UMd. Entrepreneurs Teach Students About Pursuing "Sole" Passions

Immediately after Hafie Yillah was robbed at gunpoint the summer before his senior year in high school, he had a choice to make: feel sorry for himself or channel his emotions into something more productive.

Yillah chose to use the near-death experience as a springboard to launch energy into his sole passion: sneakers.

“I realized that I had to get over it pretty quickly, so I looked to sneaker customization as an outlet,” Yillah said. “It’s so therapeutic, and it allowed me to convey my emotions.”

That outlet evolved into something more substantial in August 2010 when Yillah founded the Sneaker Cartel at the University of Maryland — an entrepreneurial student organization designed around the love of “fresh” shoes.

Yillah, 20, is now co-owner and president of the Sneaker Cartel. He and three other members shared their own life anecdotes with 25 eighth graders at Silver Spring International Middle School on Friday. They emphasized perseverance, patience, passion and character development as fundamental principles for life success.

It was a message that fit perfectly with a yearlong project some of the students are working on, called the “Passion Project”; students can explore their own passions through research.

“A lot of the concepts I am teaching the students in class, they talked about in their presentation, which amazed me,” teacher Bret Williams-Caison said.

“By bringing the Sneaker Cartel in to speak, I wanted to show the students that passion is research and that research isn’t a negative word,” Williams-Caison said.

The Sneaker Cartel isn’t a business. Their platform is: if you have an entrepreneurial passion that you want to pursue, join us and we will help bring it to life.

Yillah said he is looking at expanding into a larger business model, but for now, Sneaker Cartel conducts community service and sells T-shirts and promotes various events around the Washington, D.C. area.

“We try to provide [students] a platform for entrepreneurial development,” Yillah said. “We each have individual crafts that we have found ways to make money from, but right now we are trying to put a little more focus in as a student group so we can leave a legacy here.”

That legacy is rooted in a mission to give back to the community. For example, as part of its aptly titled “soleanthropy” project in March, the group partnered with Soles4Souls to organize a campus-wide shoe donation drive. Group members collected 500 pairs of shoes in six weeks, and they were later distributed to countries in need, like Japan, which suffered a tragic earthquake earlier that month.

“While we champion entrepreneurship so much, we also lead by example,” co-owner and vice president Marshall Tan, 20, said. “We don’t see any other way. It’s not even that we see it as a long-term investment benefit, it’s the fact that we want to be the best we can be.”

Yillah is all too familiar with using constructive energy to be the best he can be. The robbery that could have ended in tragedy turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Now, it is the pursuit of greatness that keeps him comfortable in his shoes everyday.

“If we know we can do it better, then we will do it better — that’s our standard,” Yillah said. “If we can’t, we will continue to try, because a limit does not exist.”