What Happens When You Don’t Follow the Rules
I have never followed the rules.
This is a succinct way to describe the decisions I have made as an artist and entrepreneur in my lifetime. When I self published my first novel 13 Secret Cities in 2013, being an indie author did not carry the prestige it does today. I chose to self-publish my own novel of Aztec sci-fi, simply because I did not want to bend to the will of the New York publishing system, which lacked diversity, oppressed the voices of queer and POC authors, and which upheld a system of white supremacy.
Fast forward to 2016, when I launched LED Queens, my own retail and fashion startup that was in fact a spinoff from my two novels 13 Secret Cities and How to Kill a Superhero. I launched LED using my own financial investment. I avoided taking VC money or other types of investment, even though I already had made strong connections in New York City during the years I worked for startups like Ars Technica, Circl and Wirecutter. It was tempting to make pitches for my startup and get cash to grow LED, but the truth is that most investors were straight cis white men, and you can imagine the type of feedback they gave me on my unusual, colorful and very queer brand of gym gear.
So I ran LED Queens my way, ignoring many "best practices" of marketing and branding, including staying quiet about politics and values. Instead, I doubled down on making myself very visible. I am queer, non-binary, and born and raised in Mexico. My values are centered on a.) stewardship of all kinds of life, including humans, animals and plants, around the whole planet b.) the acknowledgment that capitalism and white supremacy are systems that actively exploit and destroy said life, and c.) the validation of the lives of queer people and other marginalized groups.
When I spoke out about these issues on the LED Queens blog, in our email campaigns, as well as on social networks like Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, I continued to break the rules of what brands are supposed to do if they want to scale.
And that's the key right there: what does scaling actually mean? Simply put, scaling means that a brand grows in profits and employees, but it also becomes part of the status quo. Scaling also means that many compromises may have to be made by the owner of the brand in order to get there. When I was first launching LED Queens, Brian Lam, the founder of Wirecutter marveled at my designs, but he also asked me if I was willing to make more black and gray gym tights, because those colors would help me scale and make the brand more appealing to the mainstream. You can imagine how I felt about his advice, and you can see the choices I made over the past eight years to avoid falling into that trap.
And so, queero, you have seen LED Queens grow in boldness and its color spectrum over the years. But because we stick to our values, that also means our growth has been quite modest, and at times if has slowed down a lot. I don't make a living from the business, and I'm going to tell you why that is so.
From the years of 2016 through 2022, l worked on LED Queens full time to get it off the ground. I gave every part of myself to the business, often at the expense of my own health. LED Queens became profitable in 2021, and that is a major milestone that I will always carry with me in my heart. But profitable doesn't mean that a business can pay a salary for the founder. When we became profitable, we simply were making a few thousands dollars over the costs required to run the business, but I could not pay rent or a mortgage, or hire employees, with that surplus. There was lots of potential for growth ahead, but I was also more than burned out and exhausted.
In 2022, I had to make some tough decisions in order to stay financially stable. That summer, I took a position as director of product and strategy with the agency Razorfish, and for three years, I served one very large client, Ford Motor Company. And as you may recall, in 2023, I decided to close LED Queens, mostly because I could not keep up with the demands of my startup plus my day job. And so I closed LED Queens.
But what happened next was nothing I could ever have expected. The community of my customers asked for us to come back. And after much deliberation, I reopened, but with many tweaks to optimize and minimize our business model. Instead of a massive catalog of tights and spandexwear, I offered up select small collections that I could sustainably release once or twice a year. Our output became smaller in volume. That change allowed me to step away from the business and focus also on my work as a consultant for a Fortune 100 company as my client.
And yet, destiny has called me back to what matters. This past April, my father experienced a heart attack while he was at home. On the very same day that he was rushed to the hospital where he would eventually die 72 hours later, I was laid off from my position at Razorfish. That's the nature being an employee in today's corporations–companies periodically make decisions like this to benefit the business, and they often don't align neatly with the needs of human beings. This wasn't the synchronicity I was looking for, but we don't generally get to determine the timing of our death, or the deaths of our loved ones.
I am pro labor and pro union. And as you know, consulting agencies, by their sheer nature, work against unionized labor. And for full accountability, I acknowledge that while I had wonderful experiences with both my team at the agency and with my client, consulting as an industry often sustains capitalist systems that conflict with my values. I earned $170,000 a year in my role as a director at Razorfish, and I share this fact with you simply to be transparent about the kind of work and compensation I experienced in corporate consulting.
I took many months off to deal with the grief over the loss of my father, but I did not grieve over the loss of my day job. I liked my job a lot, but it's only a job. It's not my identity. A job is not a human being, but my father was. I prefer to grieve over human loss instead of titles and positions.
Just within the past month, I have come back into the job market while also focusing on my small business, in order to decide what the next chapter in my career should be.
I don't yet know what the future holds. I do know I will exit LED Queens at some point soon, because there's another type of entrepreneurial project I definitely want to launch. And although I did enjoy being a consultant with a top pedigree, I don't think that repeating myself is healthy. Repetition can lead to complacency, boredom, and inertia. Instead, I want to stay awake and ask you to also rise to a state of full awareness.
Look around: our world is in chaos, and many people are unwilling to name the root problems that drive the chaos. It's what we are doing to each other and to the planet that still goes unnamed.
I don't need to be rich. What I need is meaning in what I do, and in the art and product I create. I want to continue to be an abolitionist in the second half of my life, which is the current phase I find myself in.
And so today, I am telling you my story so you can see that I am a human being who is simply human. I am not better than anyone, but in turn, no one is better than me.
I am definitely wanting to take the great lessons I have learned with LED Queens to shape a new business or even a potential partnership with like-minded folks. As I do that, I want to let you know that I will never shut up talking about the damage that racism, transphobia, homophobia, queerphobia, mysogyny, anti-indigenous thought, anti-blackness, and disdain for nature in all its forms perpetrates upon us all.
Most business "leaders" would advise me against talking to my customers this way, but as I said, I do things my own way, and I refuse to let the elephant in the room go unaddressed. Practically speaking, LED Queens may fold if we cannot maintain a certain level of sales this year, and I am okay with that. Nothing is forever.
Practically speaking, I could also damage my ability to get a "traditional" white collar job in the tech sector and digital marketing by writing this type of note to my customers, but I prefer to stay true to my values as a writer, a thinker, and most of all, a human being. The tsunami of death that we are experiencing in the planet exists mostly because people stay complacent (and afraid to speak out). The systems that have been put in place in American society since this land was taken by colonizers from its original inhabitants are systems that are killing us all.
You may think of me as a fool, but when I'm gone, at least you'll remember that I behaved in a way that is true to what I believed in. I want to make this world better, and I don't think that the notion of "working inside the system" makes sense for me. If it makes sense for you, I respect your choice, but I have to listen to the truth I feel inside of myself.
To abolish means that revolution has to take place. To make true change, we have to say no to the status quo. To love one another, we have to put the brakes on the ways in which we hurt all people, not just one group of people.
And so if this essay causes a strong reaction in you, or if you want to introduce me to someone who may want to work with my type of energy, please keep me in mind, share my story with them, and introduce us. That's how I will get to the next place in my story. Thank you for your support for LED Queens, my novels, my visual art, and I hope you keep it queer.
Cesar Torres
Chicago, 2025