In recognition of National Black Business Month, BET.com is highlighting Black business leaders who are inspiring the next generation. 

He didn’t know it then, but Hamilton Perkins, whose rapidly growing business makes bags from recycled materials, began planting the seeds for his company in middle school. “I would take old Source and Slam magazines apart and sell them as locker decoration art,” the Virginia Beach native tells BET.com. “That was one of the first things I did entrepreneurially. From there, I just kept making products from recycled materials.” 

His passion paid big dividends and led to the creation of the Hamilton Perkins Collection, which has drawn attention from big boosters, including Ellen Degeneres, who featured his products on her show, and from fellow Virginian Pharrell Williams, who made a big investment in Perkins’ business as part of his business incubator program Black Ambition Prize. How Perkins got there is a story of steady smart moves, unwavering faith in his ideas and ability, and a little luck of being in the right place at the right time. “I don’t think about the [negative] statistics,” he says. “Is there an upper hand that others have? Sure, but I think a lot of times, we don’t go for things because we don't think it's for us. We don't think that we can actually be successful because of how things might be presented. In my case, I got some of the most successful people that you can imagine on the phone to just give me advice on what I was doing or how to make a deal just by asking.” 

That’s how he got his training. After studying business at Old Dominion University -- where he had a side hustle making and selling T-shirts for classmates --, Perkins went on to work in the marketing department for a bank, where he accumulated a wealth of knowledge by taking advantage of the resources before him. “I was always the person that was volunteering to do stuff,” says Perkins, who has since moved his business, Hamilton Perkins Collection, to Los Angeles. “I sought out a lot of mentors within the bank, different people in different departments, and kind of created my own curriculum outside of what I had to do for my actual day job.” His humility and hustling led to a huge investment in the form of an executive MBA program at William & Mary, paid for by the company. “I didn't have the capital to really do that but I got a proposal together, presented it to my big boss, and ultimately, by the time they saw the proposal, they said, ‘We fully back you on this opportunity.’ That was a really good turning point, because I got this exposure going to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Madrid, and Athens as part of the program. That exposed me to tons of people in different industries just kind of soaking up everything, and I brought all of that into Hamilton Perkins Collection.” 

Perkins poured all that knowledge and passion into the business with a formal launch in 2014. Hamilton Perkins Collection offers a range of products, from bags to luggage and bottles, all made from recycled goods, including billboards, garments, sailboat sails, and pineapple leaf fibers. Some businesses even give Perkins’ company materials that would otherwise be headed for a landfill or would cost them disposal fees, allowing Perkins to turn trash into treasure. And the business is growing, big time: not only is Hamilton Perkins Collection gaining more attention from investors and incubator programs like Pharrell’s, but the company is continuing to invest in itself by exploring new ways to use chemistry, biology and technology to break down fibers from one product and reuse them for another. Perkins has come a long way from selling locker decorations, but the vision -- and the hustler’s spirit -- is the same. 

“You gotta have faith, and you can’t compare yourself to somebody else’s journey,” he says. “You don't know what that other company or what those founders did to get to that point, if they worked a 100 hour week or how they got that first customer. You have to just run your own race, and know you can do it.”