BUSINESS PLAN

2026-09-17

Athletic and tactical apparel. Faith-based, athlete-fronted, made in America. Launching before Black Friday 2026.

The company

Warrior Poets makes athletic and tactical apparel for people who fight — in a cage, in uniform, or in the part of life nobody photographs. Faith-based, athlete-fronted, sourced and sewn in the United States, priced as a premium good because it is one.

The thesis is one idea: the man who fights and the man who writes are the same man. David killed the giant and wrote the psalm. That is not a slogan, it is the product architecture — a brutal condensed display face beside a classical serif, a spearpoint that is also a quill, scripture set on a shirt built to be bled in.

The six pillars

Love · Truth · Faith · Grace · Humility · Bravery. Not values on a wall. They are the Anno Testimonii line — one shirt per pillar, one mark per pillar, one verse per pillar, collected or worn alone.

The six lines

The three we build around

Maj. Jim Gant — US Army Special Forces, Silver Star 2007. Author of One Tribe at a Time (2009), the paper that changed the argument about Afghanistan and was found in bin Laden's compound. Subject of Ann Scott Tyson's American Spartan. Now with Built to Lead. Mission anchor; the Λ line is his.

Impa Kasanganay, "Tshilobo" — 2023 PFL Light Heavyweight World Champion. Kill Cliff FC, out of Deerfield Beach, Florida. Founding athlete.

Anthony Wint — 8–0 in MMA. UFC debut August 2026, won by first-round arm-triangle eleven days after taking a contract on Dana White's Contender Series. Former New York Jets linebacker, undrafted out of FIU. Kill Cliff FC. Founding athlete.

Both fighters train out of the same gym. That is an asset, not a coincidence — one shoot day, one location, two athletes, and a room full of the next four.

The mission is the business

Fighters get a few good years and then a cliff. No pension, no guaranteed healthcare, and for most, no second act. The purse stops, the sponsors leave, and a man who organised his entire life around one thing has to find another.

Warrior Poets answers that directly, and not with a donation. The athletes own a share of the brand they build. The creator pool is not a sponsorship perk bolted to the side of the company — it is the point of it. Impa and Anthony hold points that keep paying after the last walk to the cage, and the four seats they nominate extend the same thing to fighters who are not there yet.

That is why there is no foundation here.

We do not run a non-profit

A company this size standing up its own 501(c)(3) would spend year one on a board, a Form 1023, an audit and a filing calendar, and would duplicate organisations that already do it better. So giving goes one of two ways, and neither is ours to administer:

• Through ImaginAItion Foundation, where a vehicle is needed.

• Straight to a cause already doing the work — Mighty Oaks (Chad Robichaux: Force Recon, pro MMA champion, faith-based veteran programs) or The Refuge in Columbus (thirteen months residential, free, every graduate leaves with a job offer).

Jim has no foundation of his own. Checked — the Green Beret Foundation is a separate organisation founded by Aaron Anderson in 2009, not by him. There is nothing of his to fund and nothing of ours to invent.

What this changes

The Λ line still gives its full margin away, but to a cause we choose and do not run. And the line on the hangtag stops being “a portion of proceeds supports…” — the sentence every apparel brand already uses — and becomes one almost none of them can say:

The people on these shirts own the company that prints them.

That is also the recruiting pitch. A fighter choosing between an appearance fee and a share of something that outlives his last fight is not really choosing between two sponsorships.

Domestic sourcing

Domestic costs about $7.50 more per unit than imported — roughly $18,000 on the first buy. It is also the only reason a $48 tee is defensible. Pay it on purpose, and say so on the label.

The mills

Three mills, not one. A single-source blank is a single point of failure eight weeks before Black Friday.

The honest gap

True moisture-wicking polyester performance fabric is effectively not knitted in the United States at retail scale. Every major performance blank — Sport-Tek, Gildan Performance, Hanes Cool Dri — is imported. This is the one place the domestic insistence bites, and pretending otherwise is how brands end up with an FTC problem.

Three honest ways through, in order of preference:

1. Launch on cotton and US-knit tri-blend. Garment-dye heavyweight is the aesthetic in every mockup. Tri-blend from Royal performs well enough for training and feels more premium than poly. This is the recommendation — it costs nothing and loses nothing.

2. Add a true performance drop in 2027, cut and sewn domestically from imported fabric, labelled "Made in USA of imported fabric." Qualified claim, legally clean, still a domestic sewing job.

3. Do not label an imported-fabric garment "Made in USA." See below.

FTC labelling — this is a legal instrument, not a slogan

An unqualified "Made in USA" requires the garment be all or virtually all of US origin: US-milled fabric, cut and sewn here. All three mills above clear that bar. A garment cut in LA from Italian or Honduran fabric does not.

Veteran-owned, not just American-made

Someone is already doing this, and it changes the story from a label to a chain. "Made in USA" is a sourcing decision. Cut by veterans, printed by veterans, shipped by veterans is the mission running through the supply chain instead of sitting beside it in a donation line.

And on the back end, veteran-owned 3PLs exist too: Exegistics (warehousing, staffing, and veteran hiring as a stated priority) and Veteran Carriers (end-to-end warehousing through final delivery). At launch volume the pick-and-pack economics are near-identical to any other 3PL, so this costs nothing to choose and it is the difference between a claim and a chain.

Diligence before committing: current capacity for a 2,400-unit run against the 6 Oct PO date, whether they blank-source or only decorate, and — for anyone claiming veteran employment rather than just veteran ownership — ask how many and in what roles. The claim is only worth what it can be checked against.

Have counsel sign off on the exact label wording before the labels are woven. Woven labels are a four-week lead and the single hardest thing to unprint.

Unit economics and the first buy

2,400 units, $42,108 at cost, $130,670 at retail, 67.8% blended gross margin. Breakeven is 32% sell-through.

Unit cost is landed: blank + 2–3 colour domestic screen print, front and back, plus woven neck label, hem tag, hangtag and mailer.

Size curve

S 8% · M 20% · L 27% · XL 24% · 2XL 14% · 3XL 7%. Skewed large on purpose. Buy a combat-athlete customer flat and you finish the quarter holding 400 smalls.

What Q4 realistically does

A cold-start DTC brand does not sell through in one quarter. Three honest cases:

Even the bear case clears cash on the quarter. The carried inventory is not a loss — none of it is seasonal and none of it is dated. Six lines with no holiday graphics means Q1 sells the same goods at full price.

The lever that matters most

Average order value, not conversion. A $52 single-tee order barely clears fulfilment. The six-pillar Anno Testimonii capsule at $264 for all six, and the athlete capsules at $75, exist to move AOV past $110. Build the site around the capsule, not the single unit.

The Creator & Athlete Pool

Recommendation: make this a profit-share pool, not equity. Equity to non-employee athletes triggers a 409A valuation, securities questions, tax on grant, and a cap table you cannot clean up when someone leaves or does something brand-damaging. A points pool over profit does the same job, pays cash they can actually use, and converts to equity later if you define the trigger now.

Size: 12% of gross profit, distributed across 100 points. On the base Q4 case that is roughly $5,850 to the pool; at $1.2M of revenue in year two it is about $97,000. Small now, real later — which is the correct shape for a sponsorship instrument.

The 100 points

That reads your "40% of the pool to athletes, with Impa and Anthony accounting for 20%, then 5% each to four more they recruit" exactly: 10 + 10 + (4 × 5) = 40 points, closing precisely. Two recruit seats each is the clean split; the document should let either of them nominate up to three if the other has not filled theirs.

Vesting is on deliverables, not time

Time-based vesting pays athletes who went quiet. Points vest against a contract:

• 4 fight-week activations per year

• 24 posts per year, minimum 6 with the product in frame

• 2 shoot days

• 2 mission appearances

• Walkout kit worn where their promotion permits it

Quarterly true-up. Miss a quarter, that quarter's points do not vest — they do not accrue backwards.

The three clauses that are not optional

1. Company approval on recruits. Impa and Anthony nominate; the company approves. Never let a sponsored athlete unilaterally bind the company's economics.

2. Morals clause, mutual. Points forfeit on conviction, doping ban, or conduct that would embarrass a faith-based brand — and the athlete can walk with vested points if the company does the same.

3. Good leaver / bad leaver. Retirement, injury or an amicable exit keeps vested points for 24 months. A bad-leaver trigger forfeits everything unvested immediately.

One risk worth naming

Two founding athletes from one gym is concentration. If Kill Cliff FC has a bad year, or either fighter has a long layoff, the athlete story goes quiet at once. The four recruit seats are the hedge — fill at least two of them from outside Kill Cliff, and ideally at least one from outside MMA.

Launch timeline

71 days from today to Black Friday, 27 November 2026. That is enough for a domestic launch if the long-lead items are ordered in the next two weeks, and not enough if they slip.

Launch on Veterans Day, sell on Black Friday

The strongest recommendation in this plan: 11 November is a better brand launch than Black Friday, and it is sixteen days earlier. Put the Gant film and the mission out on Veterans Day as a statement with nothing for sale. Open the store on Black Friday. You asked to launch before Black Friday — this is how, and it costs nothing.

The four drop-dead dates

Miss any of these and the launch moves to 2027.

Week by week

What to cut if it slips

In this order: the 真理子 Child of Truth line moves to a January drop (it is limited anyway, and scarcity is its whole mechanic); the Anno Testimonii capsule ships three pillars instead of six; hoodies move to Q1. Do not cut the athlete shoot or the Gant film — without them this is a T-shirt company.

Capital required

$118,000 to do it properly. $61,000 to do it lean. The difference is paid media, professional photography, and 1,000 units of inventory.

What the lean version actually gives up

Not quality — same blanks, same printer, same labels. It gives up reach and depth: no paid prospecting means the launch lives entirely on the athletes' own audiences, and 1,400 units means the popular sizes in the popular colourways sell out in week two with nothing to reorder into before Christmas.

The middle path is the right one: full inventory, full trademark and legal, in-house photography with one hired shooter, and $6–8K of paid media held back until you can see which line is actually converting. That lands near $88,000 and is the number to raise or commit.

Where the money should not go

No trade shows, no influencer seeding beyond the athletes, no retail or wholesale in year one, and no hoodies in the first buy. A $138 hood at 6.1 oz domestic is a beautiful product and a terrible first-inventory decision — it eats three tees' worth of cash per unit and sells at a third of the rate.

Risk register

The name is the biggest open risk, and the good news is better than expected. Searched on the public register, September 2026. This is the input to a legal opinion, not a substitute for one.

WARRIOR POETS — Class 25 looks open

Despite selling apparel nationally since roughly 2018, John Lovell's company never registered Class 25 — their apparel trades as Warrior Poet Supply Co. You own warriorpoets.shop; the .com belongs to the film company and should be left alone.

But: a decade of national apparel sales creates common-law rights a registration does not erase, they can afford an opposition, and WAR POET (Ser. 97315747) is live in Class 25 with a full apparel list, which an examiner may cite. Legally you can probably register. Whether you want to build next door to a brand with the same name, the same faith and the same customer is a business question, not a legal one.

HARD 2 KILL — this is the one that bites

GBRS Group runs a "Hard to Kill" collection in exactly your aisle. HARDER TO KILL is registered in Class 25 by Atomic Athlete Enterprises. Add Hard To Kill Apparel, htkill.com, Hard to Kill & Co and Hard to Kill Fitness. A line name is still trademark use — "it's only a line, not the company" is not a defence. Rename it, get a written coexistence, or do not print it.

Everything else

The two sites and the pAIrtner workspace

Two domains, two jobs, one new workspace.

What still has to be decided before the store is built

The apparel store is not a static page — it needs a cart, inventory that decrements, a payment processor, shipping rates, and order/fulfilment records. Whether that lives natively in pAIrtner or whether pAIrtner fronts a commerce engine is the real architectural question, and it changes the build completely.

• annotestimonii.com is a static one-file deploy. pAIrtner can host that as-is, today.

• warriorpoets.shop is transactional. Building cart, inventory, payments, tax and fulfilment from scratch inside pAIrtner by 24 October, while also making the apparel, is the single most likely way to miss Black Friday.

Recommendation: put the workspace and both domains in pAIrtner as the system of record and the front door. Let the book site be fully native. For the store, front a commerce engine for checkout and inventory in year one, and bring it in-house once the range is stable. The launch date is the constraint that should win this argument.

What I have not done yet

I have not created the workspace or touched pAIrtner. Two reasons, both worth stating plainly: the orchestrator box is ahead of the laptop and must not be deployed from here, and I do not yet know what the sites and hosting layer in pAIrtner actually supports for a transactional storefront. Point me at it and this is the next build — workspace first, book site deployed same day, store scoped against what the platform really does.

Mission partners

The Gant network is the unfair advantage, and the warmest contact in it is not a general — it is a novelist. Nothing below has been contacted. This is the map and the order to walk it.

One degree from Jim

The partner that solves the hardest constraint

Origin USA, Farmington, Maine. Founded by Pete Roberts, co-owned by Jocko Willink. They run a loom, a denim mill, a boot factory and roughly 200 sewing machines, entirely inside the American supply chain.

Chase this one hardest, and the ask is not a podcast appearance. It is co-manufacturing. Origin is the only operation at scale that already solves the gap this plan admits to — domestic performance fabric. A co-made Warrior Poets capsule, knit and sewn in Maine, is worth more than any interview, and it turns "made in America" from a sourcing decision into a partnership story.

The cause — where the 5% goes

Recommendation: Mighty Oaks Foundation. Founded by Chad Robichaux — former Force Recon Marine, eight deployments with a JSOC task force, professional MMA champion, and a man who nearly became a veteran suicide statistic before faith turned it. Faith-based peer-to-peer programs for veterans, active duty and their families: over 6,000 alumni, and more than half a million service members trained in resiliency.

Faith, special operations, professional fighting, brotherhood. That is not a cause adjacent to Warrior Poets — it is the same four things in one man. Nobody has to explain the fit to a customer.

Alternates, if the fit or the leadership does not hold up on closer inspection:

Diligence before a dollar moves: current Form 990, program-to-overhead ratio, and whether they will publish what our 5% actually bought. If they will not name the number, pick someone who will.

The local one, and it may be the better one: The Refuge. Columbus and Lancaster, founded 1999, five locations, more than 5,000 men through it. A thirteen-month residential Christian recovery ministry, free of charge, no insurance, and every man who completes has a full-time job offer waiting. That last part is why it belongs in this plan — it is not a program that ends at sobriety, it ends at a man with work.

Three things make it strong here. It is in your city, so the 5% is visible and you can walk into it. Free-to-the-man means a donated dollar buys a bed rather than offsetting a fee. And Wes Thompson is already reading this material and pushing back on it in writing — the relationship exists before the ask does.

Suggested split: Mighty Oaks for the national veteran-and-fighter axis, The Refuge for the local beds-and-jobs axis. Addiction is what takes down operators and fighters after the career ends, which is the same ground both sit on. Publish the split, not just the total.

MVP — a partner, not a recipient

Merging Vets & Players, founded 2015 by Jay Glazer and Nate Boyer (Green Beret and NFL). Combat veterans and former pro athletes train together, then sit in a circle, facilitated by people who are themselves vets and athletes.

They are not where the money goes — they are who we stand next to. Anthony Wint, NFL linebacker turned UFC fighter, is precisely their profile and is already ours. The natural shapes are a co-branded capsule with proceeds split, MVP huddles at fight weeks, and their facilitators training whatever we eventually run ourselves. Approach through Nate Boyer.

Publishing the book

Four live paths, and one of them is already inside the house.

The byline is the gating decision, not the publisher. A house cannot acquire a book whose author line is unsettled, and hers is not settled. imaginAItion Publishing is the only path that does not force that question early — which may be the reason to use it for A.T. 0 and take a house for whatever follows.

Expert commentary

Wes Thompson at The Refuge read the Matthew 18:20 piece and came back with post-modernism's reference point being the self, and why that crushes rather than frees. That is the λ case in a pastor's vocabulary, arrived at independently. He is a commentary candidate on the strength of that alone.

Holds as before: commentary is additive, never superseding; exact quotes only with permission; and no outreach without you.

Reach, once there is something to show

The order to walk it

1. Pressfield, through Jim. Warmest contact, highest leverage, and he can open Black Irish for the book at the same time.

2. Origin, through Jocko or direct to Pete Roberts. Operational, and it needs lead time before the October blank PO.

3. MVP, through Nate Boyer. The mission partnership, and sign it before you publish any giving number.

4. Petraeus, through Jim, last — once there is a brand to attach a name to.

No outreach without you. These are Jim's relationships and yours, not the company's, and the first approach can only be made once.

Open decisions

Six, in the order they block work. Each has a recommendation.

1. Hard 2 Kill — DECIDED. Warrior Poets is the operating name; Hard 2 Kill is a line under it; Warrior Poets are hard to kill is the bridge between them. That resolves the question and changes what the legal work is for: no longer "should we," now coexistence rather than avoidance. File Class 25 on WARRIOR POETS this week, brief the attorney that the line name stays, and put a contingency in the legal budget for a letter from one of the Hard to Kill holders. Survivable — but a budget line, not a surprise.

2. Storefront — DECIDED. pAIrtner end to end: own checkout, own inventory, own site, general processor. The repo already carries provider-agnostic payment intents, inventory v2, replenishment, abandoned carts and a per-tenant storefront, so this is wiring, not a build from zero.

3. MVP: fund theirs, or build ours? Recommend: partner with MVP, give through ImaginAItion Foundation or an existing cause, and run no non-profit of our own. The alternative is spending year one building a second version of something Nate Boyer has run for a decade.

4. What does O.A.T. stand for? It is on every board and I carried it through every line without knowing the expansion. If it is One Tribe at a Time it belongs to Gant's Λ line specifically, not the whole house.

5. Pool: profit-share or equity? Recommend: profit-share at 12% of gross profit, with a defined conversion trigger. Equity to non-employee athletes is a tax and securities problem you do not need in year one.

6. Capital: $54K lean, $88K middle, or $118K full? Recommend: $88K. Full inventory and full legal, in-house photography, paid media held back until the data says which line converts.

7. Veterans Day brand launch, 11 Nov? Recommend: yes. It is before Black Friday, it costs nothing, and the Gant film has a natural day.

The one thing to do this week

Book the decorator and reserve November capacity. Everything else on this page has a workaround; a printer with no open slot in November does not. Then the trademark opinion, so it lands before 2026-10-03.

Sources

• Impa Kasanganay, PFL fighter profile · Kill Cliff FC

• Anthony Wint, UFC athlete page · NFL.com on his UFC debut

• Maj. Jim Gant, War on the Rocks · One Tribe at a Time · American Spartan

• Los Angeles Apparel 1801GD · Royal Apparel, US-made blanks · Bayside, made in USA

• FTC, Made in USA compliance warning, July 2025 · Executive Order on enforcement, March 2026

• Trademark records: WARRIOR POETS Reg. 5235050 · WARRIOR POET SOCIETY Reg. 5732063 · WARRIOR POET Ser. 97315799 · GBRS Group "Hard to Kill"