The Jersey Was the Door: Starky Is Building a World Bigger Than Sportswear

From a bedroom in the South Bronx to Barclays Center, Gabe Stark — known publicly as Starky — built Rare Breed BX by turning his perspective on New York, sport and design into something tangible. Now, with Starky New York, he is asking what comes after the jersey.

Rare Breed BX is Starky’s South Bronx-founded design company, creating custom apparel and visual identities across sport, fashion and culture. Since launching in 2020, the company has grown from an independent jersey experiment into a creative platform whose work has moved through professional sport, arenas, fashion media and retail.

There is something almost too neat about the distance between Starky’s bedroom and Barclays Center.

Rare Breed BX began there, in the South Bronx, with a computer, samples and the sort of trial and error that rarely makes it into polished founder stories. Starky was figuring out manufacturing, sizing, construction and production as he went. There was no team of specialists waiting behind the idea, no established name to reassure customers that what he was making was worth paying attention to.

A few years later, something conceived in that same bedroom was being sold inside Barclays Center.

“The distance between those two images is almost absurd to me,” he says.

It is an image that neatly captures the growth of Rare Breed BX, but perhaps not the reason it worked. Starky’s story is less about learning to make jerseys than it is about learning how an object can carry an identity.

Long before Rare Breed existed, he was already interested in the world surrounding a product: uniforms, logos, campaigns, the fragments of New York culture that become meaningful beyond their physical form. A jersey was never simply fabric and stitching. It could signify a city, a team, a memory, an allegiance or an entire visual language.

Later, working in advertising gave him terminology for instincts he already had. He learnt strategy and branding, and how to make an audience care about an idea. Rare Breed gave those instincts somewhere tangible to go.

“Instead of just having an idea, I could make the idea exist.”

Built in the Bronx

Growing up in the South Bronx shaped Starky’s understanding of creativity in ways that remain visible throughout his work.

He is careful not to make scarcity sound poetic. Having fewer resources, he says, is not inherently beautiful. What it can create, however, is resourcefulness.

“The Bronx teaches you the difference between having a lot and doing a lot with what you have.”

It taught him that presence does not have to come with a high price tag; that presentation, confidence and originality can alter the way something is perceived. More significantly, he grew up watching people create culture without always being recognised as its creators.

“You grow up seeing that the biggest influence can come from places the rest of the world isn't paying enough attention to.”

That understanding of New York — who shapes it, who gets credited for shaping it and how identity becomes visual — would eventually become fundamental to Rare Breed.

The company itself arrived without a cinematic lightbulb moment. During the pandemic, Starky began reimagining the New York Knicks through his own design perspective. In November 2020, Rare Breed released its first jersey.

Initially, the challenge was surprisingly straightforward: could he take something that existed in his head and manufacture it properly?

Then he made another.

People responded. The work travelled.

And, gradually, Starky realised customers were responding to more than a single product.

They were trusting his taste.

“That was when the possibilities became much bigger than one product.”

The distinction matters. Rare Breed was no longer simply selling an item; it was establishing a point of view.

When a Team Trusts Your Taste

For any independent designer, institutional recognition can change the scale of what seems possible. For Starky, that shift came when the organisations he had grown up watching began trusting Rare Breed with their own identities.

“That’s different from somebody liking a shirt,” he says.

The company would go on to create apparel connected to teams including the New York Liberty, LA Sparks, Chicago Sky and Brooklyn Nets Hype Team. But it was the Liberty that changed the trajectory most.

The connection predates Rare Breed entirely.

Starky’s first professional sporting event was a New York Liberty game in 1997, when his second-grade teacher took him. Years later, he would find himself contributing to the visual world of that same organisation.

There is, as he puts it, “a full-circle element that you couldn't manufacture if you tried.”

Central to that relationship was Ellie the Elephant, the Liberty mascot who has become an unlikely fixture across basketball, fashion and New York culture.

Rare Breed wasn't simply tasked with putting another mascot into another team uniform. The company was helping develop the wardrobe of a character increasingly treated as a fashion personality in her own right.

The resulting “Herzey” travelled through every world Starky had been interested in from the beginning: sport, design, fashion, culture and commerce. It moved from an idea to something Ellie wore on the court, then into fashion coverage, before eventually becoming an object fans could buy for themselves at Barclays Center.

For Starky, it proved those worlds did not need to remain separate.

The right idea could move between all of them.

The Part That Doesn't Make the Campaign

Success, particularly in fashion, has a habit of cleaning up its own origin story.

The finished product appears under arena lighting. The tunnel walk gets photographed. The editorial lands. Eventually, the work can begin to look inevitable.

Starky is quick to dismantle that illusion.

Asked which parts of building Rare Breed were messy or unglamorous, his answer is simple: “Most of it.”

There are packages being tracked at two in the morning, samples rebuilt because a single measurement is wrong, unanswered emails, invoices that need chasing, production negotiations and manufacturing mistakes. There are decisions made without enough information and problems that cannot be passed to another department because, when you are independent, that department is you.

“Fashion gets photographed beautifully,” he says. “Building a fashion business is mostly logistics.”

It is perhaps the least romantic sentence in the story of Rare Breed, and one of the most revealing.

Public momentum and private reality do not always move together. A founder can receive

the biggest press of their career while simultaneously navigating rising production costs, shipping challenges, manufacturing problems and changes in client demand. Success does not remove the operational realities of building independently; often, it simply means learning how to manage them at a different scale.

As the company has grown, Starky has been forced to continually rethink parts of the business.

Where an earlier version of himself might have viewed that as evidence that something had gone wrong, he sees it differently now.

“Every few years the business asks you whether you're willing to become somebody different enough to keep building it.”

Pivoting, a word he used much more casually early in his career, has become less like startup terminology and more like a requirement for longevity.

The logistics have also changed him creatively. Rare Breed taught him that executing an idea is inseparable from having one.

“An idea isn't really an idea until you can execute it.”

Beyond Recognition

There is a version of a founder story that ends here.

The brand earns major sports partnerships. The work appears in arenas. Publications including Vogue and Sports Illustrated take notice. Recognition becomes the tidy proof that the original instinct was correct.

For Starky, recognition still matters. He has no interest in pretending otherwise.

“I'm not going to pretend seeing your work in Vogue becomes normal.”

What has changed is what that recognition represents.

Earlier in his career, it could feel like permission. Now, it feels more like evidence: evidence that an idea travelled far enough beyond him for somebody else to care about it.

The publication is not the destination.

Neither, increasingly, is the jersey.

Starky’s ambitions now centre on ownership, longevity and creating a body of work recognisable by its perspective rather than its category.

“I don't just want people to know something I made. Eventually I want them to know I made it before they see my name.”

That thinking sits behind the wider Starky world he is beginning to build.

If Rare Breed BX taught him how to make things, Starky is concerned with a different question: what deserves to exist?

A jersey might be the answer. So might a skort, a jacket, an image, a campaign or an object that has nothing to do with traditional sportswear.

What matters is that the perspective remains intact.

New York. Sport. Design. Culture. Humour. Memory. Identity.

Those ideas have always been present in Starky’s work; the wider Starky world simply gives them more room.

“Rare Breed BX is an incredible engine and it remains an important business,” he says.

“Starky is the universe that the engine helped make possible.”

Making Something From Nothing

There is more autobiography inside Rare Breed than Starky initially realised.

The fixation with New York is his. So is the competitiveness and the humour. So is the instinct to look at something familiar and ask why nobody has done it differently.

Even his favourite kind of brief reveals something about him.

“I like impossible briefs. I like the moment where somebody says, ‘I don't know if this can be done,’ because now I'm interested.”

Yet he is resistant to treating design as a diary.

Personal experience is useful because it creates specificity, but the objective is translation.

An idea has to become expansive enough for somebody else to locate themselves inside it.

“That’s when design becomes culture instead of autobiography.”

It may explain why the Rare Breed story feels less like the rise of one particular product and more like an accumulation of ideas — each one testing how far Starky’s perspective can travel.

Asked what would surprise the version of him who released that first jersey in 2020, and initially his answer is considerably less philosophical.

“Honestly? Probably the elephant.”

There was, understandably, no section of the original business plan predicting that he would one day become known for “figuring out how to make an elephant look snatched.”

It is funny because it is true, but also because Ellie represents the larger unpredictability of what Starky has built.

Something that began in a Bronx bedroom reached professional sports, major arenas, retail and national publications. An experiment in whether he could manufacture one idea correctly became proof that his perspective could extend far beyond one garment.

And now, several years into building Rare Breed BX, perhaps the biggest shift is that Starky is no longer asking how far the jersey can go.

He is asking what it made possible.

“The jersey wasn't the destination,” he says.

“It was the door.”