Lonzo Ball: Is the Big Baller Brand business going bad?
By Ronald Agers
A friend of the family with total access to their trust
Alan Foster was the financial manager to all of the Ball family business ventures since 2014. Foster and Lonzo’s father, LaVar, were friends for close to a decade and Lonzo was friends with Foster’s son since the seventh grade.
According to ESPN, it was Foster that convinced LaVar to build a brand around all of his sons instead of Lonzo accepting a multi-million dollar deal by himself from established shoe companies that were reportedly interested like Nike and Adidas.
Plans like these rarely work out, especially for a rookie coming out of college. With Lonzo Ball in his rookie contract, it was not the greatest of ideas to put his own money into the business without established investors. The last time a player tried to do a business venture like this was former NBA All-Star Stephon Marbury.
Marbury started his own line called Starbury to sell shoes and clothing at a reasonable price for all consumers to enjoy. The price to the shoes was something sneakerhead historians could never forget; $14.99.
Marbury wanted to make a difference when shoe prices skyrocketed to the point people were getting robbed and even killed. He had good intentions until his investors bailed and he got hit with a $16 million dollar bank lien by then bank Wachovia.
But even then, Marbury was an established NBA All-Star with a previous shoe contract with And-1. Couple that with a huge NBA contract, his situation looked at the time like a good business decision. The failure of the business venture along with his NBA career coming to a crashing end sent Marbury into a deep state of depression.
Lonzo Ball’s situation was doomed to fail from the start in comparison.
Remember those ridiculous prices for the first shoes that came out under the Big Baller Brand? If anyone remembers the internet went nuts when LaVar Ball announced the launch of the new shoe with the price of close to $500 dollars a pair.
Naturally, when the shoes didn’t sell as well, so the price dropped down to $200 a pair. The lack of success shows the lack of homework on potential sales based on that price range.
That wasn’t the only time LaVar and the Ball family failed to do the homework ESPN apparently did on their business manager.
It seems that Alan Foster was arrested, convicted and sentenced to jail for one count of mail fraud and two counts of money laundering scamming people out of millions back in 2002. He spent around seven years in jail, plus was ordered to pay restitution to the victims as part of the sentence.
Lonzo Ball took the information from ESPN and starting investigating the history of Foster and the story was corroborated, he broke immediate business ties with Foster.