Today we’d like to introduce you to Ray Howard.
Hi Ray, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up in Memphis knowing two things: I loved clothes, and I wasn’t supposed to. Not the way I loved them. I was the kid with a dream that got told didn’t belong to me. So I set it down and did what made sense, I became a bodily injury adjuster. Respectable. Stable. Completely wrong for me.
My first brand started in 2017 because I got tired of not seeing myself anywhere in fashion. Not my body, not my identity, not my taste. So I taught myself everything from the ground up design, construction, screen printing, hand-embroidery, silk dyeing. No school, no mentor, no map. Just obsession and a refusal to deny my dreams any longer.
I showed in Phoenix and was featured on the morning news the day of my debut. Tell me a better sign of fate. Then Denver, from 2 models walking to 20 in just a few months. From there I’ve been invited to show in NYFW and Halifax FW. I am privileged to say I have shown coast to coast.
Then I went quiet. Some thought I was dead.
What looks like disappearing was actually transformation. The kind that takes as long as it takes, the kind that forms something forever.
Now I’m back and building something bigger than what I left. Honoring the work that started it all, and finally making room for the dream I buried when I was too young to protect it. Two visions. One house. All mine.
I didn’t get a seat at the table.
I worked nonstop for the door to open and not shut behind me. Now, I’m building the whole set. Flaws included!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Smooth? No. Not even a little.
I built everything by hand, by myself, with no blueprint and no safety net. Every skill I have I taught myself because I couldn’t afford to pay someone else and I refused to wait until I could. That’s not a humble brag that’s just the reality of being a self-funded independent designer who looked around and decided the only option was to create the world I didn’t see.
I’ve faced the financial grind that every small brand faces and then some. I’ve had moments where the dream was technically alive but I personally was running on fumes. Fashion is brutal that way. It will take everything you have and demand more, and it does not care how talented you are just how long you will keep yourself going.
Then there was the disappearing.
At a certain point I stepped away from everything social media, the public eye, the brand identity I had spent years building. It wasn’t clean or graceful. I let people believe I was gone. Not just from fashion. People who followed me thought I had died, and I let them.
Because the version of me they knew? They needed to die. That persona had carried me as far as they could, and holding onto them was costing me everything I was actually trying to become. So I put them down. Deliberately. Dramatically. A decision I made following my instincts and I would do it again if necessary. Then just silence. Stepping back to the dream and the quiet, brutal work of figuring out what fit my definition of the future.
That kind of transformation doesn’t come with a press release. It comes with loss, and stillness, and eventually if you’re lucky, clarity of the vision.
I’m not the same person who started this in 2017. That’s the whole point. I am excited to show you the dreamer becoming the creative director and CEO of something that proves dreams are meant to be followed and most rules are optional.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m a designer, a creative director, and a one-person proof of concept.
Rabbitjax is my high fashion streetwear brand. Gender-free, unapologetic, built for every body that has ever been told their standards were too high or their taste was too much. We don’t make clothes for a demographic. We make clothes for a feeling. That feeling is permission. Permission to take up space, to invest in yourself, to want beautiful things that last without apologizing for it.
What I specialize in is everything! I had to teach myself everything to be where we are now. Garment construction, screenprinting, hand-embroidery, silk dyeing, and then some. I built this brand with my own two hands because that’s how it started and because understanding every inch of the process made me a better designer and a sharper creative director.
But growth requires honesty. I realized at a certain point that doing everything myself wasn’t devotion, it was a bottleneck. The brand had outgrown me as its sole manufacturer and holding onto that was holding everything back. So I made the decision to shift to manufacturing. Not because the craft stopped mattering, but because scaling the vision matters more than protecting the process that got us here. That’s not a compromise. That’s leadership.
The rebrand to Rabbitjax International wasn’t just a name change. It was a declaration. That what started as a scrappy independent label had grown into something with a global point of view and the receipts to back it up.
What am I most proud of? Honestly, surviving my own evolution and coming out the other side with something bigger than what I started with. Most people don’t make it through the kind of transformation I went through with their vision intact. Mine didn’t just survive. It multiplied.
What sets me apart? I am the brand. Not as a gimmick, not as a marketing strategy. I am literally the proof that what I’m selling is real. Every technique, every silhouette, every philosophy came through my own hands and my own life. You can’t fake that. People feel it.
There’s also something else in the works. Something I’ve carried since I was very very young that’s finally getting its moment. Something very unique and special we’re not ready to name yet. But it’s coming. And it is going to change everything.
Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
Honestly? No. I’ve never had one. A mentor, I mean. No one took me under their wing, no one opened a door for me, no one sat me down and showed me the ropes. And I spent a long time thinking that was a disadvantage.
I’m still not sure it wasn’t.
But what I’ve learned, and I’m still learning, is that the absence of a mentor doesn’t have to mean the absence of direction. I’ve taught myself everything I know by watching, failing, experimenting, and paying attention to people who had no idea they were teaching me. Life has been my curriculum. It’s been humbling and sometimes brutal and I’m still very much in the middle of it.
I don’t have a networking success story to sell you. I’m still building those relationships. What I can say is that showing up authentically and letting people see you work, really work, tends to matter more than who you know. At least that’s what I’m banking on.
If you’re waiting for someone to validate you before you start, you might be waiting a long time. That’s the one thing I’m certain of. Everything else I’m still figuring out in real time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Rabbitjaxintl.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rabbitjaxintl?igsh=bThiZ2p5NzNtZG43
