Meet Luke (I go by Luker) Alderman of Ntuitive in Downtown

Today we’d like to introduce you to Luke (I go by Luker) Alderman.

Luke, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
To explain how the vision of Ntuitive came into fruition I have to explain how it was even possible for the idea of the concept to present itself to me in the first place and believe me I’m trying to keep it short. Throughout my life, I have always carried with me a sort of diverse perception of reality that I had never been able to explain. In 2014-2015, during my sophomore year of college, my mind began its voyage towards a complete shift in conscious awareness and purpose. During this period I moved into my very own place for the first time, so it was really the first time I was able to think for myself entirely. I started to analyze the everyday motions of society and how reality is constructed.

My first step towards conscious awareness came from me conducting vast amounts of corporate research in my spare time. Aligning correlations between societal norms and corporate business motives started making itself increasingly apparent in my everyday life. Once I developed an advanced understanding of how societies major institutions influences our everyday lives, you could say I began to truly “wake up” for the first time in my life. Inevitably this brought me to the moment I created the concept of “Intuitive” for the first time in 2015. I was a junior in college, first week of the fall semester sitting in a business communication class. The professor (who was actually a great guy, Mr. Guthrie) was literally lecturing the class on the fundamentals of a basic conversation.

Which, I understand does not come natural to everyone, but I have been an entrepreneur since I was 10 years old (washing golf balls out of creeks and selling them back to golfers the next day). Therefore, conversation is very natural to me, and the fact that I had just paid thousands of dollars to hear information I already knew made me feel ridiculous. After a few moments of banter among myself, everything I had been opening my eyes up to for the past year came into a synchronized position. Sitting there, I literally started saying to myself: “I’m too intuitive for this shit”. But it was a much deeper realization that extended far beyond the context of the classroom, the electric feeling was a reference to every time in my life that the illusion of societies “normal” activities made themselves transparent.

Then an even more evident correlation took place- I already had the understanding that the pineal gland or “third eye” is known as the root of intuition because of its ability to provide people with insight and knowledge from within themselves. I came to the realization from this that the word “intuitive” & “intuition” both contain three is. Then it completely hit me, The increasingly abundant perception that people have started to naturally feel today that something is “off” in society, is actually a product of intuition. Intuition allows us to gain knowledge and perspective without any prior awareness or evidence. Primitively intuition was used as a survival instinct among earlier civilizations to protect people against dangers that initially provided no physical evidence to be foreseen.

Keep in mind, all of this rushed through my head over the course of about 5 minutes, meanwhile, my teacher is still teaching the class how to say hello to a stranger. So, I immediately began to write down the word intuition, then eventually writing out the word intuitive. I had never been one to artistically draw in my life, so the first designs of the logo are extremely elementary, and I laugh at them today. My whole life I knew I wanted to make my own clothes purely because of my struggle to find clothes that I wanted to buy for myself. For the next year and a half, I taught myself how to draw, and eventually taught myself how to use Adobe Illustrator. After well over a year of hundreds of design samples and different versions of the ntuitive logo, I finally reached my final graphic design around the Fall of 2016.

From this point forward I knew I really had something, I incorporated the third eye symbolism into the logo by removing the dot over the third eye of the word, as it is not visible to us in reality either. During 2016 while I was finalizing the logo, I met someone who is now a very close friend of mine. He owned a small mobile embroidery machine and offered to bring it by my apartment one day. From that point forward I knew I wanted to use embroidery as the medium for my clothing designs. My friend (Chuck Nkenke) and I began to hang out very often with his machine. For about 9 months I studied the fundamentals of the embroidery process and how to use a machine.

Around this same time, I was ready to release my first series of clothes, and subsequently I decided to stop going to college as a Senior at Georgia State, but I always knew college wasn’t for me. Anyways, for professional production, I still had to outsource my manufacturing to an embroidery shop that had bigger machines for the sake of optimal quality & capacity. The cost to create my clothing professionally left me baffled, and I realized I could not create the level of design I desired on the budget that I had. So, I began to seek a job at an embroidery shop so I could learn how to use a commercial embroidery machine, and after about 1 month of searching, I landed a job operating 3 commercial embroidery machines. I worked at that embroidery shop for 6 months, then had to leave because having a boss has never been for me.

At this point it is July 2017, and I knew the next step was to obtain my own commercial embroidery machine. I took the money that I had saved working and locked in an investment from a family member and by August 1 I had my own machine. I then started to advance my design company that I been building along with my apparel company. I manufacture other clothing brands and merchandise for record labels and their artists. My design company is called Ntuitive Design, and has provided my most consistent stream of income. I have now developed into a clothing designer for the clothing brands and record labels that i work with. I curate, design, and manufacture apparel for my clients. While also running my own clothing brand Ntuitive Apparel in the process.

This long (and I know, long) stream of events is what has led me to where I am today. I now work with over a dozen brands and multiple established record labels, but I am just getting started.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
There are the standard obstacles like friends and family that doubt your vision because they were already convinced that they “know” who you are. These obstacles were easy to disregard because you can simply choose to not listen to the opposition of thought, “just tune it out” per say.

The biggest challenge was overcoming what I previously thought I was capable of. It’s so easy to fall into the comfortable position of accepting that you “can’t” do something. I think fighting that comfortable but detrimental feeling was the most difficult. The biggest step people have to take is to understand that we set our own boundaries in life. Everyone is capable of everything, but not everyone believes enough in themselves to be capable of everything.

Please tell us about Ntuitive.
I have 3 separate businesses that are all under my state registered business: Intuitive Mind LLC. All 3 of my businesses operate off the commercial embroidery machine that allows me to be in control of my own production. I believe that whatever field I’m in I have to be in full control of every aspect of the creative process to guarantee the quality that I require.

Here are my businesses:
1. Ntuitive Apparel – This is the primary vision and the long-term goal I have the most personal (divine) interest in. My clothing brand and its philosophy embody a part of myself and I see us as one. I aspire to have a clothing brand that is recognized internationally. This part of my business is the dream that will require the most time to develop. I solely design, curate, and manufacture all of my own clothing and designs, and it will always remain this way.

2. Ntuitive Design – I developed this part of my business by recognizing that there is a demand for a dependable, quality, and timely apparel manufacturer that understands the needs of the youth and constantly changing the modern industry. Since my freshman year of college, I naturally got involved in the music business and was always hanging around different studios all around Atlanta. I was always networking and creating relationships with people that I knew would be beneficial one day even though I didn’t know what it would be just yet. Nevertheless, this networking ended up providing the framework needed to start my design business. When developing my plan to buy my own machine I knew I had a sufficient list of people that I could bring in as clients once I established the infrastructure on my side to produce.

3. MadebyLuker – This is my personal brand that relies on my face value. When a record label, artist, or another designer calls me for my assistance on specialized projects that require a higher degree of skill than average I am working under my personal brand. My design company is established to provide a corporate front to businesses that need standard production and a reliable (corporate) infrastructure, while my personal brand is for the people or businesses that want my personal touch or assistance.

I would say what differentiates me the most from others is that I remain in full control of all my creative processes. I make it a goal to outsource nothing or as little as possible. Also what sets me apart is my unwillingness to accept that I “can’t” do something. I am relentless in developing new skills and believe that if something is conceivable in the mind it can be done. There are no boundaries.

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Maybe spend the money I started with a little more scarcely, but that seems so easy to say. I try to never regret even bad decisions. Because I feel like if I didn’t have the opportunity to learn from my bad decisions they could have ended up being much more costly down the road.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ntuitive.net
• Phone: 4704391094
• Email: people@ntuitive.net
• Instagram: @ntuitive.apparel @ntuitive.design @madebyluker
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/ntuitiveapparel

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