Neil Doig (State Of Mind) – Looking Back On Last Year1

Hello everyone, thank you for taking the time out to read over my second guest blog here on HipHopFiend.org

The past 12 months has been full of excitement and change here at State Of Mind, we have introduced new brands which have done really well and said goodbye to some brands that just don’t work in Edinburgh.
When I opened the store almost two years ago I wanted to be the only store in Scotland who could stock my favorite brands which I usually would have to fly to america to buy direct from their flagship stores or to import and pay way over the RRP after the tax man took his slice!

In 2010 I started taking the ‘State Of Mind’ name as a brand more seriously and started to make t-shirts which flew out of the door! I would like to take the this chance to thank everyone who came and bought them and wore them.
To my delight a few famous faces began to wear them and Lil Cease from Junior Mafia (most famous for members being Biggie Smalls & Lil Kim) wore one of the original ‘State Of Mind’ t-shirts in his remix video for the French Montana song ‘New York Minute’

When I opened the store I really wanted to push the idea of having live music events in the evenings, having seen what Alife in New York had achieved; hosting parties for the likes of Drake, Nas and Cypress Hill to name a few, I wanted to recreate this here in Edinburgh.
The first party of 2010 that we hosted was with Kobi Onyame the Glasgow based MC, the night attracted a big buzz and everyone from the local music and streetwear scene came along, the events of the night were captured by Dawson from Breaking Point Flix who I worked with a lot in 2010!
Dawson was the mastermind behind the concept for the ‘My State Of Mind’ video series that he made for the store.

The second party we held later on last summer with DJ Vadim, he came along with Pugs Atomz the Chicago native MC & singer Sabira Jade who are all working together as ‘The Electric’ their album is due out early 2011!
I first met Pugz when he came into the store the summer before after performing in Edinburgh the previous night we got talking, exchange email address and remained in touch. It was Pugs who get in touch with me to say that DJ Vadim was interested in coming to Edinburgh again but this time to show case the work of the ‘The Electric’ and the rest as they say is now history!

One of the craziest moments of 2010 for me was when I was approached by DJ Nasty P about bringing Akil The MC from Jurassic 5 to the store to film the music video for the song they have done together featuring Profisee which will feature on Nasty’s new album.
As a massive J5 fan this sounded like a dream come true, upon greeting Akil as he exited the taxi I was very nervous and came over all star struck when he spoke!
Everyone who was there were all a bit amazed that they were in the company of such an iconic figure, he was such a nice person and was happy to spend time in the shop talking to everyone and look around at the clothes.

I feel the store made big progress last year and I would love for that to continue into the new year, we should have a brand new fully functional online store completed very shortly with all our brands on their including our ‘state of mind’ branded items.

Neil.