MURKETING

Q&A: Maak Eebuh

Several weeks back I got an interesting email from Jade Schulz, telling me about her new T-shirt brand, Maak Eebuh, which had just released its first line of three T’s, called “The War Series.” The official site explained: Each Maak Eebuh t-shirt series is theme-centered and is made in limited quantities,” the official site explains. “Currently, The War Series reflects on the war in Iraq. As a commitment to social and economic development, 10% of our proceeds will be donated to Project HOPE in Iraq.”

At first I thought maybe she had mistaken this site for one of those influential spots on the Web that touts this or that new product, bequeaths coolness, and helps sales. That’s not my thing, of course, but it turned out that she knew that. We swapped emails for a while, and I decided it might be interesting to make Maak Eebuh the subject of an occasional Q&A series: Since the brand has just started up – at the moment, it’s available only through the site — it’s an opportunity to follow along as Schulz and her partner try to “make it,” as it were. They have no financial backer for the project; they’re funding it with their own savings. The attempt to deal with serious issues – and it doesn’t get much more serious than the Iraq war – makes the project that much more challenging, and more interesting. So I asked some questions, and she provided answers, and that resulted in the below. I’ll check back in a few months to see how things are going.

Schulz is 28, and has worked in costume design and “high end fashion,” and still does freelance design work and other projects. The T’s are priced at $59 each.

So when did this project get started?

I guess I thought of the idea two years back, but really started to do the actual making of the shirts in the past year. Originally, I started doing it by myself and then a partner, Kim Situ (a friend from high school; she has more of a business-school and fundraising background), joined me later.

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The No Mas Q&A [Pt. 2]: Art, writing, business, and the “Baghdad Oilers.”

Here’s the second part of the No Mas interview; part one focused on appropriation, free speech, and the law. Part two deals with why founder Chris Isenberg turned to a brand as a vehicle for expressing ideas about sports, given his background as a writer, plus details about how he got things off the ground that should be of particular interest to any of you creative-entrepreneur types out there, plus the story behind the shirt that first got me curious about No Mas. Here goes.

You’re a writer, so of course I’m also curious, if you had a set of ideas about sport and culture, why did you choose this medium as opposed to say, writing a book?

Well, I guess in my own way I had tried very hard to create a career for myself as a dude who wrote long, sports feature stories for magazines. That definitely was my original intention to be A.J. Liebling or Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer or Roger Angell—to be a high-minded writer of feature pieces for magazines. And I discovered that career really was basically gone.

I have had tastes of how great a job this could be. Right out of school, I got a commission from Sports Illustrated to write a feature about the Oxford Cambridge Boxing Match. Full ride travel and a decent fee, and I wrote something I was very proud of and they said they loved but held for a year and never ran. I also tried to get funding to make a documentary about the Oxford Cambridge boxing match and failed (now of course, ten years later someone else has done it). I got an assignment from Vanity Fair to do a small profile on the bullfighter Francisco Rivera Ordonez which they killed because W came out with a story about Ordonez right before my piece was scheduled to run. I did a long piece for a magazine called Icon about Michael Ray Richardson, the former Knicks point guard who had been kicked out of the NBA for drugs and went to play in Italy, and that magazine folded right before my story was supposed to run and then a big documentary about him came out.

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The No Mas Q&A: [Pt. 1] Cassius Clay, Appropriation, Sport, Free Speech, and the Law

One of the projects on the brand underground scene that I’ve been sort of fascinated by is No Mas. The man behind it is Mr. Chris Isenberg. You’re going to get the full scoop below, but here are the basics on him. When I approached him for a Q&A, I had high hopes that I’d get something interesting out of it, but turns out he blew my expectations away. In fact, there was so much interesting material that I’ve decided to make the unprecedented move of turning it into a two-parter. Today’s installment covers some of the most thoughtful material on logo/visual remixing, intellectual property, and free speech — not to mention sports and culture — that I’ve encountered anywhere.

Part two will be in Monday, but meanwhile if the issues above are relevant to you, I encourage you to take the time to read the below.

Q: So I’m curious about the initial decision to start No Mas. Did you see it as a brand, as an art project, as a business, all of the above?

A: I definitely did not have a clear idea of starting a “brand” in the way I now think of No Mas as a “brand”, when I made the first t-shirt with a No Mas label in 2004.

Sometime in about 2001 I think, I saw a picture from 1964 of Muhammad Ali, at that time called Cassius Clay, training at the 5th Street Gym in Miami. The photo was just before the 1964 “shock the world” fight with Liston. In the photo, he’s wearing a t-shirt that says Cassius Clay in a sideways script font that looks very much like it was inspired by the coca-cola script.

The picture that was here is not here anymore.

It’s funny, Ali was really doing the exact same thing that a lot of us do now. He kind of appropriated and parodied the visual identity of the coca-cola brand to lend power to his own personal brand. That’s classic Ali. Not only was he the greatest fighter, but he was the greatest promoter and marketer. Anyway, I just wanted that Cassius Clay t-shirt really badly. So I made a run of about twelve at a screenprinter in Brooklyn. I wore them myself and I gave them to a few friends.

Wearing this particular shirt in New York City was like conducting a very complicated sociological experiment. Here I am, this white, Jewish kid wearing a shirt emblazoned with a name Muhammad Ali rejected as a slave name. It is a name that has the power of celebrity but also the power of taboo. Muhammad Ali was furious at fighters in the sixties and seventies who still called him Cassius Clay. He famously tortured Ernie Terrell who refused to call him Ali, yelling, “What’s my name fool?” as he pummeled him in their 1967 bout.

So for the people that noticed the shirt it usually produced one of two reactions:

One was basically, “Yo, that’s dope.” “That’s the coolest t-shirt I’ve ever seen.” Etc. I am not gassing myself here because all it really was a well-timed reproduction of Ali’s own work, but literally I would get at least four or five comments every time I wore that shirt out. And a lot of times the conversation ended with, “Where can I get it?” So it became clear really quickly there was a market for this product. Read more

To Do in NYC November 30

Gabriel Urist, partial subject of a Consumed back in June, is opening his own space, Gabriel Urist Worlds Fair (204 Elizabeth Street, Basement) in NY. Looks like there’s an opening event Thursday night, Nov. 30. Info via Mr. Urist, and Freshness, where you can find the details.

Death Ave.

Here’s another quick update on Barking Irons: Recently the brand reached out to Friends of the Highline, the nonprofit that’s been involved in restoring and revamping and re-opening to the public a strip of what used to be an elevated rail track built mostly in the 1930s. (Here’s more on all that.) It’s one of the more widely discussed urban-renewal kinda projects of recent years. Anyway, the Barking Irons guys approached the with some ideas for some T’s, that (per the brand’s method) draw in history; with proceeds going to Friends of the Highline. One of those above (they’re at Barneys and the brand’s site) and info below…

I hope to have an update on what’s up with the Hundreds soon, as well.

Something to do: Barking Irons live screenprinting

The Barking Irons guys, who you may recall from the Brand Underground article, have something interesting going on: In-store screenprinting at several NYC venues over the next week or so. They’ve built a traveling screen-printing box — that’s it above, pretty cool — and will printing up shirts on the spot. They’ll be making available some of their more popular designs “plus additional accents like bats and ‘the collect’ designs to overlay on top,” Daniel Casarella explains.

They’ll be at Atrium from 12-9 today, Friday November 3. At Saks on the Saturday November 11 from 11-9. And at Barneys Coop (the one in Chelsea) on Saturday November 18 from 11-9. The plan is for the custom shirts to be priced at $75 for a single print and $85 for a double, but those details may vary by store.

Here’s the “menu” they’ll have at each appearance.

aNYthing new?

A-Ron’s aNYthing, one of the startups featured in the Brand Underground story that appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine several months ago, is the subject of an article today in The New York Times. There is one new piece of information: He got a cease-and-desist from the New York Giants (since the aNYthing logo uses a very Giants-like “NY”).

That’s not A-Ron in the picture above, but that’s one of the T’s that was in the planning stage when my story came out. It’s now available.

T Time

Clearly I’m still in catch-up mode. Here’s something else I meant to post earlier: At the Museum of Design Atlanta, a show opened recently called To A T: T-shirt Culture … Cute or Couture? Here’s something from an article about it:

With the wildfire growth of the D.I.Y. and affordable-art movements, T-shirts — already synonymous in American life with totemic expressions of selfhood in washable form — have now also become as symbolic to artists as to consumers. As the Wall Street Journal‘s Jamin Warren notes, the limited run of artist-designed shirts also gives them an exclusivity, that elusive “cool factor” that younger consumers treasure.

Laura Moody, a co-curator with SCAD-Atlanta of the MODA show, says the new “Art T” serves two markets: “With the rise of D.I.Y. designers and indie crafters creating limited-edition shirts, you probably won’t be caught wearing the same shirt as your neighbor. For the designer or artist, T-shirts offer an affordable medium for experimentation.”

In any case, we’re actually going to try to see this, maybe in January. I believe it closes January 13. If we go, I’ll report back….

I’m not sure exactly why…

… but I like this. I wouldn’t wear it, of course. But there’s something about it I find appealing. Or at least clever. Via: High Snobiety, which describes this T as “VNGRD x Pimpnosis!!!”

Sneakertrash

Usually when I’m thinking/writing about consumption, I’m essentially focused on the moment people buy something. I don’t think I’m alone in this: consuming and buying sound like the same thing.

But of course you could also argue that the purchase moment is actually just the beginning. The process of consuming something doesn’t end until it’s gone (in the case of, say, a beverage) or thrown out, or dissolved, or whatever. And we all know it’s pretty common to feel much differently about a given object at the end of this process than at the beginning.

For a long time I’ve had this on my list of “themes to address some day,” but lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because we’ve been in the process of getting rid of a lot of stuff. For instance, the sneakers above — one of two pairs I just threw away. Pondering the conclusion of my personal history with these consumable objects has given me a reason to act on a months-old invitation to join an online “sneaker community,” called Sneakerplay.

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“Messenger chic”

New York Magazine asks Dave Ortiz of DQM, “what’s new in the skater world?” He says:

The track bike—fixed gears, no brakes—is the new skateboard. We’re making six, basing them on the eighties; they’ll be out for February. The Williamsburg kids rock these with rolled-up pants, Vans. Messenger chic. You can do wheelies and skids and be in another borough in twenty minutes, and that’s whassup.

Strictly speaking, I’m not sure I would say it’s new, but I do think that what he’s calling “messenger chic” could be pounced on by the trend industry in a much more aggressive way than it has been to date. As an interesting bit of background, this Village Voice article on “mutant bike culture” was quite memorable — and not just because it includes a Brooklyn Industries guy bumming out about “malicious” graffiti on his shop window. Also possibly interesting (I keep meaning to get this book), is Pedal: “a wild ride alongside a band of New York City’s most feared and respected inhabitants: bike messengers.”

Q&A: Neek

At some point during the reporting of the Brand Underground story, I was introduced to Neek, a high school student who was into The Hundreds, and was also kind of a figure on the NikeTalk message boards. Not long after that, in fact, his notoriety on NikeTalk culminated in someone making a Neek T-shirt. (That’s it at left; the style is an echo of Supreme, of course.) Apart from being another reason that NikeTalk kind of freaks me out, I thought this development was fascinating: Neek had basically become famous by way of his fandom, to the point that he’d made some strange transition from consumer to brand. Of course when I say “famous,” it only applies in the sense of 21st Century microfame of a super-fragmented culture. But still.

Anyway, Neek ended up not being part of the Brand Underground piece, but he’s certainly an interesting manifestation of that culture, and we kept in touch. Lately he’s gotten involved with a project called Fruition — another step on the road to converting his lifestyle into a way to make a living — and I decided it would be worth a Q&A. So here it is.

Let’s start with the very straightforward background stuff about where you live and how you ended up there and so on — including where the name “Neek” comes from, if you please.

Yeah. I live in Vegas and I just graduated high school actually. I am 17 years old, turning 18 next month. I ended up in Vegas because my parents wanted to move away from the hustle and bustle in New York City. They wanted a more slow-paced life. So that is why I am here.

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The design*sponge shop…

Grace Bonney, who has enjoyed quite of bit of success with her blog design*sponge, has taken that project to a new level: the design*sponge shop. She writes: “I’ve always wanted to have a place where I could showcase affordable, limited-edition designs by my favorite independent artists; I feel strongly about supporting the fantastic community of indie designers making their own goods by hand.”

While Bonney and various other bloggers who focus on products or designers might seem quite distant from the “brand underground” that I wrote about over the summer (using T-shirts as my example category), I see them as having fundamental similarities. So I’ve been very interested to follow how she and others have sought ways to convert what started as a hobby into a way of perhaps making a living — turning their “lifestyle into a business,” as A-Ron put in the brand underground piece. This is an interesting approach, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it, for sure….

Anyway, her initial lineup of six products/pieces includes pillows, a salt/pepper/olive set, and hand-printed wood blocks.

Update: Barking Irons

From time to time, I’ll provide updates here of developments with the upstart brands that I followed for the brand underground story.

Here’s one. Sportswear International’s sixth annual “Sportswear International Fashion Awards Winners” were just announced, and Barking Irons won “Best Newcomer Brand.”

I should admit two things. One is that when I started following the various brands who ended up in the story, I wasn’t making some kind of upspoken bet about their future success, etc. I didn’t know what would happen, and for my purposes, it didn’t actually matter if they succeeded, or threw in the towel. Two is that I actually don’t konw enough about the fashion business to say anything about the significance of Sportswear International.

But … this certainly sounds like good news for the Casarella brothers. And I’m quite happy for them. Congrats, guys, congrats…

Carry Art

In Consumed: Poketo: How a promotional vehicle for undiscovered artists became a desirable purchase.

Back when they lived in San Francisco, Ted Vadakan and Angie Myung were part of that city’s tight-knit community of young artists, and they would help organize or participate in a variety of gallery shows. It was always a lot of fun, but there was a problem. “No one was buying art,” Myung says, “because all of us were pretty poor.” Their response has gradually turned into a small business called Poketo, which has worked with more than 70 artists in creating wallets, messenger bags, T-shirts and, beginning in the fall, stationery and housewares.

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site by way of this no-registration-required link.

Related links: Poketo; Poketo blog; Poketo Myspace page; The Little Friends of Printmaking; Boy Girl Party (Susie Ghahremani); Hot and Cold; PCP.