“I’m trying to start a franchise,” senior Alberto Garcia said. For the past four years, besides trying to learn the curriculum at HHS, Garcia has been operating his business, Infinite.

“What it is right now is we kinda have a music division, a clothing division, an old gaming division, and that’s pretty much where it stands right now. We also have a food truck in the works. Basically, it’s all different things that me and my friends specialize in. We’re doing it all under one roof,” Garcia said. Although the business has multiple branches now, it started out as one basic idea.

“I used to play a lot of XBOX with my friends and we decided that individuality is pretty important so we would customize our controllers and XBOX’s and once we started doing that, I started doing it for other people for a profit. That evolved into that part of the company but then, after a while, I started making music, and then after that I had picked up the clothing thing here recently,” Garcia said.

The company was originally called A-Gaming, where buyers would “bring their A-Game” in for customization. However, since the business has expanded, the name has changed with it.

“At the beginning of last year, I made this logo. It was like two intertwining hearts, but also made two side-by-side infinite logos, so the original name was Infinite Love, and it was just gonna preach to peace and equality and all that. But I decided to step back from that and just branch that off into its own line. There are going to be different lines. Since I want to do a franchise, I want to have Infinite Gaming and Infinite Sound for the music and Infinite Clothing and have different infinite sayings and catchphrases,” Garcia said. Garcia originally started expanding his company because of a class that he took.

“I was in band. Then I’d gotten kicked out by Mr. Richard. By that time, he had me doing music theory work and working on the computer, and I started making beats because they have a lot of software that I didn’t have. I had written poetry before and lyrics, so I just applied one to the other and started making actual tracks. We released a mixtape in October,” Garcia said.

Although the music division is important, it doesn’t make as much money as the other divisions. However, it is very good for getting out the Infinite name.

“The music thing takes place from here through New York and Knoxville, Tennessee, and we spread the music as far as we can but that’s just because we’re not really making a profit off that right now. We’re using it more just to build a base, just to get some fanbase and use whatever money we do get from that to fuel all of our projects,” Garcia said.

Despite the interstate connections that Infinite has made, the company is primarily local.

“Anybody who knows me knows that the high school’s been my market, mostly. I’m talking to Mr. Wilson with the athletic department to link up and do some sort of project there. I think it’d be cool to see my infinite brand crossing over to a lot of the high school designs that we have. We did some prototypes this week actually to take to him,” Garcia said.

For the most part, the business is completely independent. Garcia has some help with music and media, but he runs both of those and is wholly responsible for the clothing branch. With such a large role in the company’s success, many of Infinite’s breakthroughs are personal milestones as well.

“There’s breakthroughs for me, like doing my first customized shirt, and painting sneakers and whatever. As of a major way, I’ve found myself with a couple sit downs with some major companies or sending emails back and forth with some people like Def Jam records, but nothing really to snag on,” Garcia said. But the big names have not done enough to entice Garcia.

“The deals weren’t as nice as you might think. There’s a lot of contracts that you need to read into and when it comes to music deals, you usually don’t get as much as you want, so we’re staying independent for now,” Garcia said.

With just one person in control, the future of the company can be uncertain.

“Ideally, I’d like to go to college, but I only have two real choices that are available to me with my situation, which would be Blue Ridge or Bridgewater College since my dad works there and they kind of usher you in for a lower price, so if I can get the scores on my SATs then I’ll be there, but if I can’t get into those, I’m just going to go full into the company,” Garcia said.

The tales of college have been daunting to Garcia, and he worries about the ability to both get an education and run a business at the same time.

“I’ve heard a lot of stories of how people get really busy during college, but hopefully I’ll be able to work on the weekends, if I don’t have too much work. Over the summer, I’m definitely going to push hard, and hopefully I can get to go to college for some business-oriented classes and lift it up after that,” Garcia said.

You can find Infinite on Instagram at infinitex540.