Instagram. We got a pretty nice reaction to them. I got a bunch of people asking me how they can get a pair and got a few orders out of it. It was the first time anyone was willing to pay for my artwork and it’s when I realized I had found my medium.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not at all. It’s had plenty of highs and lows. When I first started in early 2017, I was working an office job full time and had over an hour commute every morning and 2 hours coming back home. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on custom shoes and it would take me a month just for one pair. I was only working on client shoes but I had so many new ideas I wanted to try, but didn’t have time for. It was hard to build a portfolio with variety. In my first year of customizing, I only worked on about 7-8 pairs with only about 4 of them being new original ideas.

In spring of 2018, I was laid off from my full-time job. I took this as a sign and a chance to really try to become a full-time self-employed artist. I was driven to make this a reality even if I failed. I needed to know if I could make a living on my art. I needed this. Well, a week later I broke my foot while I was out hiking with friends. I had completely shattered my heel in 5 places and needed surgery to repair it. I had to pay for insurance out of pocket since I was unemployed and I had to scramble to find a doctor for my surgery. I spent the next few months in bed with my leg elevated, my shoes on my lap, and my paint supplies on my nightstand painting away.

During that time, one of my custom shoes, the Slime Time Nike Uptempos, started getting shared around on Instagram including the Angelus company page. Angelus Brand is the company that makes the paint that I and most other customizers use. My follower count started rising and they even invited me to shoot a tutorial for their YouTube channel.

One video turned into more videos and I developed a good working relationship with Angelus. In January 2019, they hired me on full time to help expand their YouTube channel. Together we filmed a new video every week and introduced new ideas and series to the channel. Unfortunately, my employment with Angelus ended after a few months as they let me go in May for business reasons. So I’m back again to being a self-employed artist working towards the next great idea and the next commission. At least this time, my leg is fully healed.

But being self-employed is hard. I’m an artist first and not very business-minded. It can be really difficult to convince people that they need my work because I don’t want to come across as overbearing and pushy. The work I do is a mix of art and fashion and if my art doesn’t fit someone’s fashion sensibility then the order might not go through. Gathering a following hasn’t been too difficult but translating that into an income is a daily struggle.

Most of all, I think my biggest struggle is staying motivated and confident in my work. I take my art pretty personally and it sometimes feels weird having to sell what is essentially a piece of me. I’ll come up with what I feel is a million dollar idea and if I put it out there and it doesn’t get the response I expected, it can kind of chip away at you. I really believe in my work and have to remind myself that not everyone is going to have the connection to it that I do. I have to learn to separate my own self worth from the business side of things. It’s a daily struggle and learning process.

Swell Guy Customs – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Swell Guy Customs provides high-quality hand painted custom sneakers made especially towards your interests. I can take any sneaker and any concept/theme/general interest and make something one of a kind for you. Each pair is painted using professional leather paint that is made to last as long as the life span of any retail shoe. Something I think sets me apart is that I was an artist before I was a customizer. I have a skill set to paint in a range of styles from bold cartoons to detailed portraits and landscapes. I’m not just someone with a love of shoes and a box of paintbrushes. I have experience in design and illustration that helps me create custom shoes that look retail. That’s important to me. I want my custom shoes to be artistically pleasing but also to work within the design of the sneaker. When you’re a sneaker customizer, you’re working with two audiences; the art crowd and the fashion crowd. I put a lot of effort to make sure my designs excite both.

I’m very pop culture influenced and it shows in my work. I’m constantly soaking in new music, movies, cartoons, comics, etc. and I sometimes strike lightning in a bottle by incorporating these things in a pair of shoes. I’m also heavily inspired by nature and all of its colors and patterns around me. I am constantly taking photos of things that inspire me so I can later find a way to incorporate it in a custom.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
It’s a bit hard to say because I’m still pretty early in my career. There’s a few instances that come to mind that I remember feeling really proud.

It’s a pretty unanimous goal for any customizer first starting out to have their work shared by much bigger accounts with a wider audience. I remember being out with friends on Memorial Day weekend a couple of years ago and I was randomly scrolling through my phone. I check Instagram and suddenly I see my Slime Time Air Uptempo posted on the Angelus Direct Instagram account. I had to do a double take because I thought maybe I saw it wrong. There it was. My work being shared by the company that makes the supplies I use. They’re the center of the shoe customizing world. I suddenly felt recognized and appreciated for my work. That post from Angelus led to a bunch of other accounts sharing my work and my follower count grew. It’s kind of the growing point of my career.

That post led to me being invited by the Angelus team to come shoot a YouTube tutorial for them. Everything I learned about customizing shoes came from their YouTube channel, so to be considered good enough to shoot a video and teach other budding customizers was HUGE to me. When my video was uploaded to their channel, it felt so surreal. I started doing more and more videos with them and I’ve had people reach out to me to thank me for the videos. They tell me how much they learn from them and ask me for more advice. That means so much to me. I’ve always valued the ability to be able to pass knowledge around and to find my own way to be a teacher is important to me.

Pricing:

• Pricing is usually dependent on the shoe and the design, ranging from as low as $150 to upwards of $400+

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: instagram.com/swellguycustoms
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SwellGuyCustoms/
• Other: twitch.tv/swellguybrybry

Image Credit:
Bryan Phillips – Swell Guy Customs

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