Each and every year, millions of poor, helpless animals end up in a shelter. Many such shelters practice euthanization. After a certain amount of time has passed without the animals getting adopted, they kill them to make room for new animals coming in that, hopefully, will catch the eyes of potential pet adopters.
Even if some animals aren’t in a kill shelter, it is still depressing to know that there are many out there spending the majority of their life locked up in a kennel until someone notices them.
That is pretty much the rub of the situation; getting noticed. Fortunately, there is a superhero out there disguised as a young boy named Darius Brown and his superpower is exactly that; helping animals stand out in the crowd of sweet, furry little faces. The best part? He’s doing it with bow ties!
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The 12-year-old boy lives in Newark, New Jersey and for as long as he can remember he has been a true lover of fashion.
A smart young man, Brown knows just how important fashion can be when it comes to making a good first impression, and just how important a good first impression is to make new friends, even for animals.
The sweetheart that Brown is, he also has an enormous passion for helping animals in any way that he can, and that is how he got the idea to marry his love for all things fashion to his determination to help get shelter animals into good homes.
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Not only does Brown donate hundreds of bow ties to animals in shelters, but he also creates each and every one himself, lovingly sewing them by hand.
When asked in an interview with The Dodo what prompted him to start making bow ties for pets, he gave the sweetest answer ever:
“When people come into a shelter … they will see the dogs dressed in their bow tie looking cute and dapper and they won’t be able to resist taking him or her home,” the compassionate boy explains.
From beginning to end, Brown is the mastermind behind every bow tie that gets donated. Not only does he create every design, but he also buys the fabric with his own money from the store. Then he goes home and gets to sewing.
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The biggest reason that Brown has been able to accomplish so much at such a young age, even to the point of founding his very own company, Beaux and Paws, is because of the remarkable support system he has in his mom and big sister.
When he was just two-years-old, Brown’s doctors told his mother that he had several serious cognitive delays affecting his speech, comprehension, and his fine motor skills.
Such delays made it hard for Brown to work with his hands, but he never let that stop him from helping both people and animals where he could.
His older sister, Dazhai, happened to be studying cosmetology and she and Brown’s mom, Joy, thought that having sweet little Darius help with making ribbons might also help him with his motor skills delay, and they were totally right!
“With his fine motor skills, he wasn’t able to really use his hands well — tying a shoe was challenging. My mother and I came up with the idea that if he helped us with things like prepping the ribbon or cutting it, and sewing fabric together, it would help him. And it did — it worked!” Dazhia recalls in an interview with Today.
Brown took to bow tie-crafting like a charm and soon was making them all by himself, wearing one every single day. After people started noticing and asking where they were sold, Brown got the idea to open up Beaux and Paws to help out all of his furry animal pals still locked up in the shelter.
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Every time someone buys something from Beaux and Paws, Brown donates a percentage of the profits to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He then funnels the rest into materials to make even more bow ties. Once people got word of all his good deeds, they started sending in donated ribbons for his cause, allowing him to make his profits stretch even further.
“The donations help a lot because we were just digging in our pockets, buying the fabric ourselves,” Joy Brown explains to Today.
The general population weren’t the only ones to notice his efforts, either. Even former President, Barack Obama, sent Darius a letter to express his gratitude for the boy’s outstanding work in the community.
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Brown has gone on to help countless shelter animals get adopted into their loving forever homes.
While we are sure their humans loved them all on their own, we can’t help but think the adorable bow ties had a lot to do with getting them noticed. We are so thankful for precious hearts like this sweet boy’s, and we just can’t wait to see what he does in the future!
If you would like to learn more about Darius’s journey to help the ones he loves, you can follow him on Instagram.
