The News & Observer
By Elizabeth Wellington
staff writer

Raleigh -- The logo is small -- a circle formed by three brushstrokes. Inside it is a tiny dot. It may not look like anything fancy, but the symbol is the foundation of Southeast Raleigh High School senior Michael Stewart's big dream to one day run a world-famous clothing company.

Right now the symbol, designed by Stewart, appears only on the long-sleeved and short-sleeved T-shirts he makes and sells through his business, Mosayk Clothing Co.Stewart, 17, uses thesymbol the same way Tommy Hilfiger uses his trademark red, white andblue box to mark hisgear.

Stewart is no Tommy. Unlike the phenomenally successful designer, Stewart counts his sales in the hundreds. But he has ambition, promise and big ideas about fashion.

So far, Stewart and his business partner, 17-year-old Leesville Road High School student Kerris Lee, estimate they have sold about 300 Mosayk T-shirts, mostly on the streets of New York and Atlanta. Stewart also designed T-shirts for his school to sell during homecoming weekend and has developed a Web site for his company, www.jamdon.com. Stewart talks to people like Carlton Brown, one of the founding members of the hip-hop clothing line FUBU, for advice. Next month, he says, he plans to start making T-shirts for women.

"Why put off tomorrow what you can do today?" Stewart asks. His voice assumes the calm, authoritative tone of a businessman, but his sky-is-the-limit attitude is a sign of his youth.

"We are serious about our goals," he says, "and we want other people to know we are serious. We are not just teenagers."

The main reason Stewart started designing clothes, he said, was because popular designers were not diverse in their approach. In his opinion, Ralph Lauren, for example, has made a mint marketing sportswear to white youth, while FUBU's Brown markets his urban wear to predominantly black youth. There was no clothing out there that was a natural fit to all races. And that's what he's trying to do with Mosayk designs that combine symbols of various cultures: the Eiffel tower, for example, with an Egyptian pyramid.

"I don't see anything out there like that," Stewart says.

Getting focused

As a youngster in Brooklyn, N.Y., Stewart would take the scraps offabric discarded by hismother, Adeline Isaacs, and make clothing for G.I. Joe figures. OneHalloween, he made aBatman costume for himself, complete with cape and mask.

"He was always into something," said Isaacs, who earned a degree infashion from New York'sFashion Institute of Technology. Isaacs never worked full time infashion, however, because it'shard to break into the industry while caring for two children.

When Stewart was 11, he started hanging out with a rough crowd. So hisstepfather, CaswellIsaacs, sent him to live with relatives in northeast Raleigh tostraighten him out. The rest of thefamily followed several months later.

As part of Isaacs' plan to keep his stepson on the straight and narrow, he insisted Stewart watch the news every day before playing with his friends. At first, Stewart hated the nightly ritual. But eventually he grew to like the business news segment on CNN.

"All the numbers would confuse me," Stewart said. "But I was determined to understand what was going on, and eventually I enjoyed it."

Kerris Lee moved into Stewart's subdivision in 1996. Lee was strait-laced and serious minded; the two became fast friends while trekking back and forth every day to Carnage Middle School.

Stewart watched the baggy jeans and colorful T-shirts from hip-hop culture cross over to the mainstream. The clothing was nice, Stewart thought, but too expensive. Then, in 1998, he had an idea: Why not try to make his own line to sell to his friends? Stewart asked Lee to be his business partner.

Stewart spent most of his ninth-grade year clipping articles and surfing the Internet for information about famous designers. He also got a job working for Willie Sinclair at Raleigh Tees, a company that makes and sells T-shirts. He learned how to put silkscreen images on shirts.

Stewart's first T-shirt design incorporated the initials "RC," which stood for "real casanova." It was a design for the lady's man. Lee and Stewart spent months on the idea, but it never made it on an actual shirt.

"We just grew out of that concept," Stewart said.
Next, they came up with the idea of a design built around the word "chalice." It had a nice ring to it, but that's about all.

"No one wants to wear a cup," Lee laughed one day last week, wearing a red, long-sleeved T-shirt with four Mosayk symbols on it called "Mosayk Untitled." "There was no basis for chalice. What would it mean?"

Putting his stamp on it/Beyond MOSAYK

Then one day Stewart dropped his encyclopedia while talking to Lee on the phone; it fell open tothe word "mosaic" -- a piece of art made with pieces of colored glassor stone. The word,Stewart thought, naturally lent itself to a multicultural line ofclothing. Stewart changed thespelling to personalize it.

"That was it," Stewart said. "It was like a godsend."

Within weeks, Stewart came up with a logo, which he calls a "Mosaykpiece." Each of the three brush strokes has a meaning: motivation, success and knowledge. The small dot in the middle was a symbol of the new millennium. The logo became the centerpiece of Stewart's creations, which he would repeat in various patterns or combine with other symbols.

Stewart saved most of the he needed to get Mosayk off the ground and named himself CEO; Lee became the company's concept engineer.

Stewart wanted to design clothing that showed a unity of different cultures -- something both he and Lee could appreciate from experience. Stewart's mom is from Sierra Leone; Lee's mother is black, his dad Asian-American. Right now there are four designs of Mosayk shirts, including one called "Mosayk Balance" which includes a pyramid and the Chinese symbols of yin and yang.

"People make clothing for style purposes, but no one tries to combine style and culture," Stewart said.

Last fall, they got their first big order when Southeast Raleigh High principal John Modest hired Mosayk to design the school's homecoming T-shirts.

"We needed a very creative design for Homecoming 2000," Modest said. "He met with the adviser and gave us exactly what we needed. He is an impressive young man."

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Black and white samples of four Mosayk designs hang on the wall in company headquarters -- Stewart's bedroom in Northeast Raleigh, where he has lived with his sister since his parents moved to Washington. Although the office might be humble, Stewart can see beyond it. His business dreams don't stop with clothes. Under the umbrella of another company, JamDon Global Connections, Stewart wants to manage entertainers.

Sinclair, who has mentored the duo for years, says the plan is a reach, but not beyond the realm of possibility.

"There is no such thing as being too ambitious," Sinclair said. "The drive is there and I think they have a very good chance of succeeding."

In the meantime Stewart and Lee have to finish high school. After graduation, Stewart plans to join the U.S. Army to carry on a family tradition and to help him pay for school, where he wants to study business. Lee hopes to enroll at N.C. State University. They hope to continue working on the business together via the Internet. Girls and their studies have no chance of distracting them, they say -- at least for now.

"We are determined and we have drive," Stewart says. "We believe we can do it, and we can."