Long before Actively Black became an athleisure company, Lanny Smith had organized his life around basketball. The Missouri City, Texas, native starred at Hightower High School, played for the University of Houston and signed with the Sacramento Kings in 2009. Thirty-three days after signing his first NBA contract, a knee injury ended his playing career. Smith has spoken openly about the depression and identity crisis that followed: basketball had not simply been his work; it was the future he had imagined since childhood.
The dream that ended after 33 days
His first route out of that period was another apparel business. In 2011, working from his mother's home and with early backing from friends Anthony Tolliver and Stephen Curry, Smith started Active Faith, a faith-based sportswear brand. It made about $100,000 in its first year and eventually reached customers in more than 70 countries. The company taught him manufacturing, fulfillment and ecommerce, but it also exposed a tension. Smith said he often kept himself out of the brand's public story because he worried that some customers would react differently if they knew a young Black founder was behind it.
A brand that would not hide its founder
Actively Black emerged from the opposite premise. Smith has connected the idea to the pride he felt watching Black Panther and to the summer of 2020, when companies issued public pledges after George Floyd's murder. He saw an athletic-apparel industry that had earned billions from Black athletes, culture and consumers without comparable Black ownership. Instead of asking established brands to change the balance, he decided to build a company where Black identity, ownership and community investment were visible from the name onward.
Smith developed the idea with co-founder Bianca Winslow, who was then working full-time in marketing at Combs Enterprises while helping build Actively Black on the side. Their aim was not to place a slogan on generic blanks. The company would make premium performance and lifestyle apparel while using the brand as an economic vehicle. Its public mission—to represent, uplift and reinvest in the Black community—gave the products a reason to exist before there was a product catalogue.
The audience came before the inventory
The launch strategy reflected what Smith had learned the hard way at Active Faith. Many founders order inventory and then begin looking for customers. Actively Black reversed that sequence. Smith used social media to explain the gap he saw in the market and invited people into the mission while the first collection was still being made. By launch, he says the company had gathered roughly 10,000 Instagram followers, 10,000 email subscribers and 3,000 text subscribers—a reachable audience of about 23,000 people waiting for the doors to open.
When the store launched on Black Friday in November 2020, Actively Black recorded about $55,000 in first-day sales. Shopify reports that the company generated $2.1 million in its first 12 months. Inventory expected to last roughly three months sold through in weeks, turning an encouraging launch into an operational problem: manufacturing performance garments can take 30 to 45 days, with transport adding another 30 to 45. Each new partnership or burst of attention increased demand before historical sales data could guide the next order. Growth was real, but so was the cost of repeatedly chasing it.
From a small team to the Olympic stage
The brand's credibility grew through collaborations that fit its story. It worked with Marvel on a Black Panther: Wakanda Forever collection and secured licenses connected to cultural figures and institutions including Muhammad Ali, Tupac Shakur, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Marley and HBCUs. These were not random logo exchanges. They placed Actively Black inside histories its audience already valued, while the company's licensing approach created a path for estates, families and cultural organizations to participate economically.
Sport brought the company its most visible assignments. Seun Adigun, Smith's former University of Houston classmate and a founder of Nigeria's bobsled program, asked Actively Black to outfit Team Nigeria for the 2022 Winter Olympics. The relationship expanded for Paris 2024, where the small label produced clothing for Nigeria's opening and closing ceremonies, podium appearances, Olympic Village and track-and-field competition. On the same global stage usually dominated by multinational sportswear companies, a founder-led brand with only a handful of full-time employees carried a national team.
Ownership from the seed to the stitch
Community reinvestment has remained more than a marketing line. Smith has described a commitment to directing 10 percent of revenue toward organizations working in areas such as mental health, education, social justice and physical wellness. Forbes reported in 2023 that the company had donated about $500,000 to Black communities. The model also moved upstream. In 2025, Actively Black partnered with Bridgeforth Farms, a fifth-generation Black farming family, for a premium cotton line grown on Black-owned land and made in the United States.
That supply-chain work sharpened the meaning of ownership. A Black-owned consumer label can still send most of each sale to suppliers and systems it does not control. Sourcing cotton from Black farmers allows Actively Black to connect the finished garment to land, production and economic circulation. Its official collection describes cotton grown in Alabama and North Carolina, organic materials, water-based inks and made-to-order production intended to reduce waste. The result is apparel whose sourcing story carries the same argument as the name on the chest.
What Actively Black's growth actually shows
By October 2025, Forbes reported that Actively Black had passed $30 million in gross sales before its fifth anniversary. Later hometown coverage described more than 10,000 monthly orders moving through a Houston warehouse, bringing fulfillment and jobs closer to Smith's roots. The company also launched its own app, extending the audience-first logic beyond social platforms it cannot control. Despite the scale of its public presence, reporting has continued to describe a remarkably lean core team built around Smith, Winslow and Smith's mother, Alfreda, who has handled customer service and back-end work.
The numbers are impressive, but the more useful business lesson is the order in which they happened. Smith carried operating knowledge from one company into a second, defined a gap that customers recognized, built direct audience channels before buying deeply into inventory, and chose partnerships that reinforced rather than diluted the mission. Actively Black still faces the difficult mechanics of apparel—capital, forecasting, stock and production—but it has made belonging part of its commercial engine. What began after one identity was taken away has become a company helping its customers wear another one with intention.
