Packed as ever on the Saturday before Christmas, the Mall of America gave me the same feeling I’ve had about it for a few years now.
Ramstad: Minnesota designer looks to streets in America and China to stay on fashion’s edge
Levels emerged as a fashion brand after the George Floyd protests, adopting a high-quality, low-price formula to stand out at Mall of America.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
December 24, 2024 at 6:36PM
Shopping malls are shaped by, and aimed at, teens and young adults who set fashion and culture trends. Big brands, retailers and marketers care most about 25- to 54 year-olds, and the mall reminds me that I aged out of that demo a few years ago.
So it’s taken me longer than most to recognize that hoodies and sweatpants have changed from being clothes for knocking around the house and yard into increasingly expensive fashion.
I did notice couples wearing matching sweat tops and bottoms on some recent airplane trips and thought they were extraordinarily casual. Really, they were expressing love in a fashion-forward way.
Daniel Johnson Jr., founder and chief designer at Levels LLC, saw this streetwear trend in the music industry a decade ago and changed careers for it. If you shopped at his store on the mall’s third floor near Nordstrom this holiday season, you found a designer in full command of his craft. He had new products for longtime fans and a core selection of basics for people just trying it out.
The Levels logo, usually with the second L reversed and sometimes with only the consonants, dominates the look of many hoodies, polos, cropped tops, shorts and joggers. And then it’s hardly noticeable on others.
“We encourage individuals to express themselves through fashion,” Johnson said. “You can see things here that are logo-dominant and you could also find some more low-key, minimalist items. We can get the grandpas coming in, grabbing something, and the grandkid is grabbing something, and they’re not fighting about it.”
Johnson, who spent the first part of his career in hip-hop music and artist management, started the brand nine years ago and later opened a store on Lake Street in Minneapolis. Protesters burned down the store, Levels Xclusive Branded Apparel, in the riots following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020.
He salvaged what he could and regrouped in Rochester, where he grew up. He held a series of pop-up sales and then opened a small store in Apache Mall. The Mall of America invited him to a space in 2021 and he expanded to a larger one near Nordstrom last year. This holiday season, he said, sales are up 30% from a year ago.
“We’ve been blessed to start off at Apache Mall, which was five minutes from the Mayo Clinic. So we were getting people from all over the world coming in,” Johnson said. “Then being in the Mall of America, people from all over the nation and the world come here ... I owe a lot to the community as well as the mall.”
Levels’ business model is straightforward. Johnson focuses on fabric quality first, then he uses every technique and new innovation for displaying the Levels logo. Prices suit the quality, though Johnson aims at lower price points than the best-known sportswear names. Levels hoodies, for instance, range from $80 to $110. Mono crop crews are $95 and oversized crop tees are $38.
“We look at our competitors and see what they’re offering, then we will go up on the quality,” Johnson said. “We get the better quality and then we charge less. That’s why we’ve been able to sustain.”
Earlier this year, he traveled to China for the first time to visit the manufacturers that make Levels’ clothes.
“Right now, we have the embossed with reflective [lettering] and things a lot of people haven’t done,” he said. “Some stuff, of course, you may see in China, where they’re ahead of all the fashion.”
And that’s another lesson learned: China is not just a place where so much of the world’s apparel is being manufactured, it’s also influencing the materials and ideas of designers like Johnson.
“We strive to just have something different. Most of our pieces here, I like to call them conversation starters,” Johnson said. “We’ve had a lot of people say they saw somebody with something of ours on and that person told them where we were.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce last year honored Levels with one of its America’s Top Small Business awards. The chamber also asked Johnson to offer some lessons about using social media influencers to help market the company.
“We get tagged in pictures from all over the world,” he said. “If you’re from Minnesota, be proud of it. Because if you’ve ever supported us, or just bought a pair of our socks, this is your success. This is your brand.”
Correction: The store on Lake Street that burned down was called Levels Xclusive Branded Apparel. A prior version of this article used a different name.
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