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After meeting at Atlanta's Morehouse College, Brooklyn natives Brian Wright and Desmond Attmore collaborated on a clothing brand. They hustled their merch into the hands of hip-hop artists like Lil Wayne and Wiz Khalifa, and that led to marketing gigs for other musical artists. In 2018, the pair founded Six Degrees, a marketing agency known for experiential campaigns rooted in a sense of community, like the fashion showcases featuring local designers that they've hosted for the NFL at the past three Super Bowls. As Wright explains, the pair have spun their outsider status in the marketing world into an advantage--and a company with 35 employees that reached eight-figure revenue last year and has a client list that includes HBO, Instagram, and Nike. --As told to Kevin J. Ryan

"Pandora was one of the first brands that let us completely come up with the strategy. They wanted to engage with HBCUs; Morehouse and Spelman had both voiced the desire to have better talent at homecoming, but like a lot of HBCUs, they lacked funding. We always ask ourselves how we can help the community we're engaging with. In this case, we hosted a joint talent show with appearances from 21 Savage and Drake, and it was a huge hit.

"Once the business started getting bigger, we noticed there were things we didn't really have the answers for. We had to take a peek around the industry and see how we could speak the same language. We said, 'Oh, we need to hire a GM, we need a head of production.' So we hired those people and educated ourselves. Now that we're competing with the big dogs, sometimes we get looked at like, 'Are they capable?' But I think of it as a strength.

"We've definitely seen times when things haven't gone our way because we didn't conform. There was a major brand doing an activation at a tech conference, and they reached out because they thought we could give them the sauce it was lacking. After a few rounds of pitches, they wanted us to scale back our creativity and give them more traditional ideas. We opted out because the project no longer aligned with who we are as a company. We tell brands, 'We know your audience because we are your audience.' We've learned that if we stay true, we always come out on top.

"The thing that got us our first dollar is gonna get us our last dollar. We're a perfect mix of advertising agency mixed with creative agency mixed with music mixed with culture. We're playing in this space practically by ourselves. We knew that if we put in the work, it was gonna be explosive."

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