Somewhere in Chicago, there is a sixth grade video of Prince Jai telling the camera two things: that he would go to culinary school and that he wanted to do carpentry on the side. Years later, deep into a career built on woodworking, fabricating, and bringing other people’s creative visions to life, he watched it back. “That’s crazy to have seen that video. I completely forgot I said that. But here we are.”

It wasn’t a straight line getting there. He was a cars and sports kid in high school, taking auto classes instead of woodshop, and had no reason to think carpentry was in his future. But, he had ideas, and eventually the ideas needed somewhere to live. If he couldn’t pitch them to someone and have them accepted, then someone had to be able to bring them to life. He decided that someone would be him. “It was like a missing piece.” What started as a way to realize his own creative vision became something much larger once the market told him what it actually needed.

The pivot happened almost by accident. Prince Jai was studying the work of artists and creatives whose stores and experiences felt meticulously built out, fully realized worlds that made their art drops and shows feel like events. He wanted that for his own work. So he started building it himself, doing whatever it took to get close to that level.

ANTMAN grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. There, the murals on the walls were memorials. People passed away and their faces went up in remembrance. Murals were signals for community. ANTMAN spent the first seven years of his life on the island before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, to live with his dad. But before any of that, and before the style that people recognize from across a room, it started with a textbook and a competitive streak. In primary school, kids would open their textbooks to pictures of animals and see who could draw the closest. "I would be so competitive that I would try to get every detail lined out so I could actually win." He usually lost, he says, not because his art was bad but because he was small and kids took advantage of that. He was unbothered, however, so he just kept drawing.

By the time Dragon Ball Z entered the picture, the competition had upgraded. He and his twin cousins would go back and forth: who could draw Goku the closest? That was where he really found his footing. "I loved it ever since then."

When Tara Coley was seven years old, she wrote herself a note. She told every teacher she had that she would make their wedding cake one day. Nobody in her family cooked or baked. There were no obvious examples, no clear path. Just something she knew. There's a kind of wisdom in that: children haven't yet learned to talk themselves out of the things they want most. Before the world starts narrowing your options, you already know who you are. Tara just needed to find the note.

She found it more than a decade later, stuffed in a notebook she pulled out of her closet. She'd already dropped out of college after one semester. Her dad had given her a choice: find a full-time job or go back to school. The full-time job on the table was custodian at Regal movie theaters. "I said, I'm not doing that full-time." So she cleaned out her closet instead.

"I scribbled to myself at the age of seven in this notebook, I want to be a pastry chef. And I was like, wait, if I wrote that, that still has to mean something now." That night, she looked up pastry schools. Found one that was a year long and applied. "The rest was history."

Some people find their calling. Deon Stubbs says it found him. Growing up, he was the one everybody wanted to record: the family entertainer. "You know how you always got that one family member that's talented, that hosts the game nights, that hosts Thanksgiving, that's funny? That was me." Before YouTube had long-form anything, he was doing it on Vine in six seconds, learning early that holding an audience was about time instinct.

That instinct eventually found a real stage. His first on-screen opportunity came with "Surviving Compton" on Lifetime, and something clicked beyond the performance itself. He started to see what storytelling could actually do for the people watching, especially in his hometown, and for the younger generation looking for someone to believe in. "At the foundation, I felt like it was my purpose to tell stories in a significant way, through a character and personality that were already mine." From there, the question was never whether he'd keep going. It was what he'd build.

What he built is “Almost Famous,” a comedy series now streaming on Amazon Prime Video following a former rising star forced to move back home and wait on his next shot. Torn between loyalty to his community and the pull of something bigger, the crew hypes each other up, self-sabotages and laughs through the chaos of being right on the edge.

Alexia Heath started Young & Stamped in November 2023 with a simple premise: she wanted to travel with people. Not a formal business plan, not a five-year projection. Just a girl who grew up taking international trips with her Navy family, who wanted to extend that feeling to people who didn't have anyone to go with. We first sat down with her in May 2024, when the company was six months old and she was still figuring out hotel logistics for her first international trip. She was learning in real time, building with both hands.

A lot has changed since then.

She's done over ten sold-out ski trips across North Carolina. She’s taken a group to the French Alps. She brought people to Colombia. She just got back from two weeks in Bali at a founders’ retreat and she's quietly in the process of launching a second travel company, Avari Travel, a fully custom planning agency for retreats and private trips. Young & Stamped was the beginning. Now there are multiple lanes.

Madeline grew up in a house of art. Her mom is an art teacher, and creativity was always encouraged, always visible. “I’ve been painting since I was three years old,” she says. She remembers seeing baby photos of herself standing at an easel, hands covered in blue paint. Art was there for moments of joy and for moments of sadness too. Drawing became a way to process whatever was happening around her. It was instinctual, almost automatic.

Writing came later, and at first, she was resistant to it. Poetry felt restrictive. Meter and rhyme were not her thing. “I thought poetry was just kinda boring,” she admits. Shakespeare did nothing for her. That changed in ninth grade, when a poetry class introduced her to emulation and showed her that poetry did not have to live inside rigid rules. Around the same time, she joined an organization called Girls Write Now, which paired her with a mentor and shifted her creative practice from something solitary into something communal. Writing stopped being something she did alone in her room and became something shared, discussed, and eventually performed. “That was the moment where a lot of my artistic practice shifted,” she says.