08/10/2026
We’ve picked up quite a few new followers lately, so I figured it was probably a good time to reintroduce ourselves and share a little bit about how Beknown came to be.
We’re JJ and Ashley — and despite how much the business has grown, Beknown is still very much a husband-and-wife operation.
Before Beknown, I owned and operated a digital marketing company, working mostly with small businesses. Around the same time, Ashley started BB Hats from a spare bedroom in our house.
And I have to give her some credit here because saying she simply “started a hat business” doesn’t really do it justice.
Ashley built BB Hats into an online business that sold more than $1 million worth of women’s caps. She figured out the systems, inventory, fulfillment and about a thousand other things that come with growing an online business from scratch.
Eventually, some of my marketing clients started asking if we could make custom hats for their businesses. We gave it a shot, apparel came shortly after, and Beknown was born.
Like BB Hats, it started at home. A spare bedroom turned into the basement, and eventually we outgrew both and leased an 800 sq. ft. space in uptown Potosi.
As Beknown continued to grow, we made the decision to sell BB Hats, get out of retail completely, and put our energy into what we really enjoyed — working with businesses and organizations on custom apparel and headwear.
We bootstrapped all of it. We reinvested what we made, bought equipment when we could afford it, learned a lot the hard way and just kept building.
A couple years later, we purchased our current property — a 3,000+ sq. ft. commercial building on five acres. We remodeled the inside before moving in earlier this year, and the outside is still very much a work in progress.
Getting here required some sacrifices. We downsized our home so we could eventually leave our corporate jobs. We sold our dream car to put the money toward the property. And there have been a whole lot of long days, late nights and weekends mixed in along the way.
Today, the two of us move nearly 50,000 custom pieces a year through Beknown. We service not only local businesses, but ship custom gear all over the country.
And while you probably hear from me or see me posting more often, Ashley is the rock that holds this place together. Her work ethic is ridiculous, but even more valuable is her ability to keep a clear head when there are 100 things happening at once. She keeps orders moving, catches the things I miss, keeps me grounded and has a way of bringing order to the chaos.
I genuinely don’t know how I’d do this without her.
There’s no big production crew hiding behind the scenes. It’s still the two of us doing the work.
That’s also why our showroom is open by appointment only. A “normal business day” doesn’t really exist around here. You might find us printing at 5 AM, delivering orders around the area at noon and trying a new lunch spot, answering emails in between and running the lasers at midnight. We’ve built our schedule around production and getting orders out the door rather than traditional retail hours — and we like it that way.
Beknown is now completely focused on B2B and wholesale custom apparel and headwear. No retail store or stacks of inventory. We get to spend our time doing what started this whole thing in the first place: helping other businesses put their brand on really cool stuff.
We’re still building, changing and figuring things out as we go, but I’m pretty damn proud of what we’ve built together.
So, if you’re new here — welcome! And if you’ve been around since the spare-bedroom days, thanks for sticking with us. 🤘
— JJ
