[voh-lish-uhn] noun: the act of willing, choosing, or resolving
Like tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, John Sapiente’s dream was to see his brand logo on a random passerby. To do so would confirm he was on the path to making a difference, he thought.
“I would be blown away if that happened,” he told a friend as they walked through Los Angeles International Airport in 2016.
A couple years later, as he sat on an airplane watching others board, a fellow passenger walked on with his logo on a tee shirt, the winged red, white and blue design of Volition America, the brand he founded to honor veterans.
Sapiente was with his wife, and they looked at each other, “with a bit of shock and probably a ‘holy shit,’” he says.
Dream realized, he keeps moving forward.
Volition America is dedicated to making patriotism non-partisan again, supporting a major veterans’ charity and stitching inspirational messages that espouse a fealty to country on its various commissioned items, which include sunglasses, joggers, baseball and golf gear, watches, and its most recent accomplishment, cigars.
The brand donates varying percentages of its revenue to Folds of Honor Foundation, a non-profit founded to benefit the families of veterans who have died or become disabled through their service.
Volition does so in union with long-established institutions including Cobra Puma Golf (golf gear), Puma (clothes, shoes), Luminox (watches), Maruchi (baseball bats and gloves) and most recently Gurkha Cigar, ensuring they aren’t just slapping a logo on something.
“The way to do this was to partner in various sectors with someone who knew that side of the business,” Sapiente says.
Cobra, for example, has created the Darkspeed X Volition Driver, developed by the same teams that create its revered golf gear portfolio. Luminox features the Volition America watches on its homepage as “timepieces with a mission.”
Baseball equipment producer Marucci, which will next year be the official bat of Major League Baseball, produces a baseball mitt with the Volition logo in the palm.
Folds of Honor- Lieutenant Col. Dan Rooney
Photo credit: Folds of Honor
Volition America’s patriotic fervor comes with a story, an existential awakening with an ambitious door-knocking campaign.
And it all began with Sapiente’s golf game.
He was a high school wrestler in Arlington Heights, Ill., a Chicago suburb. But he needed a warm weather sport, and his dad suggested golf.
“You’ll thank me later for it,” said his father, the founder of Elgin Die Mold Co., which Sapiente now also helms. The elder knew that golf was not just a relaxing pastime but also an entrée into business opportunities and good social contacts.
He didn’t know that it would, three decades later, open the biggest door of his son’s life.
Sapiente as a youth aspired to be the “next Bob Costas,” taken with sports broadcasting while majoring in communications at the University of Kansas. But that fell away, and he found himself working in sales for a major lighting producer and distributor. It was unremarkable and Sapiente, young and ambitious, wanted more.
“I was traveling all over America,” he says. “I did five years there and decided that I am not a corporate guy.”
But he was still a golf guy; “I was playing golf socially the whole time,” he says. “When I golfed, I smoked cigars, it was my spare time, and that time on the course was my Zen spot, I could just play golf and smoke cigars.”
He returned to the Chicago area and accepted his dad’s offer to join the family business in sales. Elgin was an equipment manufacturer for the auto industry, selling injection molded parts to producers including Chrysler and Ford.
In 2010, Sapiente bought Trident Manufacturing, a medical device maker, applying some of the lean production lessons the auto sector made to accommodate higher quality Asian practices.
He was successful, married, had four kids–three boys and a girl–and when he got some spare time, Sapiente golfed, smoked and attended social functions. He was a member of the Inverness Golf Club, and one summer evening he attended a Folds of Honor Foundation dinner with a club colleague, Larry Robinson.
“It was at the home of one of the members and we just went to see what it was about,” says Robinson. “Dan [Rooney, Folds founder] spoke.”
Folds of Honor was founded in 2007 by Rooney, an Air Force major who did three combat tours of duty in Iraq, to support the spouses and children of disabled and fallen military families.
Rooney, also a PGA golf pro, was inspiring. Both Sapiente and Robinson wanted to help.
By chance, Sapiente won an auction to play golf at the Folds of Honor premier event, the Patriot Cup, the following spring with 1982 Masters champion Craig Stadler.
“When I won the auction, I didn’t realize we would be playing golf on Memorial Day,” Sapiente says. “I really wanted to play with Stadler. I had no idea I would be spending the whole weekend with all of these military members and their families.”
The Patriot Cup was in fact a big deal and drew from a large field of golf professionals as well as various other celebrities to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Folds is headquartered.
Entertainment came from Dierks Bentley and a classic war plane flyover, while Sapiente got to play with Stadler, who was joined by pro golfers Zach Johnson, Rickie Fowler, Cleveland Browns quarterback Brandon Weeden and actor Craig T. Nelson.
The golf, the cigars and the company were fine. But the lesson was life-changing.
“Before my experience that day, Memorial Day had just been for BBQ and golf,” Sapiente says.
That had to stop, he decided. His weekend spent talking with veterans and their families schooled him on the travails endured by our military members. He had to help in whatever way he could.
“It was a revelation to me, and I walked out of that and made up my own term, ‘patriotic awakening.’ Every American benefits from the less than one percent of us that [enter the service]. Why are we not rallying around them? We are enjoying this life because of what they do. I knew I needed to spread the word.”
In the fervor of his epiphany, Sapiente became a regular, reliable Folds donor, and networked, along with Robinson, with a considerable web of contacts, encouraging them to join him in supporting Folds.
Sapiente forged a deeper friendship with Rooney and at a Darius Rucker concert in 2014 outside Chicago. With an assist from beers, they hatched Volition America.
The first concept was a clothing line, with Top Gun-style garb – tee shirts, jeans, belt buckles, hats. It sounded simple but Sapiente’s first spot of research found a field filled with variety that an upstart would have a hard time tackling.
“I went into a Lucky brand store and saw all these sizes and shapes and realized that from a manufacturing perspective, that was going to be very difficult,” he said.
Next, he and Rooney considered golf accessories. But 80 percent of those go through pro shops, which means someone would have to make sales calls on the estimated 8,800 golf courses and country clubs in the U.S.
No one had the bandwidth for that.
Sapiente was discussing his dilemma with a business associate when the idea of a “collab” was mentioned. He was an industrial guy, and the term went over his head.
“I had no idea what that was, but it was a collaboration,” he says. “That made sense.”
He made cold calls, sent cold emails, cold everything looking for a brand that might feel his passion for helping veterans. Sapiente struck gold with Puma, which in 2010 had acquired Cobra Golf creating a formidable golf arm of the famed shoe brand.
Cobra/Puma would create its own line of Volition America golf goods. The ball was rolling.
Athleisure clothing later took shape, his own line of garb including sweats, shorts, and shirts.
Cigars entered the picture as a brainstorm of logic. While golf has always been an important part of Sapiente’s life and Folds of Honor has based its fundraising on the sport, cigars struck Sapiente as an obvious move.
“My first cigar was in the early 90s, I was 20-something, living in Chicago when it was getting trendy,” he says. Up Down Cigar on Wells was his place, bagging Ashtons, mild to medium, double coronas.
Sapiente was in Florida, playing golf and he went to the golf club humidor and saw a box of CAO America cigars. Good cigar, American flag on the box, he thought, but…
“I thought, maybe I can do a cigar that has something more than just a flag on it, which would be a Volition cigar.”
Back to the cold calling, with zero interest across the spectrum. Was this going to fly?
Then he was connected with Jim Colucci, Marine, Vietnam veteran and chief operating officer of Gurkha Cigars.
It was an instant ‘yes.’
“It’s been a long time, 55 years, since I was in Vietnam, but I lost a lot of friends,” Colucci says. “When you’ve been in the military and seen people die, when the war is done, you really feel for people.”
The deal was not a collaboration, but instead, Gurkha wanted to just do a private label Volition America cigar.
The cigars come with three different wrappers – Connecticut, Maduro, Habano –and come in three different boxes, red, white and blue. The boxes hold 13 of the 6 x 54 cigars. Why 13?
Folds of Honor is named after the 13 times the American flag is folded, representing the 13 original colonies, resulting in a visual that looks like a cocked hat. Each box of cigars features a rice paper insert explaining more fully the meaning of the 13 folds.
Anyone who has lost a loved one in service to their country is heartbreakingly familiar with the wooden triangle, a burial flag case. Gurkha, based on an idea hatched by Colucci, created a desktop humidor to go with the Volition cigar featuring the burial case on the top.
“We’re going to ship the humidor with an American-made flag in it,” Colucci says. “The flag is removable for someone who has their own and can put that in there.”
Gurkha is joining the esteemed ranks of both Volition America and the Folds of Honor, two names that are becoming iconic in the growing movement to ensure our veterans and their survivors are taken care of.
For Sapiente, the small dinner at a friend’s house in 2012 turned his life upside down in the best way possible – a chance to be part of a service to his fellow man. “It was time and place,” Sapiente says of that summer night. “I had no idea that it would catapult me on such a journey. I think we can build a power brand, where everyone knows what it means to help people.”
