Fli Pelican is a lifestyle brand that originally started out as a small t-shirt line with a bit more passion and thought than the other’s. It quickly snow-balled into something bigger with celebrities like Teyana Taylor, G-Mack and Travis Porter dawning his t-shirts.
Most see brands like Fli Pelican and believe they came out of nowhere, but there’s always a struggle that matches the story. Nino (the designer and creator of Fli Pelican) invites us to the Fli Pelican studio in the heart of Atlanta to talk fashion, life, art, music, Amber Rose and Marc Jacobs.
Walking into the driveway of his studio is something like a set of a movie. The whole downstairs is a working factory with shirts, designs, and machines everywhere. A bulky man with lengthy dreads and an petite and attractive woman pressing shirts like a Vietnamese sweatshop, but it looks like they’re having more fun and better dressed, quite frankly. We walk upstairs into a huge studio and office space with Fli Pelican designs against white walls and the sun blairing through the long windows, playfully bouncing off wood-paneled floors. Shirts, papers, and apparel are neatly stacked everywhere on shelves. It’s reminiscent of Warhol’s Factory revisited, but with a Hip-Hop disposition that is fresh and quirky.
Myself and the Greedmont team sits on the comfortable leather coaches parallel to the man of the hour, Nino. With only art-books and opportunity between us, I dive right into the good stuff with the prolific CEO and designer.
“Art is life. I feel like I’m a walking body of art.”
he’s not only referencing his tattoos, but his lifestyle. It’s apparent that Nino lives and dies for the funk. This isn’t just a hobby, more than a profitable business. It’s a passion, a lifestyle. He speaks a bit about style. “Style is secondary to art. With no style there is no art.”
I delve into the thought and history behind the brand. I discover the FLI isn’t a misspelled gloat. It stands for ‘finding love inside’. The pelican isn’t just a joyful mascot either. Nino shares a story of selflessness that involves a mother Pelican killing herself to feed her children. The reoccurring rope in the designs represents his team as a group and a theme of unity. I knew from that point that this isn’t your average brand or your average clothing designer. This was a man with a purpose and a clothing line with a meaning, a rarity in street-wear. “I felt there was a void that needed to be filled.”
Nino is hailing from Detroit, originally migrating to Atlanta to pursue a career in music production. “I had a production deal at the time, thinking I was going to make money. Because in Atlanta it was popping.” The venture was fruitful with Nino selling independently five-thousand off of his first mixtape and three-thousand off of his second. It was appearing that all the fruit was picked with the attack of snap-music that happened and Nino was making more east-coast, authentic Hip-Hop oriented beats. He tells stories of living in his manager’s house and sleeping on his son’s bunk-bed. That’s when Nino quickly knew it was time to transition and he put his love of aesthetics and his new found ability to create t-shirts to use.
More like a phoenix, than a pelican. Nino has risen above all the adversity that could have originally made anyone pack-up and head back home. Instead, he started Fli Pelican. Music is still a focus of his. “I don’t get in-depth with music like I use to. I do more executive producing.” The brand is clearly the main focus. The brand that makes cultural, both historical and pop, commentary and mixes original art with other images. Mixing the references creates a unique experience of clothing that anyone with red-blood cells properly commuting to the brain would want to be apart of. It’s still about the positivity, though than the money. “We like to make money off the positive energy we’re bringing out there.” With all of this positivity it’s easy to make it look easy, but I had to know what drives Nino to do it everyday, to keep working harder. “People that pay me”, he laughs. “Nah, it’s what we do. It’s our lifestyle.” Nino takes pride in the fact the Fli Pelican brand isn’t just style over substance. There’s real work, energy, thought, sweat, blood, and tears that go into what you see in your local boutique or online store. “We do everything A-Z here. Everything is done inside this building. Including manufacturing.” He rightfully brags about the dynasty that he has created for himself. “That’s what has been created. A lifestyle brand.” Fli Pelican isn’t limited to just their own art and work, though that is understandably the primary concern, they are always looking at what other people are doing and participating in. As you can witness on the highly successful lifestyle blog, www.flipelican.com.
“We like supporting other things [...] It’s all inspiration.”
Nino is an artist’s artist. Drawing and being creative since he was young and originally looking towards a career that little may have known. “I have always been drawing … I wanted to be an architect.” Fret not, designers who aren’t as gifted. “I don’t think that it makes you less of a clothing designer if you don’t know how to draw.”
Fli Pelican might be huge now, but it’s only going to get better. The conversation gets juicier when Nino let’s us know the future plans of the Fli Pelican brand. He cites Paul Frank as a reference that he isn’t just doing clothing. “We’re going to start doing rugs and furniture.” Also with fashion he’s doing more than t-shirts. Nino is setting up a denim line with the addition of button-ups, cargo-shorts, cardigans, and jackets. He tells Greedmont Park exclusively, his first time for his plans to open a boutique in the near future. “We’re actually working on opening up a store in July [in Atlanta]. Instead of flagship store, we’re calling them FLIship stores.” He’s now considering between the upscale, rejuvenated area of Buckhead or the too-cool-for-school Little 5 Points locations. He’s also creatively collaborating with Hip-Hop’s golden child of 2010, Wiz Khalifa. “We just did the Wiz Khalifa t-shirt and [I’m in talks with Warner Brothers Records] to do his whole merchandise line.”
With all of this progress, Nino still finds time to dish about pop culture and celebrities, namely Marc Jacobs and Amber Rose. Fli Pelican loves Amber Rose. I ask if the references to pop culture in the shirts are negative or positive. “A little both.”, he responds. In reference to the notorious vixen, Amber Rose. “She [Amber Rose] took that [Kanye’s] celebrity and made it into avenues of her own … other people take it and use it negatively.” Kaws is one of his favorite contemporary artists. Nino even watched his last art-show via internet, though his schedule hardly permitted it. I ask Nino about his favorite designer and he didn’t think twice. “My favorite designer period is Marc Jacobs. It’s clean and good work. But you can also get something from twenty-dollars to two-thousand dollars. The range is dope. There’s something for everybody.” He even names Marc as one of the future collaborations that he would like to do. “I don’t want to call it. Marc Jacobs would be cool to work with. Wiz is one of my favorite artists, and I got to work with Wiz. That was cool. If I get Marc Jacobs, I guess, I’ll be complete.”
For Fli Pelican as a brand, the collaborations and celebrity appearances are just simply extra. “I want to effect people in a positive way.” He clears up any misinterpretations about the line. “It’s the lifestyle. There’s so many clothing lines, but it’s really the lifestyle.” He adds, “We do our own thing. Fli Pelican is for the selected, not for everybody … We’re not a certain type of a line, we’re our own type of line.” His passion for his brand doesn’t stop either as he continues to separate himself from the masses. “I call it street-wear, but its really not. It’s Fli Pelican.”
Fli Pelican is worldwide garnering orders from Canada, France, and he’s actively debating venturing out to Tokyo, but he’s not sure he wants to risk the idea of being seen as cliche.
“We use to call for placements, now we get calls from other people. Now, it’s like a selection process.”
Nino sees Fli Pelican growing with ten flagships stores worldwide within the upcoming years. Fli Pelican is unstoppable and it’s really just an option of getting with it or heading for cover. High and low, Fli Pelican is flying to a closet near you helping us all find the love inside.
- Myles E. Johnson
*photos of the interview: Kyle Allen
