Damon Dash was once a living, breathing vision of hip-hop extravagance. You may have seen him in rapper Jay-Z’s music video for the smash hit “Big Pimpin’,” dancing on a yacht in the middle of the Caribbean, one hand holding a bottle of Cristal, the other clutching the waist of a scantily clad woman.

Today, years after a falling out with business partner and friend Jay-Z – the two founded Roc-A-Fella records in 1996 – and a humbling bout with personal and financial troubles (a divorce and the foreclosure of his Manhattan loft in 2009), Mr. Dash, 40, cuts a noticeably low-key figure, with ambitions that are less hip-hop mogul than creative entrepreneur.

His three-year-old company, DD172 – an amalgam of his initials and a former street address – is part business, part passion project. Mr. Dash and his crew of creative staff (each one an artist, musician, photographer or designer) work on a slew of projects, from indie-music albums to short films to art exhibitions. But perhaps the most ambitious initiative, one that Mr. Dash and his crew have worked on for the last year and a half, is about to be realized: the launch of a DD172 branch in Hong Kong.

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