Rick Williams - Distinct Life

Rick Williams is a Detroit-based artist and co-owner of the high-end sneaker boutique known as Burn Rubber. Unlike many artists, Rick Williams has incorporated his creativity into the creative design business in a fluid and highly marketable way. While he is well known in Detroit for his mural work, ever since Burn Rubber signed a deal with Puma, this artist has been consistently expanding his creative reach.

Burn Rubber started as a small sneaker store in 2004, co-owned by Rick Williams and Roland Coit. Over the years, the store has gone through many changes that have led it to its current success. Using his creative direction, Rick Williams could innovate cutting-edge designs for Burn Rubber sneakers and stores and eventually turn the small outlet into an international brand.

Soon after, the products created by Burn Rubber started to become a vital part of Michigan's street life. This urged other companies to realize the importance of Burn Rubber in the street-wear culture of Michigan, leading to international collaborations with Puma and Reebok, among others.

However, Rick Williams did not stop there. He has stated that his mission is much more than becoming a successful business owner, as he is motivated to inspire people and tell stories. Further, he expresses his love for the underdogs and the businesses that may not make much noise but is doing important work for their respective communities.

Perhaps this motivation led Rick to start a social media consulting and management company with his wife, Yolanda. This company is known as Distinct Life, with Rick as the agency director and Yolanda as the creative director. Distinct Life offers its clients several creative services, including identity development, content creation, brand development, photography, marketing, design, and creative direction.

In this project, Rick Williams and his team can fully channel their creative abilities that paid off so well in the sneaker business. Their goal with this company is to create inspirational content, especially that which serves and represents underdog and misrepresented communities in society. Distinct Life specializes in storytelling and draws from various resources and tools to uniquely suit its clients' needs.

However, the power couple of Rick and Yolanda did not put a damper on their creative energy even then. In 2013, Yolanda opened a skincare product line from her home kitchen. The line was Cream Blends and started with Yolanda making about 100 jars of body butter in her kitchen every week.

However, in just a year, Cream Blends signed with Whole Foods and is now a full-scale operation that offers natural soaps, body butter, scented candles, and body scrubs with Yolanda as the brand's owner and operator. Rick is also involved as the brand's chief creative officer, allowing another outlet for his immense creative energy.

Today, Rick Williams enjoys the fruits of years of hard work and creative innovation. He still lives in Detroit, and impressively he still finds time for street art and mural painting, which he believes is essential community work in Michigan street culture. In 2017, he partook in the Murals in the Market Festival.

Rick covered an entire building's back wall for the festival with a painting of a young black child holding a flower up in the air. In quotation marks next to the child are the words, "They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds." Here we see the successful business owner and creative director revisit his artistic and cultural routes, expressing to his now international audience that his motivation was the uplifting of the black community all along.