- February 25, 2026
- By Annie Krakower
As the Maryland men’s basketball team powered its way to a thrilling Sweet 16 run during last season’s March Madness, one of the hottest tickets was a T-shirt, and it was designed by a Terp.
Milan Chaudhary ’26, a marketing major in the Robert H. Smith School of Business, produced the wildly popular “Crab 5” T-shirts celebrating the starting lineup as founder and CEO of Brown Boy Nation. The custom streetwear company has designed for dozens of clients since 2023—from legendary actor Robert De Niro to basketball great LeBron James’ son Bryce to renowned stylist Zerina Akers—and last fall became licensed with Maryland Athletics to support Terp teams’ name, image and likeness deals.
“It was awesome to see my shirt on the Jumbotron and seeing that Xfinity stadium filled with people wearing my shirt,” says Chaudhary, a Terps basketball fan himself.
Growing up in Montgomery County, he developed an early passion for culture and sports as his mom let him listen to hip-hop and R&B music on her MP3 player and his dad introduced him to local teams. He found streetwear to be a fitting way to express those interests, but as someone of Indian descent, he didn’t see many who looked like him in the industry. Chaudhary wanted to change that.
He started working with community members to create custom shirts for birthdays or other special occasions. He’d design the bold, graphic tees on a laptop on his couch, featuring eye-catching fonts and collages of his customers, then bring them to life in the garage with a sampling machine.
Word spread, and during his senior year at Damascus High School, a fellow student asked if he could put one of the high school’s basketball players on a shirt.
“It lit something in me a little bit. I could create an effect,” Chaudhary says. As the team advanced to the state championship, “the one shirt turned into basically the whole school buying them.”
That effect intensified, and he began crafting player shirts for neighboring high schools Churchill and Clarksburg. Riding the momentum, he decided to “shoot for the stars,” he says, and formed relationships with members of LeBron’s AAU team, Strive for Greatness. He flew out to its events to meet players and give them their custom tees, including now-Minnesota Timberwolves guard Robert Dillingham.
“His one-of-a-kind ability to talk to anybody is one thing that stands out,” says logistics, business and public policy Senior Lecturer Humberto Coronado, one of Chaudhary’s instructors. “Milan is not afraid to talk to the president of a company, to the president of the University of Maryland, to the president of the largest corporation.”
His UMD marketing courses helped him land clients like the Washington Commanders, including a collection with HBCU schools like Bowie State and Morgan State, and more. But the company really blew up when he created the Crab 5 shirt. He collaborated with the men’s basketball team on a three-month NIL agreement, and after the team posted it on X, it garnered 800,000 views and over $10,000 in revenue for the players, who received 70% of the profits.
“It was amazing to be a student as well as to handle a handle high-profile deal with the university, accessing the trademarks,” he says.
After that short-term contract, his new official licensing agreement will help him create products for more Terp squads, as well as for Testudo himself. Now with a team of employees and a factory for larger-scale production, he credits his UMD education with helping him get there.
“A lot of professors here at the Smith School have made themselves available because they really, truly believe in entrepreneurs,” he says. “Without them, I don’t think I would be as successful.”
Click on the left and right arrows below for a gallery of five of his top tees.
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