Several Marlow High School Students were in the Shark tank with a big shark on Wednesday, February the 18, at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford.

Invest ed. instructor Jeff Prater made the arrangements for students from his finance classes to join students from across the state to listen to Daymond John, CEO and founder of FUBU (For Us Buy Us), a large fashion industry.

Prater thought the presentation would help his students who are interested in becoming financially successful.

“This is not an everyday opportunity, and I am glad to share the experience with my students.”

–Jeff Prater

Many students, including sophomore Emily Taylor thought the trip would provide for future opportunities.

“I attended the motivational speech for future opportunities in college,” Taylor said.

John was scheduled to talk to the students about how to become successful and give tips into being smart with money.

John shared his six “Shark Points” S- set goals, you cannot hit a target that you cannot see, H- do your homework, you are bound to make the same mistake without doing your homework, A- motto, we amour (love) what we do and we must love our customer, R- remember, YOU are the brand, you must learn how to pitch and K- you must keep swimming.

John shared the true story of how he started small and grew into a large industry that has over $6 billion in product sales.

Senior Beau Meshell joined the group on the trip to see John.

“I thought John’s story of how he failed and then picked himself back up was really inspiring. He set goals and never lost sight of them,” Meshell said.

He started by taking a $100,000 mortgage on his mother’s house and moved his operation into her basement.

The idea for the company started with when he noticed that the popular clothing brands did not want their products to be associated with gangs, drug dealers or hip hop music.

John decided to give the rappers and other music artists the clothing that fit their genre.

While his company was growing John was also maintaining a job at Red Lobster and started designing hats and t-shirts with the FUBU label.

Soon after he started designing his clothing he started to loan them to every artist that created a rap video.

FUBU was starting to show up in many different videos but John used the same ten shirts over a span of two years until his team got a big break.

John motivated students to keep moving forward no matter how small they started out.

http://abc.go.com/shows/shark-tank/

 Rylee Derryberry

MHS exPRESS writer