MURKETING

Guest Q&A: The Shirt Project

[Today Murketing.com brings you the second guest Q&A, conducted by Ada Puiu, a senior at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. Her first Q&A is here. More about Murketing.com guest Q&As here.]

Louise Ma and Richard Watts were both design/printmaking students at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York when the idea for The Shirt Project came to them, somewhere in the East Village in the spring of 2007. That idea was to “diagram the news, on shirts.” They were awarded the Rhoda Lubalin Fellowship later that year (an annual design grant from Cooper Union), and set out to produce 10 breaking-news shirts. For a $75 subscription (or, alternately, paying $15 per shirt), The Shirt Project provides 5 diagrammatic tees detailing a story that’s making news – for example, one charts the correlation between the declining US dollar and sunspot activity, while another points to just how little of the sun’s energy we’re actually utilizing.

Aside from clever graphic design, their aim is to reach those who may not always read the headline news. I find it really cool that you can raise awareness about Myanmar just by rocking a regular ol’ Jersey T. With 24-hour news channels, e-mail updates available from all major newspapers, and shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, all constantly increasing the flow of information and awareness, wearing a news item on a shirt in place of a brand seems like a logical step. I contacted Louise and Richard, curious about their inspiration and goals for the future with The Shirt Project. Below is our brief Q&A. – Ada Puiu

Q: What is your goal with these t-shirts? What was your inspiration?

Louise: There are a few goals. The main one is to inform people who may not pay much attention to the news or have the time to read newspapers. The T-shirt as a format presents some limitations, but also a lot of interesting ways of sharing information. So this experiment explores those different ways of story-telling.

As for inspiration, Rich was a Threadless subscriber — he was a big fan of their shirts. We actually had our first kiss while he was in his “Dog ate my homework” shirt. Our professor, Mike Essl, teaches a class at Cooper on information design, and that really got us hooked on maps and interesting educative visuals.

Q: How do you decide which news articles should be printed on your shirts? Read more

To Do in Los Angeles: Poketo First Editions Print Show

The folks at Poketo (subject of August 20, 2006 Consumed) have moved into a new studio space in downtown L.A., and are ringing it in with a show, “First Editions,” featuring limited edition prints by an impressive roster that includes Little Friends of Printmaking, Kate Bingaman-Burt (Consumed November 19, 2006), and none other than former Consumed illustrator Leif Parsons. Details here.

March 22, 6-10 p.m.
Poketo Studio
510 Hewitt Street No. 506
LA

Q&A: Glennz: A Threadless star goes solo

A few weeks back I noted that Glenn Jones – a Threadless star I first interviewed for a July 8, 2007 column on the famous T-shirt company; he’s had 20 T’s produced via its contest system – had announced he was leaving his day job to do his own thing. He’d started selling some greeting cards and prints, but it seemed obvious that before too long he’d be bringing out some T’s.

And now, he is. GlennzTees.com has just launched. Seemed to make sense to use the occasion to ask Mr. Jones a few Q’s. Here they are, with his A’s.

So what are the basics of the new project? I gather it’s six designs to start, will they be sold mostly online, or retail, or some combo?

Well, as you know I’ve been submitting designs to Threadless for a few years now, and I’ve had a lot of designs that scored pretty highly but weren’t winners. That’s led to a lot of requests from people over the years for me to make available t-shirts of some of those unreleased designs.

So I’ve taken four of my more popular unprinted designs, like Rock Me Amadeus, and refined them taking advantage of more colours I’ve got available to me now. Plus I’ve added a couple of new designs that haven’t been seen before.

For now these will just be available at GlennzTees.com.

You mentioned to me that you’re working with some folks in Austin, TX on this. And they got in touch with you via Threadless? So who are they, and when did they get in touch? How did this come about, in other words? Read more

Etsy (& Cyberoptix Tie Lab) on Martha

Martha Stewart will be doing an Etsy-focused episode this Friday. While Etsy was at the center of the Handmade 2.0 story, what I’m really pleased to hear is that one of the featured creators will be none other than Bethany Shorb/Toybreaker, the maker of hand-silkscreened ties, interviewed here in Murketing.com way back in August 2006, in this site’s very first Q&A. Big congrats to her, and Murketing remains a fan of her ever-growing line, and ever-expanding business. Check out the latest from her Cyberoptix Tie Lab here. Her Etsy shop is here.

Update March 3: Video of Etsy chief Rob Kalin on Martha Stewart. He does a good job; his energy level strikes me as quite a bit higher than when I met him, but that’s important on TV. Plus I’m quite confident that Martha is more fun to talk to than I am. Anyway, also featured in the segment was The Black Apple, mentioned in the Handmade 2.0 story — and according to this segment, she will be on the Martha show herself later this month. Impressive! Finally: Amusing to see a Toybreaker tie modeled by none other than Matthew Stinchcomb.

Kid Robot should have an interesting 2008

UnBeige points to this WWD article about Kid Robot‘s collaboration with a firm called Schifter + Partners to bring “a handbag and small accessories collection” into some 200 department stores in the fall. (Previously: 1/20/08 Consumed about Yo Gabba Gabba notes Kid Robot’s involvement in that show and other projects of production company Wildbrain, which is a majority investor in Kid Robot. Also: Schifter + Partners produces Harajuku Lovers, covered in 6/19/05 Consumed.)

The WWD article suggets Kid Robot’s revenue for 2007 was around $24 million.

If I ran a magazine about the merger of creativity and entrepreneurism, I would put Kid Robot on the cover.

Q&A: Artist AshleyG

One of the many people I interviewed for the Handmade 2.0 story a while back, but was not able to include in the article itself, was a young artist known as AshleyG. Based in St. Louis, she’s sold thousands of prints through her Etsy shop, and her work is now finding its way into both gallery and retail settings. The Q&A that follows is a revised and condensed version of my original interview with her, with some updates and follow-ups built in.

We talked about her career, about discovering blogs and Etsy on the same night, about digital elements of her work and the “handmade” idea, about online selling as an antidote to the fear of rejection, and about what she hopes might happen next.

So what are the basics? I think you’re making a living from your art now, but at what point did that happen?

Yes, I do this full time, along withy my boyfriend, Drew Bell. He is kind of the less-visible part, but our LLC is actually AshleyG and Drew. I do all the drawing, and he’s the computer genius. He scans everything, and I make the color decisions but he’s usually the one physically doing the PhotoShopping, and the actual printing.

Etsy for me was definitely a turning point. I hadn’t gone to a lot of college; I’d taken some art classes, but I’d been waitressing and bar-tending forever. I met Drew met at a restaurant where I was bar-tending and he was waiting tables. We both had a common passion for art, but really no outlet for it. We’re in St. Louis where, maybe there’s a growing community now, but even four years ago when we met, there really wasn’t. So we started working on some collaborations, my drawings and digital stuff – but I was kind of putting drawings in drawers and just forgetting about them, and going back to hating my job.

When I was little it was drawing drawing drawing, that’s what I wanted to do, but I didn’t really even know that was a possibility for me. And I don’t know, if Etsy hadn’t come to be, if it would have been a possibility for me. I had sort of thought: “Okay, now from age 16 on I’ll work in the restaurant industry, and maybe slowly go to school and things can happen. But I don’t know when I’m gonna get a career, or what career.” So this came as a total surprise, and I just feel exceptionally lucky.

So how did Etsy come onto your radar then? Read more

Shoes, lifestyle, and the absurd

I think is really absurd for a sneaker to represent a lifestyle, it is really absurd to me. Somehow, these shoe companies have managed to insert themselves into people’s identity through repetition, through sponsorship deals, where they really hammer it down that shoes are a status symbol. But at some point in time people are going to realize that that is the most absurd thing.

So says Ian MacKaye, in this long interview with a site called Black Lodges. He talks about the Nike/Minor Threat stuff, and also about running Dischord, and more broadly about the “lifestyle” idea (which he makes quite clear doesn’t interest him in the least).

I came upon it by way of The Hundreds’ blog, where Bobby Hundreds briefly recounts approaching MacKay for his blessing on a Fugazi-lyric-inspired T-shirt, which evidently MacKaye begged off on giving, and so I guess there will be no such shirt.

Related previous items: Q&A with Anne Elizabeth Moore about her book Unmarketable, in which MacKaye and the Nike/Minor Threat incident figures prominently; Minor Threat Hot Sauce; “Brand Underground” article in which The Hundreds figure prominently, as does the idea of “representing a lifestyle.”

Guest column: “What Would Jesus Sell?”

Murketing is pleased to publish this special guest column by Jean Railla, which I believe will be interesting to many crafters and followers of the DIY scene. It was written for her regular column in Craft Magazine, which chose not to publish it out of concern, the magazine told her, that it might be “anti-religious.” (Update 1/25: The magazine says it was a matter of timing and space issues. Whatever the reason, the column addresses issues I think many participants in the crafter/DIY phenomenon are very interested in.) See what you think.

What Would Jesus Sell?

By Jean Railla

What Would Jesus Buy is the suitably ironic title of the documentary produced by Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame), which follows the antics of “Reverend Billy.” As the head of the Church of Stop Shopping Reverend Billy, a character developed by the New York City actor Bill Talen, preaches an anti-corporate theology with an authenticity of feeling and full gospel choir. In the film, Reverend Billy is up to his old antics–exorcising demons at Walmart Headquarters, taking over the Mall of America, and finally crashing Disney Land. His objective? “To save Christmas from the Shopocalypse: the end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt!”

I wonder what Reverend Billy would have thought about the handmade pledge sponsored by Etsy, Craftster, Craft Magazine and others this past holiday season: “I pledge to buy handmade…and request that others do the same for me.”

On the one hand, this sentiment, urging us to buy handmade goods, like fingerless gloves crafted by a seller named Corpseknit on Etsy, or a lavender soap found at Seattle’s new Urban Craft Uprising fair, is in opposition to the very type of consumerism that Reverend Billy is bemoaning. On Etsy we can actually “meet” the producer, read about him or her, see photos. Doing this, we know that when we buy from them, we will be circumventing horrific labor practices like those described by John Bowe in Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, which chronicles dehumanizing cases of slavery, environmental damage and other atrocities both in America and abroad. Clearly, supporting Corpseknit, or sellers at any of the dozens of hip craft fairs around the country, is a welcome alternative to mass-production.

But I can’t help thinking: Isn’t shopping, no matter how wonderfully crafty and politically correct still, well, shopping? Can you escape the so-called sin of consumerism by buying handmade? Isn’t the whole point of modern crafting Do It Yourself — not Buy from Someone Who is Doing It Themselves? Not to be a total hypocrite; I shop Etsy and artisan crafters as well as buy the crap from China just like everyone else. It’s just that I see a new trend, which is moving away from crafting and towards consuming. What’s next? “Hip Craft” aisles at Wal-Mart?

Actually, it’s already happening. Scion, a youth-targeted-division of Toyota, which last year marketed its automobiles through West Coast street racer culture (read: Fast and the Furious), recently held a “Craft My Ride” competition, which strove to use modern craft customization to give a DIY patina to their otherwise anonymous econo-boxes. Clearly, this is not a good sign. Crafting is incredibly popular and corporate America is taking note. They are jockeying to figure out how to sell to the growing audience of crafters.

So, where does the craft community stand? Like all other subculture movements before, punk rock, indie rock, skateboarding, zinemaking etal, will crafting become just another consumer product, or is there something more meaningful happening here?

* *

Jean Railla is the founder of Getcrafty.com and author of the craft manifesto Get Crafty. Her ode to food and drink can be found at mealbymeal.blogspot.com. Murketing thanks her for allowing this piece to be published here.

Who says Americans don’t care about the homeless anymore?

To the contrary, this astonishing WSJ story suggests the homeless are much on our minds — as pop culture entertainment!

The main focus of the piece is a possibly schizophrenic homeless man in Los Angeles who has been adopted by three young brand-makers as the iconic centerpiece of their new line, named “The Crazy Robertson” in his honor. Featuring “stylized images” of the man, the includes a $98 hoodie “that has a graphic of him dancing and the phrase ‘No Money, No Problems’ on the back.” Available at Kitson.

Adds the WSJ:

The repackaging of [this homeless guy] as a fashion front man comes at a time of increased fascination with homelessness. The producers of “Bumfights” — a collection of videotaped street battles between vagrants — claim to have sold more than 300,000 DVDs since 2002, and a British TV series called “Filthy Rich and Homeless” made headlines this year for its depiction of real-life millionaires posing as London beggars.

Across the U.S., a growing number of homeless people have gained attention through the Internet. More than 17,500 videos on YouTube are tagged with the word “homeless.” Leslie Cochran, a street resident in Austin, Texas, who has twice run for mayor, has 10,775 “friends” on his MySpace page. In Boston, the profile of Harold Madison Jr. — a homeless man better known as “Mr. Butch” — rose through online clips and a Web site made in his honor.

Perhaps in an effort to be down with the trend, the WSJ includes links to video clips of the Crazy Robertson’s icon skating and dancing. Sadly I’m on deadline so I haven’t checked them out. Maybe The Medium will delve into this (or maybe already has).

“Authority imprinted on emptiness is money”

Marking the recent passing of Norman Mailer, the Complex blog reminds readers of Mailer’s famous essay, “The Faith of Graffiti.” I read that a year or two ago in the course of researching a story that dealt indirectly and in part with the evolution of graffiti from what it was when Mailer wrote about it (expression of the disenfranchised), to what it means in the marketplace now (cool, hip, edgy: insert your profitable adjective here).

In the end, I did not cite the essay in that particular piece — mostly because that evolution was more of a single background point, not the subject of the article — but this morning I dug up my early draft of it, and here are two paragraphs that I later eliminated:

In 1974, Norman Mailer published “The Faith of Graffiti,” and mused on the attraction of scrawling one’s tag name on subway cars: “Maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle …. Your presence is on their presence, your alias hangs of their scene.”

That one line — “your presence is on their presence” — is the one that really struck me. I was interested in how that idea applied to tags — but also to logos. I had a little on some of the pioneers of translating the graf idea onto apparel, who basically failed, and more recent examples that have succeeded, and brought graf-style expression both into exclusive downtown boutiques, and eventually into shopping malls. I’m not saying that there’s no difference between street artists and branders. What I’m saying is that whether you’re Polo or the hippest little underground brand, the goal can be fairly described as: your presence on their presence.

What, Norman Mailer asked graffiti writers back in the 1970s, explained the power of the tag, the name? “The name is the faith of graffiti,” one of them told him. Mailer seemed bowled over by this observation. But it’s another of his musings, elsewhere in his essay, that jumps out thirty years later: “Authority imprinted upon emptiness is money.”

So there’s that. As these bits strongly suggest (at least to me, re-rereading them now), one reason this stuff didn’t make it out of the first draft is that I hadn’t really worked out a way to draw Mailer’s thinking into what I was writing in a manner that was, you know, coherent. That authority-printed-on-emptiness line comes in a passage in Mailer’s essay that’s sort of about how the art market works, and I was trying to repurpose it to make it about how brands work. In my defense, I’ll say that “The Faith of Graffiti” as a whole still strikes me as being more notable for a handful of very vibrant phrases and passages, and for a very determined romanticism, than it is for having a clear point of view. I can only assume it would have felt very different to read it back when it was written, and graffiti’s cultural role was so removed from what it is today.

On a somewhat related note, Ryan McGinness once did an amazing design series that visually translated/transformed logos into tags, and tags into logs. It was pretty incredible, but I’m not sure if it was ever published. I think there were some trademark issues. I bring this up to acknowledge that I claim no originality in musing on the tag/logo connection.

Q&A: Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of “Unmarketable”

In a rare – indeed, unprecedented — move, Murketing.com brings you now a Q&A with an (https://www.drsunilthanvi.com/phentermine-37-5-adipex/) author. The author is Anne Elizabeth Moore, who can also be described as an artist, an activist, co-editor of (recently departed) Punk Planet, series editor of Best American Comics, and a surprisingly nice person. The book is Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, and I think it’s quite good. (I should disclose that I was interviewed for the book and am quoted in it a few times, but I’m pretty sure I’d like the book if I weren’t mentioned in it, and possibly even it had singled me out as corporate shill.)

The book is described as “both a scathing critique of of corporate marketing’s dalliances with the cultural underground and a highly entertaining depiction of the absurdity produced by” some of those very dalliances. The description is accurate.

Plenty more on that below in the Q&A, along with interesting observations about 1) how indie culture has changed, 2) whether the argument that corporations are “funding cool stuff” holds water, 3) whether the revolution might take the form of a handbag from a DIY/crafter, 4) the “soul crushing” experience of explaining the book to professional marketers, 5) the surprisingly bad payoffs of “selling out,” and 6) why it’s really important for some things to remain truly “unmarketable.” I know it’s long but please read it all anyway – especially if you are, yourself, in any way involved something that you think of as sub-, or counter-, or indie culture. Take your time. It’s important. amoxil Thanks.

Q. I bet your publisher asked you: “Why did you write this book?” Or maybe not. But if they did, what did you say? And what’s the real answer?

A. No, in fact my editor really never questioned why I would do this book at all, and I believe on at least two occasions I had to ask her why I was writing it. At which point I think the answer was pretty much “because now you’re legally obligated under the contract you already signed,” so there it was.

The short answer to why I wrote it is that I apparently have a space in my brain where I store my discomfort with popular modes of activism, and where I was turning over projects like Dispepsi for years, just chewing on, well, the fact that a bunch of Bay-Area troublemakers kind of made a soft drink commercial unpaid. That is crazy. Why would they do that? And then when I read No Logo, and as I watched marketing change clearly as a result of that book, something clicked. My book does collect about six years of research and thought into these issues that I couldn’t even really get activists to discuss too deeply. Which I do, totally, understand: they are too damn busy to also be constantly re-theorizing their methods. Anyway I guess that space in my brain got filled up and it had to go on paper so I could start thinking about, like, my cat again.

Conceptually, the book kinda came together when, in 2005, Nike SB — long reviled by the skateboarders I’d grown up with — appropriated the image and ethos of the stridently anticorporate band Minor Threat, a part of the Dischord Records crew in DC. Some kind of circle seemed to close at that point. I started to suspect that maybe they were co-opting the underground’s strategy for debating intellectual property rights issues, called copyfighting sort of informally. At which point I just felt like, this has got to stop.

So then I stopped it. It’s over, now that the book has been written. Ha ha ha ha ha.

What’s different about “indie” culture (or whatever you want to call it, you know what I mean) now compared to 10-15 years ago? Read more

Nike and the brand underground in the WSJ

Yes, as a matter of fact, the Wall Street Journal’s front-page story today on Nike “tapping influencers” is several years late. But it’s still worth reading. (And at least they got it. While I’ve mentioned things like Futura and Mr. Cartoon, to name two examples in the piece, doing Nike stuff in the past, my own attempts to get an interview with Mark Parker a couple of years ago were totally stonewalled. Oh well.) In particular I liked this bit:

Not everyone is so anxious to see Nike roll into new turf. Recently, designer Steve “Birdo” Guisinger, owner of a small but influential Santa Cruz, Calif., retailer called Consolidated Skateboards, painted three wheel-less skateboard “decks” with images that lampooned Nike’s attempts to craft a more street-smart image. The board depicting Mr. Parker shows him in a T-shirt with flame tattoos running up one arm and a chauffeured white limousine waiting behind him.

Mr. Guisinger says the parody was meant to “raise awareness,” about the “behind the scenes jockeying that was going on with [Nike’s] attempt to enter the skateboard industry.”

Nike’s response was characteristically in-your-face. Global design head Sandy Bodecker — shown on one of the boards with a sales projection chart and a brown nose — purchased them on eBay and recently displayed them proudly in a prototype for a Nike retail concept store. “I personally was very pleased to be in such august company” he says.

Heh.

There’s also some material about Os Gêmeos. I was sort of pitched about Os Gêmeos at one point, but my interest was entirely in the role that Nike played in basically establishing them in the U.S. scene, and I was told that nobody involved was really interested in talking to me about that angle. But you get a decent sense of it here — Parker introduced them to the Deitch gallery, etc. So, again, the broad theme of the piece isn’t going to surprise anyone who’s been paying attention, but they got some facts.

Q&A: Indie branding, the thesis

A few months back I got an interesting email from a graduate student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Greta Ackerman. She was working on her thesis show, “The Ironic Brand.” It centered on the indie clothing brand Barking Irons, which she’d read about in the brand underground story last year.

Surprised as I was to hear this (I’ve had articles cited in academic papers and articles and books and so on, but this was a new one for me), she was even more surprised to learn that I live in Savannah. So I was quite happy to chat with her at the time, and to check out her actual thesis show here last month. It was impressively comprehensive, exploring print ads, online material, outdoor, even direct mail. The over-arching theme was how an underground brand can sell more without selling out.

Ms. Ackerman was of course at the opening, too — but she had to come in from out of town. She’s now a designer for Merkley i.D., a division of Merkley + Partners in New York. I decided to pester her with a few quick questions about the thesis project, and she graciously obliged.

Q: Let’s start with the obvious: Why this thesis subject, and why this brand?

I’m a fine art student-turned-advertising-designer, so I’ve spent a lot of time toggling between art for art’s sake and art with a commercial purpose. People, especially design students struggling to find a voice, often harp on designers who have “sold out,” applying their design skills or their artistic vision to a corporation to help them draw a profit.

The way I see it, there’s no shame in making a living, but there’s a lot about big business and the way it advertises and brands itself that turns me off. I was attracted by a group of brands on a mission to sell without being perceived as sell-outs, who had a greater purpose than simply profit (although some profit would be nice). I wanted to find out if that was even possible, and if so, how advertising could play a role, even a nontraditional role, in that process.

Barking Irons spoke to me as a brand trying to grow without losing its integrity, but it stood out against some of its fellow indie brands because of its old aesthetic. Read more

Pleasing thing of the day: Paper dolls etc. by Wool and Water

This person’s work is pretty cool. Her name — I learn from Craft’s blog — is Amy Earle, a maker of paper dolls and other things. Here’s her blog, and here’s her “Wool and Water” Etsy store. Enjoyable.

Ghostly International: The Q&A

I’ve been wanting to do a Q&A with an entrepreneurial type in the wild and woolly underground music business, and I think we have a good one here: Mr. Sam Valenti IV, of the independent avant-pop/electronic record label Ghostly International (Matthew Dear, Tadd Mullinix (aka James T. Cotton, Dabrye), Mobius Band, etc.). My Q’s and his A’s follow on subjects such as: founding a label “on the fault line of mass culture” while still in his teens, why branding matters for a music company, how a record label is like an art museum, what it takes for a new artist’s first CD to break even, and dreaming up new projects and new revenue streams like the USB-as-CD-alternative Ghostly created for the famous design store Moss. Here goes.

Q: So let’s see if I have this right. Ghostly started in 1998/1999, when you would’ve been around 18 years old, basically because you heard and really liked Matthew Dear, and decided to record and distribute “Hands Up For Detroit.” 500 copies, on vinyl I think. How did you go about executing the basics on this, like locating some entity to press the records, and another to distribute them? And wasn’t Napster-mania pretty much full blown by then? Did that have any kind of impact on your thinking about what Ghostly should be, and/or might become?

A: Matthew and I met at a house party. I was a lonely wayward freshman and had been DJing house parties, and he was making music for fun, but we both wanted to make records. After a year of making tracks together, I took a DAT of songs that he did, along with some from our mentor, Disco D, to London, where I found a place that would cut and press your record in one shot. I guess it was wish-fulfillment in a way, that’s how I view my college years, as very fortunate, in that meeting a group of people allowed something to happen.

The idea of Ghostly was there, but Matthew was the inspiration to take up arms and create it. When we started, I felt that we missed our chance twice, in both the beginning with the P2P revolution and then a few years later with 9/11 and the death of the “good times.” I had envisioned a luxury electronic “brand,” but the idea of both pushing high-end goods and running a profitable record label seemed far-fetched after that.

I think Ghostly was founded on the fault-line of mass culture. We use the term “Avant-Pop” to refer to some of our output, in that what we make is popular music that has been subverted by our personal beliefs and preferences, which aren’t in line with what the word “pop” means. This attitude applies across all of our output, this sense of art/entertainment that is not pre-prescribed or “destinational”. There’s a great freedom in not being treated like a demographic or a Consumer, and that’s what Ghostly is about. Read more