Spring Break in New Jersey #1: Of Death and Crocuses and Custom Truck Bodies.

You do know we’re taking a Spring Break, away from Houston, right? Last year it was a 10-day cruise to the Panama Canal. Remember that? For 2011, it’s off to a destination that is just as foreign: New Jersey.

We’ll be visiting Rachel Baron and Alison Bond in North Bergen, NJ. I realized I hadn’t posted you about this specifically. So when Rachel called to let me know that “…the crocuses were all dead,” I thought I better catch you up.

Look for Barbara Nytes-Baron and me just across the river in North Bergen in a couple weeks. We have been…alerted about the oddball weather in that part of the world in this time period. Alison mentioned that it could get up into the 70s – that’s Fahrenheit. I told ‘em, I thought that was pretty impressive but that as far as we were concerned, the 70s is so last week.

That’s when Rachel mentioned the crocuses. Planted in various parts of the outdoor realm of their house, they have apparently fallen victim to this afternoon’s hailstorm. Dead, dead, dead. “Hail storm?”

“We hardly ever get hail storms in April. Really,” Rachel answered.

I’ve done some research on North Bergen, I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the culture. I pointed out one discovery to the girls – all the elected officials (the Mayor and four City Commissioners) all have Italian-American last names: Sacco, Cabrera, Ferraro, Gargiulo, Pascual. It’ll be such a change for us, even if I’m doing Commissioners Cabrera and Pascual an injustice. Those could be Latino and Portuguese respectively.

Rachel pointed out, “They keep the streets clean, we keep voting for them.” Fair enough.

We’re genuinely looking forward to this and I will make every attempt to avoid embarrassing [1] the people who are opening their arms to us in hospitality and [2] Barbara.

Meantime, you’re probably wondering about the sign in the photo, the one that says “Highway Body Works?” I put North Bergen, NJ, through a Google Images search and this photo came up in third place. I thought it was appropriate for some mental reason, so mille grazie to the photographer, Vincenzo Aiosa.

Vincenzo – I’ll buy you a beer, meet me at the Italian bar around the corner from Rachel and Alison’s, okay? April 2 – it’s a date!

How Crowdsourcing Put a Mad Gringo Shirt on My Back – and for a Great Price.

What if you’re a tropical clothing etailer trying to sell stuff from your HQ in wintry…Nebraska? (“I wish it was sunny here today in Omahahu, cold with a high of 13,” Mike Markowski wrote me; then…“Yes! Please blog about the contest.”)

So here’s a post about lust. And also combining Facebook and website and email. And crowdsourcing. It’s the Mad Gringo Facebook “Like” contest.

Greg Chambers, the Mad Gringo himself, boosted the use of social media to promote his lines of “Go Slow” clothing. Because I have bought a shirt or two from him, I’ve kept up – as you can see from Signalwriter posts like this one. He announced back at the beginning of January that he was going to offer a limited-time low price on the Mad Gringo shirt that topped the “Like” chart. I of course went right to the loudest shirt I could find on the site, the El Chapin, and clicked that Facebook button.

Participatory marketing is fun. On a discrete scale it’s better (for me, at least) than a giant retail push. So I sat back to await results. But whoa! Midway through the contest period, Mad Gringo’s report on the voting indicated that my fave shirt was running a poor second.

(Here’s where the lust comes in, I wanted that shirt. For 11 bucks.) What to do, what to do? El Chapin needed more votes.

I crowdsourced the problem. You have read about crowdsourcing on Signalwriter. I don’t have thousands upon thousands of people to call on but I do have some friends on Facebook myself. So I sent ‘em a note. Asked ‘em to do just what I did: Go to the specific Mad Gringo web page and click the “Like” button.

They did (thank you!) and a week later, Mad Gringo announced the results via Facebook and email:

…The people have spoken. (Well, they clicked on the Like button a bunch of times on our website.) El Chapin takes the prize and will be on sale today for the low, low, low price of $11 from 10am CST to 4pm CST.

Mad Miguel (the above-mentioned Markowski) filled in some blanks thisaway:

For the contest we had two styles in the running…El Chapin and Jade Scorpion. El Chapin won with 36 likes and Jade Scorpion came in second with 24. We had a total of 39 orders. Which is funny to us because El Chapin is one of the older styles and Jade Scorpion is one of the newer styles. But the public spoke and we put the winner up for sale.

Not everything worked out right for Signalwriter as Markowski relates:

I am sorry that we had to switch out the Kokoberger shirt for you. We didn't expect an older shirt that we didn't have much left in stock. Well I hope that is enough info for you.  We will be running more contests in the future: naming tees, tattoo prints tee, polos and fleece contest as well. All good stuff.

No fear, Mad Miguel and Mad Gringo. Here’s me enjoying a tiki-themed alco-beverage in my new 2X Kokoberger from Omahahu. Lust temporarily assuaged.

I’ll reward my crowdsourcers (see Warning No. 1) with a tiki drink of their choice too, redeemable at our next bar outing. And here’s to the guys and gals on Nebraska’s big island. Oddly, they all want to retire to someplace warmer.

You could support that plan by purchasing a great shirt or even two. Think of it as your own crowdsourcing experiment. Tell them Signalwriter – or if you prefer, Mad Tex – sent you.

Mad Tex to Mad Gringo: Extra Thanks for the Nickname.

You may suppose that the Signalwrite brand is effortless to maintain. On the other hand, you might correctly suspect that my arresting tropical attire (so central to who I am as a marketing professional these days) is top secret.

There is no secret, except a highly valued network of shout-out-loud aloha shirt creators and suppliers that have lent their retail skills to my own business brand-building effort. One of those is Greg Chambers, the “Mad Gringo” of the headline. At least one blog post over the past few years has mentioned his company, Mad Gringo Go Slow Clothing. The Mad Gringo has a philosophy and it is written thusly:

We all have a Mad Gringo deep down inside. He’s pissed about the traffic. The stress. The ties you have to wear. He’s telling you to chuck it all and go sleep on a beach in Mexico. Or Brazil…Vow to watch more sunsets. And if you can’t go slow, at least go slower.

These are true words. Marketing words. Massively sensitive for a guy who’s had to establish his business in the oddly non-tropical paradise of Omahahu.

Now Mad Gringo has given me two gifts (for filling out a survey whose results you can view here, though honestly the results look a bit wonky to me).

The first is a wonderful new high-quality T that arrived today in its own MG-branded burlap bag. It’s Mad Gringo’s commemorative Lava Lava volcano T in a soothing color that’s simply perfect for sitting out in those balmy Gulf of Mexico breezes we get down Galveston way…around about November. (Super customer relations, too.)

The second gift is a nickname. The casual exuberance with which this nickname appeared, written simply above the street address on the post office mailing label, has touched me heart.

I’m having an extra pinot grigio cooler this evening to celebrate these presents. Thank you, Mad Gringo, from the bottom of Mad Tex’s heart.

When the Consumer is an Individual, Travel Marketing Has More Moving Parts.

This Panama Canal cruise I’m taking, I never waited for Princess Cruises to market it to me. I reached out and selected the destination and the means of getting there.

Maybe it’s because I’m on the leading edge of the famous Baby Boomer generation. Or I’m one of the group that broadly wants to keep learning, connecting and engaging with the world. Maybe I’m an individual and not really part of a group at all (though I find this last bit hard to believe).

Nevertheless, taking the Princess cruise ship south and west to the Canal is a personal choice that’s years in the making. When I was growing up, the Panama Canal was heroic – in many ways it still is.

When President Jimmy Carter signed the 1977 treaty which agreed to return 60% of the Canal Zone to Panama two years later, I was against that action, not because Panamanians didn’t deserve to control their own territory but because the Canal was so much a part of my historical understanding of America’s manifest destiny. And after all, I wasn’t against it that much.

In the middle of that now-foggy set of events, in ’78, David McCullough published his superb study, The Path Between the Seas, about the creation of the Canal. I read it immediately and it’s been in my bookshelves ever since; I re-read it every couple of years: Such a very American story.

Traveling to the Panama Canal hasn’t been all that difficult in the past century. But mental barriers exist, or used to: Time, location, affordability. Mentally, the Canal has come more and more within my reach.

I’ve seen enough jungles. There’s a limit on the number of on-the-water adventures I want to have. But this event comes down to imagination. Pictures like those above, by Argentine photographer Edgardo Balduccio, mean far more to me than eco-tourism (a merely trendy appeal).

Look closely at the date on the Miraflores Locks Control House…1913. It’s the year President Howard Taft said the Canal would be completed, the year that the US started paying Panama for its lease of the Canal.  MV Island Princess is really a time machine. One with a lot of very moving parts.

Photographs © Edgardo Balduccio, 2008. All rights reserved.

Stand by, Panama. I’m Wearing “Las Señoritas” on the Island Princess Cruise.

Last year, Bill Barrett of Barrett-Wehlmann and his wife took the same Panama Canal cruise, on the same ship, that we’re taking end of March. After talking with him and seeing some of his photos, the need for a new modest (fashion) statement seemed evident to me.

I needed to go far beyond the mundane cruisewear of yesteryear (such as displayed in the ad, bottom right). After all, some agency CD might want to create a more vivid advertising campaign for Princess. I want to be ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille.

I was aided and abetted again this time by the Amazing Seamstress Herself, my traveling companion, Barbara. I got to select the fabric and it was something of a struggle, you know how timid I am about colors and patterns.

Fortunately, the Folkorico section of the Alexander Henry Fabric Collection (gots to be a California company!) yielded “Las Señoritas” in the right summer-cruising weight. The colors have the kind of understated approach you all know I favor. And even though this collection has similar patterns with island girls and aloha girls, these are pale by comparison.

Alexander Henry is the self-proclaimed industry leader in cutting-edge, conversational print design. It’s quite clear that “he” created this particular pattern for someone who carries on a conversation at the top of his lungs. Like yours truly.

“Las Señoritas” isn’t the only loud shirt I’m packing but it’s the newest and I’d like to thank the Members of the Academy for not hiding their eyes in shame as I travel to and from the Canal in a few weeks. If advertising is life, then self-promotion is…me!

Pattern: Simplicity #3852. Crafter: Barbara Nytes-Baron    . Thanks and much more to Frank White the Photographer for the excellent photo (top). Older travel photo (bottom) published on CreativePro.com by Gene Gable, February 19, 2010.

Making the “Winter Hawaiian” Shirt? Start with a Cilla Ramnek Fabric.

I’d give you the shirt off my back but first I want to blog about it. Then, after giving plenty of credit where it’s due, I’d like to wear it at least through the upcoming Houston version of winter. That’s because this is a sort of cold weather-weight Hawaiian shirt. I call it “Stockholm Syndrome.”

I had this made for me – really, I asked Barbara Nytes-Baron to make it for me because she can sew and I cannot. To start with, I’d wanted to get away from run-of-the-mill tropical prints. It’s a good thing I found this interesting fabric at Ikea…reminded me of lava lamps.

The not so good thing: It’s an upholstery fabric, which means it is quite a bit heavier than shirting. Still, Barbara had the sewing pattern and the patience – that’s how we came to invent this shout-it-out cold-weather camp shirt.

The fabric was created by a Swedish fabric designer, Cilla Ramnek. She’s said she doesn’t see any conflict between design, craft and art; but then, maybe she hasn’t found out yet what one of her fabrics has been turned into…not my own line of tropical wearables per se but an adventurous addition to the celebrated Baron collection of bold, bright tropical shirts. (I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille.)

No brands were hurt during the production of this winter/tropical camp shirt. Eat your hearts out, Mad Gringo and Hilo Hattie.

And if designer Ramnek throws up her hands and swears off fabric art forever, well, I’m heartily sorry. This shirt IMO makes a statement and it is not “Attention – this guy needs taste replacement surgery stat!” Be sure to look for us on the runway in NYC next Fashion Week…La Guardia 31.

Shirt: “Stockholm Syndrome.” Fabric: Saralisa Collection. Designer: Cilla Ramnek. Pattern: Simplicity #3852. Crafter: Barbara Nytes-Baron.

Louder! Louder!

You don’t have to believe me – believe the Associated Press: When it comes to “aloha shirts,” louder is better. There’s a full (if brief) list of dos and don’ts in a recent story by Nicholas K Geranios. He does a great job of laying out the greats and the near-greats of the burden we really big guys have to carry, fashion-wise.

The article also mentioned Greg Chambers who founded the Mad Gringo company and from whom I buy an occasional shirt. (Some of his are a little too laid back.) On the other hand, Chambers tells a GREAT story including at least one line in Geranios’s article:

And if you stretch beyond three [shirts], people start in on the “It’s so sad to see someone give up like that. His poor wife!” That would be me, I guess – and Barbara.

We were at dinner Saturday evening, at Chatter’s, when another couple was seated next to us. He was wearing a slightly less loud shirt than mine, which was a 90s’ Hilo Hattie with bathing beauties all over it. We complimented each other on our exquisite taste but I could tell I won the prize: I’d out-louded him.

I can’t show you the shirt – I don’t have a photo handy – but I sure do have this picture of the one, the only Hilo Hattie. (There’s an excellent story about her career here, by Dee Buckingham.) Part of it goes:

…in 1971, while she was at the the Merry Monarch Festival, Evelyn and Richard Margolis of Kaluna Hawaii Sportswear approached her for permission to design a line of ‘Hilo Hattie’ clothing. Kaluna, already a million dollar business, purchased a manufacturing plant in Hilo, bought the rights to Hilo Hattie’s name, and, as they say, “The rest is history.”

The firm and its retail outlets are still in business.

That AP list? Do:
■ Do: Buy at least one size too large.
■ Believe that louder is better.
■ Compliment another guy on his rockin’ shirt.
■ Wear them with a solid blazer for formal occasions.

Don’t:
■ Ever tuck them in, unless you are Thomas Magnum.
■ Wear them with a necktie.
■ Wear a shirt with matching pants or shorts.
■ Wear a matching shirt with your spouse.

Some sad new: The story appeared in the Fort Worth, TX Star-Telegram. Several respondents posted quite negative comments about aloha shirts. Tsk, tsk.

Some glad news: Catherine Mallette of the same newspaper is asking for “aloha shirt” submissions – the winner might get a future feature out of it. I told her about the 37 loud shirts I own, though I’m not too sure that’ll impress her. Ta…

A big loud “thank you!” to Donna Giles for sending the article along. The photograph is from Buckingham’s series in the Hawaii Reporter about “Women of World War II Hawaii.”

Juicy Fruity

Thanks to Paradise on a Hanger, I won’t be going into 2009 without a marvelously loud tropical shirt. (Consider it my version of guerilla marketing, will ya?)

The little number you see on the right is a Jams World® special called “Juicy Fruity.” It’s got your super organic pineapple design with unmatched panels of lime green and gray. Jams World makes these shirts bright and smart – which must mean I bought it by accident. The button-ups are made from 100% spun crushed rayon, an unusual fabric that receives a permanent “crush” (not wrinkled) finish prior to printing. So I get these tiny pockets of air between the soft fabric and my tender skin; it’s amazingly comfortable as well as dramatic.

You can poke around in the Jams World…uh…world for yourself – it started as a small surf shop in Honolulu. But I'm not going to make it easy: Search it out for yourself. And if you guess what I covet for my next Signalwrite marketing wearable, I’ll throw a genuine Hawaiian pineapple your way. Ta for the run-up to Nine!

Mambo Floridiana

Chip Weber of Rubber Chicken for the Soul commented on my blog post about my new Moon Dog shirt. He loaded up on classic Mambo Loud Shirts from Australia and sells the remainder of the stock on eBay as well as on his own site. Now he cruises the Web for people who write about wild and crazy tropicals and offers them even better deals on these out-of-production spectaculars: a form of word-of-mouth advertising that’s perhaps a little slow, but he sure does hit his targets: the best kind of shout-out there is.

He’s 52 and 6”5” tall – he thinks that size has a lot to do with Mambo. He met some Aussies in Hong Kong in the mid-90s who were wearing Mambo shirts and fell in love with ‘em. (These days, Chip and his wife Jenny hang out down on Merritt Island in Florida.) He picked up a few shirts a decade ago.

When Mambo sold out, Weber found a “secret” source for these shirts and bought them all – the whole story will come out when he’s sold them. Instead of having a couple in his collection, he’s got, like, 85.

Dare Jennings, who started Mambo Graphics in Oz, originally asked Reg Mombassa to design t-shirts and Loud Shirts for him. Mombassa has said, “A pair of oscillating buttocks or a heaving chest provide an excellent perpetual motion armature over which to stretch the illustrated fabric, giving the images on the cloth the illusion of life and self-motivation.”

I’m glad to think of these loud shirts as having a life of their own – even if the buttocks and chests Mombassa was thinking about little resemble my own. Hey, I’m just a collector here.

So I did ask Weber to send along “Day of the Dead” (pictures above) as well as “Mambo Tropicana Lounge,” which will shock those who know me: this one’s a little quieter than usual. Still, it’s got a great chest on it. Thanks to the big guy from Florida.

PS: What I heard from Weber is that Mambo is actually Jennings’ acronym for Means for Acquiring Models, Bucks and Opiates.

Moon Dog

If there really is “a tide in the affairs of men,” as Shakespeare writes, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” then it changes with maturity. For white guys of a certain age (like me), the tide seems to lead on to tropical shirts.

For cutting-edge Hawaiian shirt fashion, it’s been hard to replace Reg Mombasa and the Loud Shirt Gang who used to work under the Mambo label out of Australia. It’s been look-around, peek-into-corners action; keep searching the Worldwide Web. I’m not talking about your chain-store stuff here – that’s for the hoi polloi.

I mean your really OUTRAGEOUS aloha shirts, the kind that, when you’re 6-feet-6-inches tall and weigh 270 pounds, make a definite statement (such as “I’m color-blind and I don’t care” or “Aren’t you amazed that my wife let me out of the house wearing this!”)

Thanks to the power of word-of-mouth advertising, though, I’ve scored this super-fine “Rose Tattoo” shirt from Judy and Richard Kuenstler at Moon Dog in Austin, TX. This is a handmade cotton beauty, a spectacular piece of work that shouts, “Hey, look, I dressed myself.”

I ran into this guy at one of Roni McMurtrey’s gallery openings a couple Saturdays back; we could see each other across the room because no one (man, woman or child) had shirts that remotely mustered the sheer candlepower of the ones we were wearing. Only his was…different. It had like these Mexican Day of the Dead figures on it. Really rocking.

Naturally I complimented him on his shirt. He responded in kind. Then I asked where he had purchased it. He said, “You can buy one just like this from Moon Dog in Austin.” That was simple enough to remember. But I said right back at him, “This shirt is your statement. I’d never buy your shirt. Thank you – I’ll check out the company online and see what else it’s got.”

And I did. See above.

Sure, I could have gone stronger but I like to think I’m more subtle than that (sounds of many people in background unsuccessfully smothering their ridicule). Moon Dog has plenty of options which the Kuenstlers make to order. Excellent!

Here’s a firm that’s been around since ’84 and I’m just hearing about it. But then I purposely don’t spend time in Austin either. Fortunately, word-of-mouth works once again and I’m proud to pass on the favor: Moon Dog Shirt Company.

I don’t know the name of that guy was at the McMurtrey Gallery, but he’s got a great shirt! Happy Father’s Day.