Our Story

Contraband didn’t start with investors or a big launch. It started in a 300-square-foot studio in Miami Beach: a bed, a TV, and racks of inventory everywhere else. That one room was the warehouse, the office and the shipping department, packing orders and sending stock out to Amazon Prime.

In September 2014, I started talking to a woman online named Marilia. Our first conversation was about 90s music. She was in New York at the time, working on the yacht she managed, and we talked until 2 a.m. She’s been part of every chapter since, and eventually she took the lead on Pink Label, our women’s line.

From the studio we moved to Parc Loft, 1,200 square feet of real space in downtown Miami. That’s where we bought our first digital printer and started making apparel in-house. Then came 2,400 square feet, hundreds of orders a day, and embroidery added to the mix.

Then COVID hit, and the world shut down. Our resistance bands carried us for a few weeks before selling out, with the next restock nine months away. So we designed a reusable sport mask. For a short stretch it hit #1 on Amazon, and we were shipping around 2,000 orders a day. At the same time, the gyms we worked with needed custom apparel to keep selling through the shutdowns.

That momentum took us to a 5,500-square-foot facility in Allapattah, in the heart of Miami. It was our dream space. We had room to ship more, do all of our custom apparel under one roof, and build the strongest version of Contraband yet.

Then real life showed up. On Valentine’s Day 2023, everything stopped. Marilia was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. She went through a double mastectomy that took months to recover from. Then came 16 rounds of chemotherapy, four of them high-dose. Then 25 radiation sessions, five days a week for five weeks. Treatment doesn’t care about launch dates or inventory counts, and for a long stretch the business came second. She faced every part of it head-on, with more strength than I knew a person could have. If you’ve ever wondered what “real women, real work” means at Pink Label, that’s where it comes from.

Coming out of that, we made a hard call. We closed the Allapattah facility and moved into a smaller space. We cut down to fewer products, carried less overhead, and focused on the gloves people actually love. Some people would call that going backwards. We call it being honest about what it takes to last.

That’s the part of building a brand nobody posts about. It isn’t a straight line, and it isn’t about getting rich. It’s about getting back up, packing the next order, and making something you’re proud to put your name on. More than a million products later, we’re still here. Still training, still building, still Contraband.

— Chris & Marilia