As a Queens teenager, Adyna K. Pressley pictured her name on jeans. In her composition notebook, she sketched designs with letters looping across denim back pockets, Jordache-style. Decades later, Pressley has brought her flair for embellishing classic pieces with hometown pride to her retail apparel business, Queens Royale. The brand sells clothing emblazoned with crown-wearing “Q”s, including T-shirts, beanies, baseball caps, pullover hoodies and slippers.
The streetwear brand launched in the fall of 2025, shortly after Pressley was laid off from her longtime corporate job in finance. She would later learn that she was among the many Black women who faced disproportionate job losses that year, in part because of rollbacks in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Pressley decided she never wanted to work for anyone else again. After 34 years in corporate jobs, including years as the only Black woman at her level in her department, she had had enough of office politics and microaggressions. She invested her savings in two new ventures: AKP Innovations, a leadership and professional development firm, and Queens Royale. Both center on empowerment, and seek to offer the kind of support Pressley wished she had received throughout her corporate career.
“To be in a position to show people that where you start is not where you’re going to end up, that … you can go anywhere you want in your life, I think that’s what’s important,” Pressley said, reflecting on her “humble beginnings” growing up in public housing in Woodside, Queens.
While she had no formal training in fashion design, Pressley took a cue from her own AKP Innovations sessions and her own memoir, “Rise Into You”: trust your style. “That’s a beautiful thing about entrepreneurship: it’s not about anybody else,” she said. “You’re building your own voice and you’re building it based on your vision and your values and your goals.”
Through Queens Royale and its crown “Q” logo, she hopes to remind wearers of their worth. “You are what you wear,” Pressley said. “It’s an extension of how you look at yourself, how you carry yourself, how you feel about yourself.”
For Pressley, a large part of who she is involves Queens pride: memories bonding with cousins, of family picnics in Flushing Meadows Park, of Pressley choosing to wear hoodies instead of coats even during New York winters: “My mother yells at me about that all the time,” Pressley said.
Despite the focus on women’s empowerment, Queens Royale carries men’s apparel as well. “Women are queens, men are kings,” Pressley said. “So I wanted to bring the [borough] of Queens and then royalty into one.”
Last holiday season, Queens Royale saw repeat customers started finding the brand’s items on social media and buying them as gifts. Part of the brand’s draw, she said, is quality: the logo is stitched, not ironed or pressed, into hats. She’s expecting another spike this year that she can build on.
Still, the brand speaks to people as far afield as Florida: One woman found the brand on an online women’s entrepreneurship network where Pressley had posted and loved the design. Pressley’s photo had a woman model dressed in its creator’s signature streetwear style: baseball cap, long jacket, hoodie and high-heeled boots, and a male model dressed in a hoodie and baseball cap.
“She was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love the look,’” Pressley said. “So it wasn’t even about the Queens thing.”
Pressley has started promoting the brand abroad: Earlier this year, she packed a Queens Royale hat on a trip to Paris to make a keynote speech at a women’s empowerment conference. Pressley’s vision is for the brand to be as big as Nike.
“I want it to be that successful where it becomes a household name that, when people go out for their streetwear apparel, they would look to Queens Royale,” she said.
Pressley’s advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
- Make networking an everywhere, everyday practice: During one chance encounter, Pressley happened upon women in the back of a restaurant holding a session on beauty products. In a flash, she was handing out business cards and planning to meet one of the participants about a potential collaboration. She is constantly networking, whether out for dinner or at the gas station.
- Set the foundation first. Otherwise, your vision will be scattered. Know what your business, your niche, your audience will be. What’s going to be your offer? What’s that going to look like? Figure out how to scale it back. For instance, if you go out and you say, ‘Okay, I want to sell clothes,’ what kind of clothes do you want to sell?
- Keep it simple. Sometimes people think that when you put together a design, it has to be grand. But some of the most successful brands are pretty simple. With Nike, it’s a checkmark. With Adidas, it’s a triangle.
Queens Royale
Follow on Instagram at @queensroyaleapparel.
