UNUS VIRTUS

The purpose behind the Brand-

A clothing brand was not something thought of in the early days of my life. The concept of a brand stemmed from my inability to record music in a quiet environment. My passion for the arts has always been greater than anything in the world, specifically music. In my early life, music became a foundation for all the emotions I wanted to express. In the following years, as I grew older, it became the foundation of a message I wanted the world to hear. I hoped that with every song, I would get the world to love more. With every song, I would get people to change for the better. With my inability to record songs to accomplish this, I quickly searched for another medium that could help me spread the same message.

Majority of the credit for my accomplishments is owed to S.B.A., a girl that I dated during the most important years of my life. During these pivotal years, she quickly became someone who influenced all the decisions that would later change who I became. Through our time together, she helped me organize my professional career, pick and choose what I believed in, and aided me on my journey towards a better future.

The concept for the brand dates back to the year 2018. At this time, I hoped to finish writing my mixtape “Loveaphilia I” under the pseudonym Fazko. However, I quickly became frustrated with my inability to turn the rough drafts of my songs into finished recordings, and we began brainstorming an alternative solution. I had came to the realization that my dreams to stand in front of a crowd and sing my songs wouldn’t go away, but my message would be easier to deliver through other means.

By the beginning of 2019, I had cancelled the launch of my musical project “loveaphilia I” since the project was nowhere near finished. At this point in time, S.B.A. and I had already brainstormed a few names for the clothing brand. These names consisted of; LOVEAPHILIA; LUVRS, CO; The Nonbelievers; LOVE IMPACT; Visionary Psychedelic; VSNRYwav; VICE/VIRTUE and ultimately “ONE VIRTUE”.

UNUS VIRTUS indirectly translates to ONE VIRTUE through a grammatically incorrect translation in the latin language.

Originally, I fell in love with the “Vice / Virtue” concept that I had created during this time. However, to make the brand more appealing to the general public, it had to be a phrase that everyone could say, read and relate to. “Vice/Virtue” was an idea that resonated with our everyday lives. The meaning behind it was, ‘We all hold some form of bad above the good. It is a universal concept within the reality of being human. No one is perfect, but despite the bad, there is always some form of good hiding beneath the surface’.

Calling the brand VICE/VIRTUE didn’t make a lot of sense when it came to marketing. Linguistically, it would not feel comfortable for anyone to pronounce the name, and through conversation, the pause between the words would make the name feel awkward. I vividly remember an article that stated something along the lines of, “When you come up with a name for your company, remember that the elite will always use root words for their companies so that everywhere they go, someone can understand the name in their own language”.

At the time, this article didn’t make much sense either, but I still chose to use it as a reference for what came next. I did my research and ended up understanding that a name in Latin or Greek would be the best approach for the brand. Since these two languages hold the root words for languages like English, Spanish, Italian, and French, it would make the name of my brand a lot more appealing to the general public.

I pitched the name UNE VIRTUS to S.B.A., and her initial response was to call the brand VSNRYwav. VNSRYwav was a great name for the brand, but the idea behind that name was tying it to a music medium, hence why the suffix was “wav” (like a song format). After explaining this portion to S.B.A., she supported my decision to call it UNE VIRTUS, but as you all may know, you cannot use a generic name like “love” on a trademark. To avoid this hurdle, we opted for a grammatically incorrect translation of ONE VIRTUE in latin. Instead of One Virtue = Une Virtus we stagnated ONE = UNUS and VIRTUE = VIRTUS.

Fast forward into the future and I could not be more proud of the name we decided on. The brand has been worked on for the past couple of years and I still feel the same level of pride that I did all those years ago. 6 years into the making and we are still set to turn it into a global phenomenon.

UNUS VIRTUS, THIS IS MY VIRTUE, WHAT’S YOURS?