From Hueytown to Nashville, Kelly Roberson is redefining Southern luxury

“I go from not doing this to Russell Dickerson hitting me up, and then it’s plastered all over the internet because he’s wearing my jacket. I’m just like, what just happened? I was just in my mom’s living room—it’s insane.”

Kelly Roberson, a creative from Hueytown, Alabama, is the founder of one of the South’s hottest new bespoke clothing lines. Wayne Southern Luxuries is based on a partially fictional character—Wayne—and even if you haven’t heard of him, he’ll be familiar to you, because everyone knows a Wayne.

Kelly Roberson’s roots

Roberson grew up in Hueytown, a small town a little less than halfway from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa. “Born and raised…I wouldn’t want to grow up anywhere else,” Roberson says of his hometown.

One of Hueytown’s claims to fame is that it is the hometown of 2013 Heisman Trophy winner and NFL quarterback Jameis Winston. Roberson’s dad actually coached Winston in middle school football.

Roberson said he gave his dad a tough run as a rambunctious middle school football and baseball star. His family even had an air freshener that Winston bought as a back-to-school gift in their river house bathroom. It said “Jameis Winston” on it and stayed there for several years.

Growing up with a creative passion in a smaller, traditional, blue-collar town like Hueytown wasn’t without its struggles for Roberson. He didn’t feel like he completely fit in culturally. He was a creative at heart, but throughout his adolescence and into early adulthood, he doesn’t recall ever meeting a professional creative.

Creative struggles and false starts

Without a role model to guide his career path, Roberson went to school to learn the automotive paint and body trade. After getting his degree, he landed what he thought was his dream job at Goolsby Customs, a world-renowned custom hot rod shop.

Not long into his time there, however, he recalls “grinding the trunk of a ’60s truck by myself in the middle of the summer, and thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life.’”

To begin scratching his creative itch, Roberson went to ministry school at Church of the Highlands in 2010 and started a career as a worship musician. Recently, he was the creative director at Zeal Church in Nashville.

Along the way, he’s worked on musical projects of his own, which mostly fall into two categories: “Bobby Quick,” named after his grandfather, for anything that feels inherently country, and “Kelly Roberson,” for anything that feels authentically him, drawing heavily from American genres and groups like The Fray and Augustana.

Travel: leaving Hueytown to understand it

“In my younger years in high school, I was ready to leave Hueytown—I was a creative guy and I felt stuck. The South can sometimes have closed minds about creativity and people who dress differently, and I got made fun of quite a bit for my attire most of my life,” Roberson says.

Since leaving Goolsby Customs and Hueytown, he has lived in Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Hilton Head and Fort Lauderdale. He now lives in Nashville and has traveled extensively throughout Europe and the Caribbean.

Through all of that travel and those cultural experiences, however, Roberson came to see his experience of being raised in and living in the Deep South in a new light.

“I realized how colorful Hueytown was—small-town Alabama, the Southern culture, the blue-collar culture. I look back on what people were wearing, and I know that other cultures would think it was so interesting, but to us in Hueytown, it’s normal.”

“The world is getting a little more bland because we’re all connected through social media and the internet, and the places that keep their culture and flavor are anomalies—and they’re so valuable. The thing that pushed me out and got me made fun of growing up is the thing I love the most. I love the extremes of Southern culture in Alabama, and my upbringing.”

“And that’s Wayne. That’s why anything I make is based off the normal of Hueytown—but to a lot of the rest of the world, it isn’t normal. It’s very interesting.”

The idea of Wayne

“I had this guy in my head I was designing for. Or maybe I wasn’t designing for him, I was designing his life,” Roberson says of Wayne.

Wayne, both the brand and character, is a composite of the Hueytown Roberson grew up in and Roberson himself.

“Southern blue-collar culture and luxury don’t traditionally go together, but I personally love both…so that’s what I’m making.”

Wayne is the guy you remember working at the bait shop in the ’90s. He’s the guy who stops on the side of the road to help you change your flat tire. He’s that colorful good ol’ boy we all have experiences with. He’s that guy, mixed with a little bit of Roberson as well.

Wayne is definitively blue-collar, but he gets respect from “all the other collar colors.” You get the idea: Wayne is everyone’s favorite hard-working Southern gentleman, with an effortless—maybe even accidental—sense of style.

Russell Dickerson and the toolbox video

One day, Roberson was working hard making clothes for Wayne when he decided to make what would become a fateful “toolbox video,” a behind-the-scenes look at his creative process and craftsmanship.

Little did he know at the time, Roberson said, he had included “a bunch of algorithm trigger words in the video, and everyone in the music industry saw the video.”

The video went viral, and shortly after, Russell Dickerson reached out and commissioned him to make four jackets for him to wear on his Russell Mania Tour.

The kicker: he needed them in 10 days.

So Roberson did what many of us would do if we were in a bind and needed help sewing: He called his mom.

Roberson and his mom underwent a sewing marathon to get the jackets finished. When Dickerson got the jackets in his hands at his fitting just two days before the Houston Rodeo, “He loved one of them so much he changed his entire outfit,” Roberson recalls.

And just like that, after years of hard work, Roberson was an overnight success.

“I’ve had probably four brands before this that I tried and they didn’t work…it just now started hitting,” he says.

Craft and philosophy: what makes a Wayne’s piece

Wayne’s pieces are often made from high-quality vintage bases. They’re hand-sewn, sometimes made from ’90s Silverado seat-cover patches pulled from a junkyard, and even the non-custom pieces start with modern premium blanks.

“I really love lived-in clothes more than new—the fading and the rips,” he says.

His pieces are refreshingly new and unique, but nostalgic at the same time. On his ’90s Silverado pieces, Roberson affectionately notes that the ’90s Silverado is the “Ferrari of the South.”

On why he does everything to such high quality in a mass-produced world, he says, “I’d rather just not have a clothing brand than sell something with better profit margins but worse materials.”

That commitment to quality is central to the brand’s philosophy and to Roberson’s vision for Wayne Southern Luxuries.

Roberson dreams of one day having a retail store that isn’t just a store, but an immersive shopping experience—a way to meet Wayne, not just dress like him.

For now, he is focused on cautiously scaling while keeping the brand exclusive and maintaining the quality that brought people to it in the first place.

“I want people to be so proud of that hat that they’re scared to throw it away years from now. I don’t want it to be a trend.”

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