11-Year-Old NY Boy Opens His Own Thrift Store for Low-Income Families.
Obocho Peters is a New York fifth-grader with a style so polished, and a heart so genuine, he had to make sure that everyone else with the desire could do the same.
The 11-year-old Brooklyn trendsetter launched Obocho's Closet in his neighborhood selling fashionable children's clothing and shoe, in an array of sizes, for under $10. Obocho's Closet started out as an online thrift store in 2018 and blossomed to a "brick and mortar" shop this past December!
The physical shop, the product of a lot of hard work and crowd-funding, came to Obocho after he watched Avengers: Infinity War, he asked his mom Sasha Peters for eight toys from the film.
When Peters said she couldn’t afford the toys, Obocho took matters into his own hands, selling clothes and shoes he no longer wore to pay for them himself.
“I realized that other families must face these same challenges when taking care of their children,” he wrote. “That idea turned into the mission I have today — to help the community GROW.”
“I was inspired by all the superheroes helping to make the world a better place,” he added to GMA. “I wanted to be a hero myself by helping my mom.”
Peters, a single mom from St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, helped her son launch his website, and, recognizing that her son was bound for entrepreneur life, signed him up for business classes after school.
“You have to nurture kids when they come up with ideas and you have to pay attention to everything they say because they’re telling you how to groom them to be a better version of themselves,”
Obocho's Closet is a for-profit business and, because of this, he has found a different way to give back to the community: hosting free financial literacy seminars “geared towards teaching parents and kids how to save for college or pursue other goals like entrepreneurship.”
“It makes me feel like the hard work I’ve been doing in this community… it finally paid off." he says.
This young man is going places!