The "official brand" of Mentors worldwide.

 

A Letter from the Founder: Build Better Humans.

To anyone fighting to find their way out of the dark,

I didn’t build Mentor Empire to start a clothing company. I built it to stay alive.

If you looked at my life today, you’d see a successful entrepreneur, a corporate executive, a proud father, a grateful husband and a state advisor to the governor. You’d see a man who overcame every single obstacle put in his path. But you wouldn't see the scars unless I showed them to you.

Before the titles and the boardrooms, my reality was struggle, abandonment, and addiction. I traded my youth for juvenile hall, jail cells, and ultimately, a prison uniform.

Nine days into my prison sentence, the illusion shattered. I realized my looks and my smooth tongue weren't going to save me anymore. For the first time in my life, I was being held entirely accountable. I had to pay the price.

It was during that isolation that my father sent me a book—a gesture from a man whose relationship I had yearned for my entire life. After I finished it, I called him and asked, "What was I supposed to get from this book?"

He simply asked, "What did you get from it?"

I explained my thoughts, and he replied, "Well, then that’s what you were supposed to get."

In that exact moment, my life began to shift. I finally understood what a mentor was. My whole life, I had just blindly followed the advice of others, trying to find my way in the dark. A true mentor wasn't someone who told me what to do. He was someone teaching me how to think. How to look inside. How to find what I needed.

When I stepped back into society, I committed to a new code of radical transparency. It became the very first letter of our HUMAN brand: H for Honest.

Fresh out of prison, I found myself at a home in Las Vegas belonging to a incredibly wealthy, powerful man. I had no idea who he was. Standing on his property, stripped of my old pretenses, I walked right up to him and said, "I don’t know who you are, but you’re obviously important. If me being here is a problem, I can leave. Because I just got out of prison for selling ecstasy."

This was a man who famously avoided touching or hugging people. But he looked at me, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, "People don’t do that. They aren't that honest."

That man was Tony Hsieh.

From that day until the day he passed, Tony mentored me through everything. No matter how busy or successful he was, he always gave me his most valuable asset: his time.

Years later, when I was on the brink of losing a business, I called Tony in a panic, asking what to do. He told me: "Do it again." He asked how many hours I had put into being an entrepreneur. Through a clouded, stressed mind, I added it up and told him 8,000 hours.

Tony said, "Don’t quit now. You’re over half way there. Mastery comes from repetition. Keep going."

And I did.

I kept going through the trials, the losses, the rebuilding, and the victories. I designed symbols like our Infinity Emblem and the Duality Ambigram not as fashion trends, but as physical armor. I wore them to remind myself of who I wanted to be. They became my North Star, forcing me to make the right decisions even when they didn't benefit me.

Mentor Empire is not my company; it is a living "thank you" to my father, to Tony Hsieh, and to every mentor who ever looked past my wreckage and taught me how to think.

The world today is fractured, lonely, and spinning upside down. But our Duality Ambigram proves that even when you are inverted, your core structure can hold. We are building a global network of accountability. When you wear this gear, you are wearing a uniform. You are signaling to the world that you are a safe harbor, a beacon of good, and a mentor ready to pull another human up.

My journey took me from incarcerations to a state advisor. If these symbols could rewrite my destiny, imagine what they can do for yours.

We don't wait for a better world. We build it—one human at a time.

Welcome to the Empire.

Chad Taylor 

Founder, Mentor Empire