Matt Choon got his first taste of investing with sneakers.
He started trading them for fun when he was around 12. As a teenager, he didn’t have much money, and he recalled the rush of taking $200 in birthday cash to SoHo to buy a used pair of statement sneakers from a stranger on Facebook.
“Teenage Matt definitely was obsessed with the internet and looking cool,” he said.
When he came home with his 2003 Nike SBs, his mom “flipped out” at the price he’d paid, he recalled. But as he bought more sneakers to resell or trade for a profit, “she realized it was me becoming an entrepreneur.”
Choon, 26, went on to found multiple businesses: Potion, a CBD brand; Bowery Showroom, a retail space and hub for creatives in Lower Manhattan; and Bowery Agency, a marketing firm. The showroom and agency are part of Choon’s Lower East Ventures LLC and have pulled in five figures of revenue per month in recent months, according to records provided to MarketWatch. Choon said all three businesses are consistently profitable and gross five to six figures per month combined.
A native New Yorker, Choon grew up on the Lower East Side and went to elementary school in Chinatown and middle and high school in Chelsea. In middle school, he met his best friend Takeshi Fukui, now his business partner and roommate in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
After high school, Choon got into CUNY’s prestigious Macaulay Honors College, which allowed him to study tuition-free at Baruch College. He switched gears there from studying finance to entrepreneurship, and got his feet wet starting an app and hustling through business competitions.
He tried and failed at day trading, and recalled the pain of losing a hard-earned $3,000 by the time he closed his Robinhood account.
His luck changed with crypto. Choon told MarketWatch he sold stocks and put the cash in his bank account into Ethereum — most of what he had at the time. He saw the low five figures he invested soar to more than $100,000 and then fall, he recalled, still landing, at the time, at more than double what he’d invested. He went on to earn much more.
He worked as an economics tutor during college and said he took $1,000 of his earnings from that job to start his CBD brand, Potion. The brand started in fall 2018 when he bought a bunch of CBD gummies from a local deli, which he repackaged, rebranded and resold for a profit at the Hester Street Fair.
He went on to get a 9-to-5 digital marketing job at a crypto firm and sold CBD gummies on the weekends at parties and street fairs, growing the business. He was earning enough from Potion that he decided to leave his full-time job in August 2019.
Fast forward to 2020 and the pandemic era. Choon owned a pair of vintage Air Jordan 4s that he took to a shoe repair shop in Bushwick. He recognized the owner as a shoe designer who used to have a store in the East Village. After a conversation, Choon said the man took him to the back, where he had a slew of vintage designer clothes, and told him there were even more in a warehouse. Choon bought a black garbage bag stuffed with clothes for $300.
“We’re talking about like $500 T-shirts that are crumpled up, smelled like bleach, dirty, disgusting,” Choon recalled. “But to me it was like a treasure.” He bought many more bags from the seller, and washed, ironed and tagged them to get them ready for sale. He posted what he was doing on TikTok.
He returned to the Hester Street fair with cannabis products and this time, vintage clothes. Interest exploded thanks to his TikTok posts.
“So now I’m this micro influencer overnight,” he said.
As he continued to buy more clothes to sell at fairs, he needed a place to store them. He found a store on Craigslist, “really cheap because it was still during Covid,” and in serious need of repair.
He used some of his crypto earnings to get the space ready for a sample sale, and at that sale, he sold enough to fund renovations.
These days, the Bowery Showroom is a retail space for clothes and cannabis products, and Choon is CEO. Brands pay to have their clothes displayed in the store, which attracts creatives and influencers. A tattoo artist and a direct-to-garment printer add to the offerings.
Through his marketing agency, Choon offers services from concept ideation to completion, employing videographers, editors and social media writers to make content. There’s also a hospitality component.
Looking back, Choon noted he never had business plans for his businesses before he started. He learned as he went along.
“My biggest teacher is the experience itself,” he said. “Understanding what my customers wanted, what I wanted, what performed well, trial and error, those are all things that got us to this point. But my professional background, things I was interested in when I was young, provided me the foundation.”
Julia-Barrett-Mitchell contributed to this story.
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