The Story of Guyanese Swag: From Belonging to Brand

Long before Guyanese Swag had a website, a product catalog or a pop-up booth, Lakeshia Singh-McKay was a ten-year-old girl from Guyana sitting in a Washington, D.C. classroom while someone else tried to explain where she was from.

Key, as she is known, had moved to the United States with her family and entered fifth grade in the middle of Black History Month. On her first day of school, her teacher misunderstood Guyana as Ghana and introduced her to the class as a new student from Africa. The class was shown Amistad as an attempt to help students understand her background.

For Key, the memory stayed with her. Not because one classroom moment told the whole story, but because it was an early lesson in what it feels like when your identity is misunderstood and someone else’s story is placed where yours should be.

New York showed her what belonging could feel like

Visits to family in Brooklyn and Queens gave Key the opposite experience.

There, Guyana did not need an introduction. Guyanese people were everywhere. So were Guyanese grocery stores, restaurants, food and familiar accents. Her family would stock up before returning to Washington, D.C., because those small pieces of home were much harder to find there.

The contrast stayed with her: in one place she had to explain Guyana; in another, she could simply be Guyanese.

Years later, when Key moved to Miami to attend Florida Memorial University, that contrast appeared again in a different form. The campus was deeply international and Caribbean, and cultural events were a regular part of student life. Jamaican shirts, Bahamian jewelry and other country-pride items were easy to find. Stylish Guyana merchandise was not.

Key could see Guyana represented in Caribbean spaces, but not with the same depth, variety or visibility she saw for some other countries. That gap became one of the ideas she carried with her into adulthood.

The spark came years later through her work

By the time Guyanese Swag became a business, Key had spent years developing skills in branding, design, websites and business growth through her professional work.

One project with a Ghanaian mother-and-daughter-owned company made a particular impression on her. Their pride in Ghanaian culture, history and identity brought several pieces of Key’s own life together at once: the childhood misunderstanding between Guyana and Ghana, the visibility she had experienced in New York, the representation gap she noticed in college and the professional skills she had spent years developing.

The thought was simple: I can do this for Guyana.

Guyanese Swag entered commerce in 2021. Key founded the company and serves as CEO, with Charles McKay as co-founder.

Why the name “Guyanese Swag”?

The name did not come from a marketing exercise or a trend forecast. It came from something Key kept saying while trying to name the idea:

Guyanese people have a certain swag.

To her, swag was not just clothing. It was the way Guyanese people talk, laugh, eat, joke and recognize one another. It was the inside references that make sense when you know. It was the country’s mixture of African, Indian, Indigenous, Chinese, Portuguese, Caribbean and other influences becoming something distinctly Guyanese.

Food made the idea especially easy to understand. Guyanese Chinese food, for example, is not simply a copy of Chinese food from somewhere else. It reflects years of cultural exchange and local taste. Guyanese people living abroad often talk about missing it specifically because it tastes like home in a way that another version does not.

That was the meaning behind the name: there are many influences inside Guyanese culture, but the combination has a character of its own.

The first collection started as Key’s creative expression

The first Guyanese Swag collection was not built around simply placing the Guyana flag on a T-shirt.

Key created an original Guyana-inspired pattern that blended African visual influences with Guyana’s flag colors and identity. She used that pattern across products including hats, mugs, T-shirts and sweatpants.

Her first customer was her older sister.

It was a small sale, but it meant something. Someone Key loved saw a product she had created to represent their culture and believed in it enough to spend her own money, wear it and share it.

That first purchase was proof that the idea had meaning outside Key’s own sketchbook.

Then the customers started teaching the founder

Guyanese Swag launched online first, using the ecommerce, web design and branding skills Key already had. But it was the move into in-person pop-ups that changed the way she understood the company.

The very first pop-up did not go according to plan.

Key and Charles signed up for an event promoted broadly as a Caribbean festival. When they arrived, they realized the audience was largely there for a Jamaican Independence celebration. It was a great celebration of Jamaica, but it was not the Guyanese-heavy audience they had expected.

They made three sales all day.

The first customer was Nigerian.

He chose a pair of sweatpants featuring Key’s original Guyana-inspired print. Key heard his accent and made sure he knew the flag in the design was Guyana’s, not Nigeria’s.

His response stayed with her: “It doesn’t matter. We’re all one people anyway.”

That first pop-up taught Key something important. Some people would buy Guyanese Swag because they were Guyanese. Others would buy because they were married to someone Guyanese, had visited Guyana, worked there or had some other connection to the country. And some would simply love the artwork, the energy or the story.

But the bigger lesson came as the pop-ups continued.

Key had started the brand as a designer, and the first collection reflected her own artistic point of view. In person, customers showed her that not everyone wanted the same kind of expression. Some people loved intricate, creative interpretations of Guyanese culture. Others wanted a bold Golden Arrowhead that could be recognized from across the room.

That feedback changed the way she thought about ownership of the brand.

“I learned that I can’t just make this about my creative expression. Guyanese Swag belongs to the Guyanese people, and it really needs to represent Guyanese people, not just my creative expression.”

The Caribana moment that made the mission feel real

One of the moments Key remembers most clearly happened at Caribana in Canada.

A Guyanese man saw the Guyanese Swag booth and came running toward it. When he reached the booth, he started dancing and shouting “Guyana!” at the top of his voice.

It was funny, joyful and unforgettable.

When Key spoke with him, she learned that he had left Guyana as a child and grown up in Canada. Seeing Guyana visibly represented at an event that large meant something to him.

For Key, that reaction brought the original problem full circle. She had once been the child in a classroom where people did not know what Guyana was. Years later, she had helped create a space where another immigrant could spot his country from across a crowd and immediately feel recognized.

Words such as seen, heard, represented and belonging can sound abstract. At a booth, with someone dancing because he saw his country represented, they were not abstract at all.

As those moments accumulated, the idea that started as a response to underrepresentation was becoming something Guyanese people could encounter in more and more places.

Then Guyanese Swag reached Walmart

Later in 2021, Guyanese Swag products expanded to Walmart Marketplace.

For Key and Charles, the significance was bigger than another sales channel. Walmart was a globally recognized retail name. Seeing explicitly Guyanese products accepted onto that kind of mainstream marketplace felt like confirmation of the idea that started the company in the first place: Guyana did not have to remain a niche people had to explain.

Guyanese culture, Guyanese products and Guyanese stories could sit in mainstream spaces too.

It felt, in Key’s words, like part of the mission had been accomplished.

The brand started becoming more than merchandise

As Guyanese Swag grew, Key kept returning to the immigrant experience that had shaped her childhood.

When her family first moved to the United States, one of the difficult parts of migration was not knowing where to find familiar things: Guyanese grocery stores, Guyanese restaurants, Guyanese businesses and the small pockets of community that make an unfamiliar country feel a little less unfamiliar.

That memory shaped the next phase of the company.

In 2023, Guyanese Swag expanded into a broader diaspora platform that included a business directory designed to make Guyanese-owned businesses easier to find. The idea was not simply commerce. It was familiarity, connection and community.

The company also launched Guyanese Swag: Trailblazing Voices, a podcast hosted by Key featuring entrepreneurs, creatives, professionals and members of the diaspora.

For Key, immigrant success stories mattered because migration can be emotionally exhausting. Hearing from someone who had navigated that journey and built a life in another country could become a form of encouragement for the next person still trying to find their footing.

The vision became bigger than the infrastructure

There was also a lesson hidden inside all that growth.

Guyanese Swag was trying to be an ecommerce company, a cultural platform, a business directory, a media brand, a podcast and a community resource while much of the work was still being carried by Key and Charles.

The vision had expanded faster than the infrastructure underneath it, and life outside the brand was demanding more attention too.

Rather than keep forcing the company forward at a pace they could not sustain, Key and Charles made the decision to step back and reassess what the brand needed in order to grow well.

Going quiet was not the same as giving up

Publicly, Guyanese Swag became quieter.

Behind the scenes, Key and Charles were reviewing what the first years had taught them: which collections customers connected with, what they learned at pop-ups across the United States and Canada, what friends and family in Guyana were telling them, which suppliers could support growth and what systems the company would need if it was going to scale.

Collections were redesigned. Suppliers were reconsidered. The business model was reworked. The larger ecosystem idea was not abandoned; it was put into sequence.

Key does not describe today’s Guyanese Swag as a different company.

She calls it an evolution.

In the beginning, Guyanese Swag was largely her artistic expression. Now, she sees it as a company for Guyanese people, built to represent Guyanese people and shaped by what the community has taught the brand.

That means making room for different ways of expressing pride. One customer may want intricate artwork that rewards a closer look. Another may want the Guyana flag loud, proud and impossible to miss. Neither expression is more authentic than the other.

What Guyanese Swag means to Key now

Key approaches the business through faith, purpose, resilience and service.

Entrepreneurship has taught her that not every season goes exactly as planned, but every season can still teach you something about what to build, what to change and what to carry forward.

Her favorite way to explain it is with lemons.

Life, she says, does not hand you a bottle of lemonade. It gives you lemons. You have to decide whether to make lemonade, lemon pie, lemon pound cake or something else entirely.

Moving from Guyana to the United States gave Key plenty of lemons: misunderstanding, homesickness, cultural disconnection and the repeated experience of searching for representation that was not there.

Guyanese Swag became something she made from those lemons.

It became clothing and products, yes. But its real story is about a child looking for belonging, a designer deciding to create the representation she could not find, customers teaching a young company what it needed to become, and a community turning one person’s creative idea into something larger than its creator.

That is the story behind Guyanese Swag.

For the next chapter of that journey, read how Guyanese Swag grew through ecommerce, pop-ups and marketplaces.