How it started
Early life
Carl Williams was born in Costa Rica to a Panamanian father and Costa Rican mother, both of Jamaican descent. The family migrated to the United States in the late 1960s, and he grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Early career
At age 16, Williams started designing clothes after learning the essential handcraft at his father's company. He never studied tailoring or design, but he would buy material and tell a tailor exactly how he wanted his garments to look, enabling him to have "fresh outfit(s) that nobody (else) had." Eventually, people who saw him wearing these outfits in clubs began asking for Carl Williams clothes of their own, and he began taking orders for them.
In 1989 he went to Los Angeles, where he and a friend opened a clothing shop on Crenshaw Boulevard. They made no profit at this location, and after the shop was robbed, they moved to Hollywood, where he started selling catalogs for $2 that he and his partner had put together. They only made profit from the catalog sales and did not sell any clothes. He decided to take out an advertisement in Right On! Magazine, but that did not jumpstart sales.
From Wikipedia’s article on Kani Ladies, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2