August Ames has trained consistently since she started jiu jitsu in 2019, but moving frequently forced her to jump from gym to gym. We all know that every jiu jitsu gym has its own culture and traditions, and it’s not always easy to find your place. Especially when training no gi, there’s a tendency to size up the new folks and get a sense of their skill level instead of just asking about their time in the sport. But thanks to her brand, Kami BJJ, no one ever has to guess August’s belt rank.
As the founder of Kami BJJ, August makes ranked Jiu-Jitsu scrunchies that allow players to tie back their hair and show off their colors at the same time. They come in two different sizes (standard and mini) and are available for kids and adults. August says she grew up around a sewing machine and regularly worked on DIY projects, but she didn’t have any formal sewing training before she started the brand. She refined her technique as the brand grew: “A lot of people might think it’s just a hair tie, how much thought can really go into it?” August told Jits this winter. “But when you sew hundreds and hundreds of them from start to finish, there’s actually a lot of thought and details that I put into it.”
At first, August posted the hair ties in an Etsy shop called BJJ Designs and left it at that. But when she saw someone else nosing in on her territory, she was motivated to start taking her own ideas more seriously. Kami BJJ quickly became August’s full-time focus, and the brand has been going strong ever since. Fun fact: August was inspired by the fact that “kami” is a homonym in Japanese, meaning both “hair” and “god” depending on the context (and the kanji). If Dolly Parton said “the higher the hair, the closer to god,” does that mean a higher ranked hair tie inches us even further toward the heavens?
We’ll let August tell you the rest of her story…
JITS MAGAZINE: What was the original idea behind Kami BJJ?
AUGUST AMES: It started in 2020 when I was at my first home gym, Gracie Barra Corona. A couple of my teammates and coaches were going to do a 5 vs. 5 women’s team competition, and I wanted to give them something as a show of support. I wanted it to be Jiu-Jitsu related, but I also wanted it to be something they could actually use. I came up with these hair ties. They really loved them, and then all the other women at my gym, when they saw them, they wanted them too.
Then they started telling me, ‘Oh, you should really sell these…’ I didn’t mean for it to be a business, I just made it as a gift. But they told me I should sell them, so I put them up on Etsy and just left them there for a long time. Once in a while, someone would come across them. I’d get maybe one or two orders a month, if that. It was still nice seeing the notification pop up out of nowhere and seeing that someone liked it enough to buy it.
How did it grow from this Etsy project into a fully fledged business?
One day, I was scrolling on Instagram, and I saw this picture of a ranked hair tie, but it wasn’t mine. I saw that their first post was in 2022. I can never drop the big “S” word and say they stole my idea, or they copied my idea, but it had been two years since I started floating my hair ties around on the internet, and jiu jitsu is a really niche community, so you can come to your own conclusions about that. But it was shocking, because I saw this person was making and selling theirs, and they were going at it at a full sprint, making it their business.
I went through a lot of emotions when I saw that. At first, it was disbelief. Then I also felt a lot of shame and guilt, because I didn’t mean for the hair ties to become a business but to see someone else do it, I felt like I kind of had it coming to me. It was my fault. I should have worked a lot harder to build my brand, and I should have really believed in the potential that other people saw in it. And then also, of course, I felt a little bit of resentment that someone would try to take credit for the inception of it and try to use it for profit. I went from being in disbelief to feeling apathetic. ‘Okay, it is what it is, that’s just how the market works.’ Eventually, I said, ‘No!’ You know what? I really need to put in the work to take back what was originally mine.
So I named it, I made my own site, I drew the logo by hand and traced it on Photoshop. Then I redid all my hair ties, took all new pictures, and did all the photo editing. I rebranded and overhauled everythingin the span of one week. From the moment I woke up to when I went to bed, I would just be working on it. It felt good, because it had been a long time since I had found something that I could just lose myself in. It’s been over a year now and it’s grown so much. But there’s still a lot of room for growth.
People do jiu jitsu for a lot of different reasons. Some people want to compete, some just want to exercise. Some people put a lot of stock in belt rank, and some people don’t at all. Why do you think people are so excited about displaying their rank like this?
The belt colors are really subjective. I know there’s also a lot of talk on either side, either you’re sandbagging or you don’t deserve the color of your belt. But to me, it’s all relative, and it’s nice to have this measure of how long you’ve been training and your own standard. I think having the belt colors is a great way to manifest how much you’ve been training, and how much you’ve grown since you’ve started. And I love putting it on the hair tie. I think there’s something very human and also very feminine about it, because you’re going to take this violent sport, and all the guys, they try to act tough: ‘Oh, I could choke you out. I could break your arm.’ Ok, yeah, that’s really cool. It’s really fun. But like, how about we all do that while we’re wearing cute bows in our hair too, you know?
I see people loving their Kami BJJ hair ties on Instagram all the time. What happens when they get promoted?
This is the most common question I get asked. When people buy the scrunchies with a stripe, it’s sewn into the seam so I can’t really unstitch it and re-sew it. What people do instead is add their own tape, so they promote their hair tie when they get promoted on their belt.
What’s next for Kami BJJ?
I want to get to the point where I can start sponsoring athletes fully. Until then, I think one of the best parts of having this small jiu jitsu business is that I get a lot of requests from charities or organizations or events, and they’ll ask me to donate some hair ties for them. It’s great because even if I don’t have the means to make large financial contributions, I can make these hair ties. I have another charity event coming up this weekend, they can either raffle them off or sell them to help different groups. And I’ve been able to donate to a lot of organizations around the country for women’s shelters, open mats, camps, and stuff like that. It’s just nice having this currency that I can use to give back to the community, even when I wouldn’t be able to do so financially.
Jits readers get 10% off Kami BJJ hair ties! Use code JITSMAG at checkout at kamibjj.com!
