MURKETING

Claw Money: The Q&A

I’m pretty sure the first Claw piece I ever really focused on was on a wall in Los Angeles, in 2003. Somebody was driving me around, showing me Shepard Fairey pieces, and there was this big claw symbol next to all of them. The guy I was with didn’t know what the story was. The symbol looked familiar, but I didn’t know the story either, until a little bit later.

The story is that the claw was/is the mark of Claw Money, about whom I kept hearing more and more from various people in the years that followed. Have made a name/mark in NY graffiti, she was doing the same in clothing and products (including, memorably, pillows), in the “streetwear” scene, or the “downtown” scene, or whatever you prefer to call it. She built an underground brand. The recent publication of her book Bombshell, which is about all of the above, and none of the above, seemed like a good excuse to see if she would answer a few Q’s. She said: Okay.

A few things are not covered in the Q&A that follows. One is that according to her recent interview on The Weekly Drop, she’s now making some art on canvas. Another is that her dog, Peepers Marie Saint (that’s PMS, she points out), turns 12 this year. But a lot is covered — graffiti, fashion, the book, her appearance in the documentary Infamy, being the first female artist ever to do a Nike artist series/”Tier 0″ sneaker, and what you might have said to her 15 years ago that would have inspired her to spit in your face.

Here goes.

Q: You’re a well-known graffiti writer, who also has a clothing line. Once upon a time that would’ve sounded strange, but not so much now. I think the essay by DAZE in Bombshell suggests you were into fashion before writing. The way the book is done, the fashion and the graffiti work all run together. Is that how you always thought about it?

I had a passion for fashion long before I got my hands on a can of Rustoleum. I’m an FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) dropout, and it was at that point that I picked up my graffiti habit. It wasn’t the other way around. I started in my 20s, which is late for a graff writer.

To me, graffiti and fashion come from two totally different places, but I’m lucky enough to have eventually merged them. And really, so many graff writers have clothing lines! West FC, one of the graffiti greats, is actually one of the founding fathers of streetwear. The company he started with his high school homeboys Sung Choi, Zulu, Bluster and Brue, is of course the one and only PNB. (Unfortunately this line been recently resurrected without any of the original members and in my opinion is destined to be terrible.)

I don’t consider my collection “graffiti clothing.” My logo is the “throw up” that I painted on walls illegally, but other than that, it’s not meant to evoke graffiti associations. I did it a a joke. Who knew it would be a hit? And as far as my book is concerned, it is not a graffiti book, or a fashion book– it’s the real story of Claw Money: artist, designer, family girl, dog lover and all!

WEST is in the book, too. He remarks on how the claw is “more of a symbol than a throwup.” But you weren’t thinking the claw could have a life beyond walls? Read more

“A logo that’s about finding music”

Pitchfork interviews Debbie Harry, and the conversation turns to CBGB’s, which shut down a while back:

Pitchfork: It’s ironic that it’s living on as a fashion store.

Debbie Harry: Yeah. There’s a double edge to that, too. The girls who started the merchandising and t-shirts for CBGB’s are singers, Tish and Snooky. They used to be my backup singers for a little while. They had a band of their own and used to perform at CBGB’s, so were really a part of CBGB’s from the very beginning. They had a store on St. Mark’s Place where they sold used clothes. They used to buy dresses in these huge bundles form some warehouse. They’d buy these bulk things of old clothes and just make a huge pile in the center of the floor. People would go in there and dig through. That was Manic Panic.

Pitchfork: Could you imagine CBGB’s being better known as a brand than as a punk venue?

Debbie Harry: Well, CBGB’s was always based on finding music. So if you’re actually going to wear the logo, you’re wearing a logo that’s about finding music. That’s kind of nice.

Crowd Control

In Consumed: Threadless: What one T-Shirt company has learned about community power — and avoiding a design mobocracy.

From Wikipedia to “American Idol,” shifting control from experts to the masses has never been more popular. As an example of what this can mean for consumer companies, the herd of anti-expertise experts often points to Threadless.com, which has sold millions of dollars of T-shirts by not hiring star designers. Founded in 2000, Threadless asks for designs from anybody who wants to submit them. These days, according to its chief creative officer, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Threadless receives about 125 submissions a day. These are winnowed by the site’s hundreds of thousands of user-voters to half a dozen new T-shirt offerings a week and sold in batches of 1,500. Winning designers are paid $2,000; almost everything sells out. The site has evolved to include a variety of clothing for kids; the owners are dabbling in other products through a new brand called Naked & Angry; and in July, the first Threadless retail and gallery space will open in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago.

It’s a crowd-pleasing story, but there has always been more to Threadless than mere mobocracy. …

Continue reading via The NYT site, or The Boston Globe site.

Additional links: Glenn Jones’ site; interview with Jones at Threadless. Ross Zietz’ site; interview with Zeitz at Threadless.

Indie-ness, 2.0

I don’t where I’ve been, but I completely missed the news — apparently first revealed here by Pitchfork — that Sonic Youth has been working on what Thurston Moore called, “this Starbucks record that’s coming out.” Sonic Youth, doing a project for Starbucks?

Evidently. And this occasioned a piece on Utne.com, headlined “Selling Out Sans Guilt.”

The partnership between the corporate coffee giant and iconic counterculture band has reignited a discussion about what exactly qualifies as “selling out” these days, given the struggles that the music industry has had marketing artists during the decline of commercial radio and the rise of all things mp3.

That piece mentions the Doors’ drummer vetoing a deal that would have involved Cadillac paying $15 million to use one of the band’s songs. That serves as sort of an old-school example. For the new school, the piece links to this column, “In Praise of Selling Out,” by a writer for the Chicago Reader. The writer reels off a long list of recent entanglements between indie artists and corporations, and basically wraps up this way:

If you remember the days when it was tantamount to treason for an indie rocker to sign to a major label, you might feel like commercialization is eroding a vital but intangible spirit and polluting the noble ideal of art for art’s sake. But people who make music for a living have always needed to support themselves somehow, and they have to change with the industry that pays their bills — if they can’t stay safely in the black by playing gigs or selling records, some of them are bound to choose licensing deals and sponsorships over day jobs or credit-card debt.

That sounds more like resignation than praise. But I think the upshot is the same: My sense for some time has been that the whole concept of “selling out” has largely faded away. Many (not all, but many) indie entities — bands, brands, artists, whatever — see these sorts of deals as essentially co-promotion opportunities, and have found that they pay very little if any penalty in the marketplace for doing them. Thus, turning down potentially useful corporate dough is now viewed by many (again, not all) as romantic at best, and at worst naive.

Trading Partners

In Consumed: Coudal.com’s Swap Meat: How one online cool-stuff experiment evolved from promotion to swapping to selling.

Creative people want to express that creativity. Meanwhile, they need to make a living — possibly by finding an audience for some buyable form of that creativity. This is an old predicament, but the Internet enables new experiments in resolving it — like the Swap Meat, a project of a Web site called Coudal.com. Coudal Partners is a small firm based in Chicago that does branding and design work for clients and has also created products of its own. Coudal.com is certainly a promotional tool for the firm, but just as certainly a constantly updated trove of interesting links and cleverly entertaining goof-off projects. Which is more or less how the Swap Meat started. Read more

KAWS

Some day I should probably write about KAWS. Above some jeans he just did for Levi’s. Below, some shoes with VisVim. Both, I believe, are for his Tokyo store, Original Fake.

He’s a very productive young man, and a talented artist — I mean his actual paintings and prints, aside from the products.

Not that I think there’s anything wrong with his products. I bought a KAWS pillow myself.

I just mean that he’s found a way to strike that balance between art and commerce that’s more interesting than most. Or at least that’s what I think. Or … maybe I just like his style.

An Ink, Inc. pioneer

In the recent Consumed that dealt with Scott Campbell, the Sailor Jerry brand, and the persistence of the old-school tattoo aesthetic, I made passing metnion that Normal “Sailor Jerry” Collins left his estate to two of his proteges, who get a cut of Sailor Jerry brand sales. One of those proteges was Michael Malone, who has just passed away. From the Times obit:

Steeping himself in California’s 1960s counterculture, Mr. Malone worked in San Francisco on rock shows that had psychedelic lighting while studying ceramics and carpentry. He moved to Manhattan in the late ’60s and, under the tutelage of a local tattooist, began decorating clients at his downtown apartment. In 1971 he helped organize an exhibition called “Tattoo!” at the Museum of American Folk Art in Manhattan.

A year later Mr. Malone moved to Hawaii and became a protégé of the artist known as Sailor Jerry Collins, who was famous in the industry for introducing a sophisticated style and vivid new colors to the skulls, roses, hearts, tigers and sailing ships of classic tattooing. When Mr. Collins died in 1973, Mr. Malone bought Mr. Collins’s company, China Sea Tattoo, in the Chinatown district of Honolulu, and with it his mentor’s designs.

Ink, Inc.

In Consumed: The Tattoo Aesthetic: Why, despite years of trendiness, the old-school tattoo tradition hasn’t faded.

It has been several years since even Ozzy Osbourne could see that tattoos were overexposed: “To be unique, don’t get a tattoo. Because everybody else has got tattoos!” Yet despite the fact that tattoo imagery is everywhere — serving as the basis for reality shows, as a de facto part of N.B.A. uniforms and, increasingly, as an element in marketing — it retains its appeal as “an authentic and real part of culture,” one advertising executive recently informed The Chicago Tribune. What’s surprising about the popularity of tattooing is that it won’t seem to go away — that some tattoo imagery still seems authentic, even when it’s mainstream….

Continue reading by way of this New York Times Magazine link, which will probably expire in a week, or this Boston Globe link.

Related Links: Gyro/Sailor Jerry case study; Scott Campbell.

A book about “Streetwear”

The title is, in fact: Streetwear.

I don’t know anything about it beyond what’s here, at the author’s site. Could be interesting.

On a possibly related note, We Make Money Not Art has an interview with “a PhD-candidate in critical fashion design,” partly about a project that “engages with social and subversive fashion design. [The project] takes a critical and political look on design and in particular on the fashion system and its networks. By organizing workshops and distributing booklets, the project tries to demonstrate in a very approachable way how to critically hack and re-form the operating system of modernity and the industrial modes of production.

I don’t really know what any of that means. But, again, could be interesting.

Staple: The Q&A

Today I’m pleased to present a Q&A with Jeff Staple, of Staple Design, The Reed Space, etc. I’ve forgotten now how I first met him, but as an example of where he fits into “the scene” these days, consider this Consumed column about a collaboration between New Era (the old-school baseball cap company with surprising street cred) and NYC “custom bling” jewelry artist Garbiel Urist — put together and overseen by Staple.

Anyway, the story of Staple’s success has been told many times in magazines like Theme and… I don’t know, lots of magazines, but that Theme piece is one that I remember. The point is, the part of his story that seems to get the most attention is that he says he got into the streetwear/T-shirt/design business by accident (made some T’s for friends, stores wanted to sell them, etc.). I’m interested in what happened after that, because to me Staple seems a bit ahead of the pack in terms of building a real business. If I had to bet on one brand-underground entitity that’s really going to “make it big,” not just as a brand but as a business as well, it would quite likely be Staple. (Luckily for me, I don’t have to bet.)

Here, then, my Q’s, and his A’s.

Part of my interest in the so-called brand underground (so-called by me, of course) was the creative side, but part if it was always in the entrepreneurial side. I feel that by and large being sort of openly entrepreneurial is seen as not just acceptable, but kind of cool, for this generation. (I forget how old you are, but basically I mean contemporary youth culture.) But there’s still some stigma around “selling out” in the “wrong way.” Maybe I’m wrong about all that, so what do you think?

The way I see it, there are a whole lot of creative people in this world. The differences are the ones that are able to make something out if it. Even back in design school for instance, tons of kids had a great eye, great talent, and graduated with great grades. But what you were able to do with that talent was the deal breaker. Maybe it’s because I am now so neck deep in this industry, but in my opinion, there is a HUGE chasm between being an “entrepreneur” and “selling out”.

My company is somewhere floating in the middle of this chasm. I’ve been doing this long enough to remember the days when doing a shoe with Nike or designing a soda can would automatically be deemed as “selling out”. Now it’s a badge of honor. I wonder why this is sometimes. Read more

Cyberoptix update

Got a note the other day — okay, the other month, it’s been busy — from Detroit-based artist/musician/DIY creator Bethany Shorb at early Murketing Q&A subject Cyberoptix. I’d asked for updates, and she said: “We’re growing like mad and things are good.”

Aside from lots of new designs in the Tie Lab — including a collaboration with Detroit’s Ghostly International, below — Cyberoptix now offers a range of … ascots! “100% charmeuse silk, hand dyed and hand screened ascots/scarves. All edges are hand-finished with silk thread.” Available through the Tie Lab and, I gather, a Los Angeles store called All Purpose. The Raven design, above, looks quite nice on the tie-as-medium as well.

In other news, while she was too modest to mention it, her music project Dethlab played at the Guggenheim! And it sounds like more attention, from mightier forces than Murketing, is on the way. I’m glad to hear it.

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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 Houston December 1

Poketo, a Consumed subject in August of this year, co-presents a group show in Houston, “You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it.” It’s at Domy Books, 1709 Westheimer, opening Friday night December 1. Details here or here.

There’s also a Poketo show in San Francisco, but I’m always a little more excited to hear about things like this happening in the Space City.