At 11 a.m. on Friday, a Charlotte Hornets employee opened the team store doors and waved in a handful of customers. Within minutes, a steady stream flowed through the racks of purple and teal, most with the same question:
“Where’s the 704 Shop stuff?”
It was the first day of the locally grown streetwear brand’s collaboration with the city’s first locally grown major pro sports franchise. The 704 Shop-Hornets pairing was years in the making, and the timing couldn’t have been better. The night before the release, the Hornets had defeated the Knicks for their fifth straight win. They’ve been one of the NBA’s best stories since the calendar flipped to 2026.
704 Shop, the local brand created by UNC Charlotte grads 12 years ago, has dropped releases for most of the other major sports franchises and events here. But never the Hornets, until now. This five-piece, limited-edition collection (two T-shirts, a hoodie with Hugo climbing the BofA tower, and two hats) had only been made public Friday morning, hours before the release. But within 30 minutes of the shop’s opening, store workers were replenishing some racks for popular sizes.
As I waited my turn to browse, a woman wearing camo pants walked past me with two T-shirts and a hat, on her way to the register. I asked her how much the shirts cost, and she said, “Oh I didn’t even look. Doesn’t matter.”
One person who wasn’t there was 704 Shop co-founder Christopher Moxley. He was a few blocks away at an event with his alma mater, UNC Charlotte. I’ve been talking to Moxley off and on since December, trying to understand how he and his former college friends, Jerri Shephard and Scott Wooten, built a brand that’s outlived countless other small businesses and community initiatives.
“We weren’t the first brand to write ‘Charlotte’ on a T-shirt, by any stretch,” Moxley told me. But he added, “there’s never been a brand in Charlotte that’s had that level of intentionality towards placemaking.”
It sounded like marketing speak when he said it. But the more I’ve sat with that line, the more I’ve realized what 704 Shop’s tapped into: Winning NBA basketball teams can happen anywhere, but a 704 Shop partnership says something else. It says that this team could only have grown here.
Moxley was eight years old and growing up in a north Charlotte public housing complex when the original Hornets launched as Charlotte’s first major pro sports franchise in 1988. He became obsessed with the team. Even today he can name a dozen or so players from the 1980s and ’90s era.
He lived with his mother and three siblings in Dillehay Courts. Until it was demolished a few years ago, Dillehay was the last remaining public housing community under the old Charlotte Housing Authority, now called Inlivian.
Moxley remembers playing basketball with most of his free time, pretending to be Dell Curry, Muggsy Bogues, or Kelly Tripucka. He was always aware of his family’s finances, and rarely asked for anything that wasn’t a necessity. He was able to attend a few games at the old coliseum with community groups. In 1991, he went to the NBA’s Stay in School Jam during All-Star weekend. Only kids with perfect attendance received invitations — Moxley says his mom “played no games” about her kids missing school.
Moxley was a natural student. He was in Harding High’s IB program and taking calculus courses by his sophomore year. When he was 14 or 15, he was accepted into a summer engineering program at Georgia Tech. His mom didn’t have a car, so he took his first Amtrak ride to Atlanta, alone. He enjoyed it, but left unsure engineering was for him.
Students on free lunch could have two college application fees waived. Moxley used his waivers for UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State. Both sent him acceptance letters.
He chose UNC and became a business major. He walked onto the track team in his freshman year and ran hurdles. But being a student-athlete was more difficult than he expected. For the first time in his life, he flunked classes. He was also anemic, and the track workouts drained him. A nutritionist put him on a better diet, and his grades improved in the second semester.
That summer, he came home to Dillehay Courts and enrolled in classes at UNC Charlotte to make up for the rough start. He wound up loving it, and graduated in 2003 with honors.
He couldn’t find a job, though. One question he’d see on applications still irks him: Do you have reliable transportation? He took a job at a chain jewelry store near his apartment and walked to work for six months to make ends meet. Then his college mentor set him up with an interview with Northwestern Mutual in SouthPark. The firm found a job for him and he’d take the city bus to work each day, thankful for the little bit of social capital that helped him land the position.
He’d spend nearly 20 years in financial services, the bulk of it with TIAA. He also owned a recording studio with friends off of North Tryon for a few years. After he shut that down, he still couldn’t sit still with just one job. So in 2013, he and Shephard and Wooten launched 704 Shop. Moxley worked both — TIAA and the business side of 704 Shop — for seven years. When the pandemic hit in 2020, he took a buyout offer from TIAA that gave him the runway to work 704 Shop full time.
I asked him why he hadn’t gone all-in on 704 Shop sooner, and he said, “I’m a very risk-averse person. A lot of that is due to where I come from.”
About that: Starting when he was 22, Moxley raised money to give away Thanksgiving meals to his mom’s neighbors at Dillehay Courts. The annual funding drive became so popular that his TIAA coworkers would remind him each November that Thanksgiving was coming soon.
For all the skills he learned in college and business, that Thanksgiving drive may have helped him with the most useful one for his role today.
“I know,” he says, “the power of relationships.”
His connections have become the architecture of 704 Shop.
The business started a dozen years ago by dropping limited-edition Friday releases that pinged around the internet and social media. The marketing strategy was a mix of abundance and scarcity — a new release every week, but when they sold out, that was it.
This was just as Charlotte began to explode in a post-Recession era. Millennials from all over were moving to the city and looking for some sense of connection to their new home. 704 Shop opened a brick-and-mortar store in South End in 2017, but the rent prices made it difficult to justify. The store closed in summer 2025.
Now Moxley focuses on something that can be harder to scale than a Friday drop — those relationships. Business-to-business contracts and partnerships are the company’s focus. That means coffees and lunches and speaking engagements.
One of the most meaningful partnerships, for Moxley, was with UNC Charlotte. In 2020, when the university released its new All-in C logo, 704 Shop collaborated on the rollout. Moxley also started a now-endowed scholarship, named for his son, Jaylen, awarded to low-income freshmen.
Another memorable partnership came last year at the PGA Championship. 704 Shop’s deal with Quail Hollow included an agreement to sell some of the gear through 704 Shop’s channels.
“I think we were, like, the only people who’ve ever sold the Quail Hollow ‘Q’ off-grounds,” Moxley said, with a little laugh of disbelief. “They don’t need 704 Shop to have a successful merch tent at PGA tents. They’re going to do quite well without us. But I like to call it the crossover effect. They’ve got their thing, we’ve got our thing. The old Venn diagram.”
Earlier this month, we met Moxley in the lobby at the airport. 704 Shop opened a kiosk in the Concourse A/B connector, just behind the 1897 Market restaurant, in 2023. This guy who once relied on public transportation for everything now can send just a few texts to bring a couple of journalists through security at the airport.
A fellow named Terry came to meet us in the lobby and escorted us in. Moxley made small-talk with Terry like they were old friends while we walked. Moxley has regular meetings with some of the most powerful people in the city, but he maintains the same demeanor and flashes the same smile with airport employees and anyone else he encounters.
The airport kiosk has been great for business, he says. When it opened, they stocked a few cut-and-sewn hoodies with the 704 Shop logo, and priced them at $125 because of the cost of producing them. They sold out within days.
At the grand opening, local slam poet Boris “Bluz” Rogers, another UNC Charlotte graduate, was there to deliver a special performance.
For Moxley, it’s always been about that Venn diagram, how one business or artist can help another, and how those connections combine into something larger. His business partner, Wooten, the designer of the ownership trio, had the idea for 704 Shop when he was living in Pittsburgh, where he saw how apparel companies there contributed to the broader narrative of the community.
“One of the unique things about our business has been our ability to bring people together in what’s historically a very segregated city, by design,” Moxley told me on the escalator ride out of the airport.
“You see a lot of young professionals” wearing the gear, he continued. “You see all the way up to their grandparents, every socioeconomic status in between. You see kids from the west side and folks from south Charlotte, all kind of gravitating towards our brand because of what it represents, right? It represents the 704 and just being proud to be from 704. Although it’s not a perfect city — what city is? — but people are proud to be from Charlotte.”
That pride was evident last night at Spectrum Center. The Hornets, who for years have been the NBA’s bottom-dwellers, had their 11th straight sellout and 21st of the season. Arena hosts Joel Silverio and Ohavia Phillips each wore the new 704 Shop Hornets gear on the court to hype up the crowd. The team store had the apparel prominently in two locations, and kiosks were set up in various places around the arena.
“All of these collaborations are special,” Moxley told me. “But this one is different because … it’s the Hornets. It’s the one that I’ve always wanted.”
Moxley sat in section 110, watching the brand he helped create being showcased by a basketball team he’s rooted for since he was 8. Next to him were friends and family, including his brother, who traveled in from Virginia, and his mom, who raised him in Dillehay Courts and taught him the value of perfect attendance.