- I like to use my artwork to kind of reflect a lot of my emotions, a lot of my feelings, a lot of my mental health.

- [Michael] Some days I'm not okay, and that's okay.

And, you know, I deal with anxiety.

I feel like I can't breathe half the time, that doesn't define who I am but I still run a business.

A successful business and I believe his art helped create that conversation.

(upbeat music) - My name's Shawn Coss, I am the co-owner and artist behind the brand Any Means Necessary.

- Michael Nemitz.

I am the co-owner of Any Means Necessary.

Any Means Necessary is more than a saying to us, it's a lifestyle.

You know, we started the business in my basement on $200 and we turned it into a million dollar company by being relentless, never taking no for an answer, and, you know, we did everything we could to follow our dreams.

- The whole concept was taking dark art and mixing it in with like the street-wear fashion and no one's really doing that.

I feel like we're one of the only brands that actually has emotion, meaning behind stuff that we're putting out.

We're not trying to fit a mold.

It's always been our own path.

So the brand's kind of a reflection of that.

Dark art's obviously just a subjective term.

To me it's just art.

It's just my type of artwork.

I just kind of create how I feel.

And so, it's not really creepy to me.

It's more of like therapeutic art.

Art is in the eye of the beholder.

So it might be dark to one person.

It might be very touching to someone else.

- We started the LLC in like 2014 and we had no idea what we were doing.

The end of 2016, he started doing a mental illness series in October.

It was called Inktober Illness, and it did a different mental illness depiction every day of the month.

People were very excited.

So then, you know, we started making posters of 'em and that's when we started getting traction - We literally stumbled upon all this all by accident.

- [Michael] Yeah.

- We have no background.

We have no business being in business, to be honest.

- [Michael] I was a cable guy.

He was a nursing student.

- Yeah.

But like the last three, four years you would have no idea that we have no real business backgrounds.

It was just two friends making cool stuff.

You know, that's all we ever wanted to do.

But now it's like, we're holding conversations with people who are $10, $20,000,000 companies.

You know, big fashion brands that, like, he can sit down and actually have a conversation and not be like, what does that mean, what does that mean?

- [Michael] We did a lot of fake it till you make it in the beginning and- - [Shawn] We've always fallen forward.

- [Michael] Yeah.

- [Shawn] Which is nice.

We've never fallen backwards.

Every year's always been better.

- I want to be a motivational story for people to know that like, I deal with anxiety, depression, stressed out all the time, but you know you still can do what you want to do you don't have to follow the paths that everyone else traveled.

- Knowing that at the end, we built this on something that shouldn't have been successful.

And that's super motivating to me, Like, we are so spiteful that we're being told like you can't be successful in Ohio.

We're like, okay, cool.

We'll figure that out.

And being a million dollar clothing brand, direct to consumer, with dark art, and street wear fashion with no business background.

I mean, I feel like we're doing something right.

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