It was 2003. I'd just had my first child nearly a year after I'd met her father. If you do the calculations it becomes apparent that she was unplanned. I was in Vancouver, BC presenting a poster on the research from my master's thesis on a scale I'd helped develop measuring emotional regulation (mentioned so you can see how far babywit is from my original starting point.) While checking out the city, her father dragged me into a Bang-On shop. Bang-On is the modern equivalent of the old time transfer shops you'd see in the malls except Bang-On offered mega cool images on ultra hip well-fitted t-shirts.

In the very corner of the shop I found a couple of blank baby t-shirts hanging from a rack. I looked up at the dizzying array of transfers covering the walls, I looked down at the blank baby t-shirt in my hand, I peered at the face of my sleeping 4 month old baby tied to the front of me and BAM there it was. "JIM, can you believe this? Do you get this? I can put ANY image I want on a baby shirt!" I went crazy and bought all my friends with babies some baby shirts. The shop only carried one size of baby shirts so everyone ended up with the 18-24 month. I bought Angus on a black baby t-shirt, Bowie, Blondie, Sonic Youth on Pink, Ramones on Black, The Smiths and I was laughing out loud the entire time imagining their faces when I gave them their shirts. I also imagined the faces of people who saw these babies on the streets wearing these crazy shirts. (Remember it was 2003. There wasn't a Ramones shirt for babies for sale anywhere yet.)

The blank t-shirts themselves without the transfers were also blowing my mind. The labels in the shirts said American Apparel and I hadn't seen a t-shirt fit quite like this anywhere else. I asked the clerk where this brand came from. LA?! in the USA? They were made in the US?

I bought a bunch of blank ones (ironically enough I prefer blank t-shirts to those with images) for myself. That was in August of 2003. By the end of September I had built out a website, opened up wholesale accounts with both Bang-on and American Apparel and in the first month I was in the black. Crazy, huh?

Not really, when you think about it.

What we do as social creatures is make social. We try to communicate with others. We are happier in groups. Function at a higher level. Make better decisions. Human brains are geared up for social interaction. Our brains automatically categorize and assign everything we see into groupings in order to make sense of our world, to identify dangers, allies and resources.

The negative side to all this categorization is the massive generalization necessitated by the heaping amounts of information coming in. It helps with processing speed but can also cause us to skip over the subtle nuances that might lead us into a much deeper level of engagement with the world around us. Generalization is necessary when processing billions of pieces of information so how do we know when to pause for a moment?

We don't really know. But, we do have the ability to send out signals to those around us to help with this categorization. So we do. As humans who are social animals, we also send out signals to those around us. Signals about ourselves. Markers that we hope others around us will pick up on. Points of allure that might allow the receiver to correctly interpret us even if all our other physical traits fall into the various stereotypes our society has created. Our society makes sure we are aware what these stereotypes are from a fairly early age. Language, family, media, school all provide points of inputs that form and reinforce stereotypes. Even as small children we quickly become aware, even if only at an unconscious level of our societal stereotypes. An overweight 40 year old black female has a different group of associations attributed to her than a slim blonde 22 year old white female vs a thin 80 year Indian female. Visual cues are the first in the line of mental absorption followed by aural cues. How we look, how we sound...this is how we are judged. Many of our extremities are given to us at birth and they are unchangeable. Colors including hair, eyes, skin. Height, body type, shoe size, vocal range. But, there are also external cues that are alterable.

You didn't think I'd ever get to the part about using your children as billboards, did you? I wanted you to understand exactly what position I think the t-shirt holds in our society and why the t-shirt may hold more influence than all other fashion cues. Think about it. Fashion costs money. But, what piece of fashion remains constant between all seasons, classes and sexes whose strength of messaging is least dependent upon the amount spent on the item? Shoes? No. Pants? No. Hats? A very small maybe on the baseball hats but only for the male. Socks? Can't really see em. Stockings? Female only. Scarves? No. Coats? No. We can move on from fashion into the resources we own. Cars, houses, boats, bikes. Same answer there. No.

The strength of the medium of the t-shirt as a cultural messenger is all too often overlooked. It is THE fairest messenger out there. In each t-shirt you slip over your head, you are handing a message out to the people around you to help them place you. And get this, anyone...from the homeless teen on the street to the richest female in the world, has access to the exact same t-shirt. I admit that the same t-shirt on a homeless teen can mean something completely different on a wealthy socialite but we all have fairly equal access to the t-shirt object.

Over the past decade what I have heard from my angry fans (and I refer to them as fans for anyone who engages in a dialogue is somehow a fan) is a hostility that my t-shirts somehow allow parents to turn their children into billboards to spread their stereotypes, their personal messages. That my customers are using their children and it is a nonconsensual hostile takeover. I have also heard that my t-shirts take away a child's innocence, destroying their very childhood. This was mostly during the Bush era when my most popular t-shirt was the President Poopyhead shirt.

I think the extreme hostility I encountered was due to the power of the t-shirt as messenger.
I understand this reaction. Those who were angry did not think our children should be used as political messengers. They are too innocent and much too young to understand.

But, in any fervent political atmosphere our children know.

I understand the anger of our children being brought into your political arguments. As being used as part of the categorization of good vs. evil.

I understand the horror at the thought that children are being brainwashed with ideas of hatred, of having them develop a solidarity towards an ideal they cannot yet conceptualize. Of being asked, coerced, trained to draw lines, to stereotype, to categorize.

The bigger horror is that our children are constantly being inundated with this information. They are already being used as billboards for the millions of unconscious messages our society pushes out. Disney, Barbies, dolls with giant eyes, dead monster hyde dolls, video games, lego ninjas, angry birds. What the upset folks don't recognize is that their children, their babies are already being preprogrammed by our society.

I am not calling all lefties to insert messaging onto their babies as a way to mitigate the waves of consumeristic messaging prevalent in most activities we participate in. By selling my shirts, I am not condoning any sort of hostile black and white good vs evil billboard sort of warfare. I acknowledge that the t-shirts I make are indeed intended as a messaging system. It is in recognizing and becoming conscious of what messages we are trying to disseminate to our children and to those around us that our shirts become more than a mere billboard but enter into a realm of mental expansion...and conversation. You are offering your child a tool to express who they are. By interacting with the public with their messages they are receiving feedback. They are learning and cultivating their individuality. I consider my t-shirts the beginnings of conversations. A lot of conversations. Between family members, friends, people in your community you might never have spoken to before, strangers, lovers.

When I started this business my daughter was 4 months old. She turned 10 yesterday and the shirts she chooses to wear are truly an extension of how she sees herself. I have heard her explain to people what the meaning of her shirts are. I am so proud of her independent thoughts. I am honored when she says with such pride"And my mommy made this for me."

after the 8th revision and my patternmaker having a baby now to fit them to, she came back with 'it's perfect'. ah sweet perfection. now to roll it out.

it was discovered that pinterest had been using sort of an affiliate earning approach to their users content. so, if i post a picture of something i think is freaking amazing and you click on it and buy it from the store, pinterest makes some $. i still have to check out how skimlinks does this but it is a very interesting revenue generating model. think about when they were talking about during tv shows people would be able to click a link and buy anything they saw on the show.

is this a bad thing? hell no. i have to agree with skimlinks (http://bit.ly/yG8k10) that content sites desperately need a way to actually make money. and what a great model. nothing horrible that i can see. instead of obnoxious ads, i, the reader can find places to buy all the amazing things i am reading about. um, what is bad about that?!

their content is generated by users outside of their organization. they are not paying people to post to their site. they only make $ if readers find what has been posted about worth buying. 

the only thing i am wondering is what if pinterest is motivated by the almighty $ to give more web prominence to those items that are generating them more revenue. then, their community content site turns into more of a store of interesting things people will actually buy rather than just curious finds. this also, in itself isn't a bad thing, but i would like to know this is what i am surfing.

peel back the curtains pinterest. there is no need to hide behind them. what you are offering your readers is a good thing. not a bad thing.

Labels: content sites, pinterest, skimlinks

I signed up for this workshop with some people from the Hello Etsy conference. A group of artisans and crafters trying to make some changes to their business. We decided to continue meeting after the workshop just to touch base and be accountable to someone or something for our progress. I think we all needed the support and we were all at the same level and all makers/shakers/changers. We met at the Slow Bar and began discussing the changes we had made over the last two months and when you are sitting in front of seriously active people talking about the things that you have done it over the last 60 days you become propelled to do more, think bigger, define and follow your visions. I like this quote from Jenelle Isaacson newsletter this month, (principal for Living Room Realtors).
Psychologist Richard Wiserman studied 400 people over the course of 10 years and watched for lucky breaks or chance encounters, both good and bad. This is what he found.
"My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."
And, for me, even with the economic downturn, having to lay off my employee, having to start going into production myself, I can only see the opportunities here. There are so many. It feels good. Not bad.
We went around in a circle talking about changes and each and every one of us over the last 30-60 days had made some enormous ones. We questioned each other. We critiqued. We were not afraid to voice our true opinions. This is a good group of ACTIVE makers. I am glad to be part of it.

I just went through a most difficult transition but I think I am beginning to see the light. With the holidays being slow for my site I recognized fairly quickly into December that my website was no longer going to be able to support even one employee. The lost traffic still not regained and all the $ I had borrowed to carry the site up through xmas made the choice obvious even to Rebecca. The second week in December on a day when we received only two orders to the website, (and December is historically for me as busy as all of September, October and November put together) Rebecca asked me if I wanted her to go to part-time. I said YES.
The third week of December I laid off the woman who had been my compadre and employee for 5 years. But for only one employee I was paying a hefty wage, payroll taxes, payroll fees, workman's comp, full health, dental, vision, paid vacation etc. The choice was obvious. It was a sad day. Plus, it meant I had to come back into the shop and do all the production, ordering and customer service on top of all the website, marketing, programming and product development.
I am not sad that I have come back to this point. The same point where I started 8 years ago when I first built the business. I honestly feel reinvigorated and challenged for the first time in many years. Excited. I mean, I don't really like making shirts or emailing customers but I am challenged with regrowing my business. So, I've come up with some new direction. I've talked about it a bit in some past posts but I really want to focus my store on US made products and showcase the designers who make the products.
My drop ship program is gaining some interest.
And slowly I think my traffic is coming back. Every other week I get an email from google saying my traffic to my site has increased by 5% from the previous day and no alerts to that it is dropping. I am hopeful.
The holidays have been difficult. My ex and I stagger our weeks with the kids and I have somehow managed to get all the weeks with no school. But, I have set up a monitoring system and, while I work in the garage my kids play with one another. It devolves into squabbling every once in awhile but for the most part what I hear through the monitor is some very imaginative barbie/plushie play.
Plus, my wonderful 70 year old mom is sitting in Mississippi praying for me and also entering image tags and testing the upgrade on my cart. Thanks mom! I will pay you back all the $ I owe you and I'll do it this year by selling the coolest baby clothes on the web.

17,000 shoppers stopped by Craftywonderland this weekend. 17,000! Just a few short years ago this show was held in the basement of the Doug Fir. I am blown away but not surprised. It is a shopper's glorious, lavish feast of unique goods. I only had two hours to walk the dozens of rows of vendors displaying their handmade goods. I am sure I missed a lot.

Every year there are new vendors to delight the eyes. A man with thick fingers that twisted wire into amazingly detailed subjects. I picked up the naked woman teaching a baby elephant to walk. A goth selling her own brand of lipstick and face powder fashioned from all natural ingredients, the lipstick so full of color one only needs to swipe it once across the lips once to achieve full coverage, a man who had drawn various landmarks around Portland and Seattle and fashioned a beautiful deck of cards, hand painted wooden toys, jackets one finds at the goodwill refashioned into ultra hip embellished hoodies, screenpainted, letterpressed, hand-stamped, hand cast, hand photographed, sewn, hand drawn, HANDMADE goods all made locally with the creators, builders, artisans, crafters personally selling their wares (or someone 1 degree away from the creator). It was all here. Along one wall sat a row of tables with the children of the parents selling at the show peddling their own crafts. Ruby Girl's daughter had made bookmarks and after only 2 hours at the show had already grossed over $100. If she sold out she will have come away with $700. Not bad for someone still in single digits age wise.

The Portland Bazaar ran at the same time. dj's, live bands, vendors selling their art, clothing, my favorite booze, chocolate, Grove, Bridge and Burn, Beacon Sound, salted caramels. Packed as well.

Amanda and Paul had a small art show at their shop Infinity Tattoo. Paul was a former chef and made this rub to die for. I picked up a giant painting by Amanda for my daughter's 9th birthday.

I bought a lot of my gifts over this weekend dropping nearly 1K in total on handmade goods. The things I bought are beautiful and unique. I met each of the artists/creators behind the goods. I feel a connection to each piece because I got to meet the artisan, shake their hands, say hello.

And that's another thing. For a person who is not very social I said hello to a lot of people. These shows are a time of reconnecting, visiting, sparking new ideas. The creativity and energy that surges down these aisles of vendors is mind-blowing. Portland owes a big thank you to Cathy & Torie for Crafty Wonderland.

I talked to over a dozen vendors selling unique baby onesies, baby toys and baby accessories about doing wholesale on my site next year. This is certainly the direction to move towards. The discounts they can offer me are not the traditional ones a wholesaler offers a retailer but this is ok because I am an etailer with less overhead. This means as an etailer I can bring my consumer these amazing products without the typical markup that retailers have to make on products to stay in business. Win Win.

I want to create a bio for each vendor with their products on my site because the connection one feels between buyer and seller is a huge deal. It lends the objects much of their personality and value.

For instance, the print I purchased at the Portland Bazaar of an elephant buried in his grave with circus members gathered atop the grave to mourn, would be meaningless to me if I had purchased it at say Pier One....although I have difficulty imagining this exact print in Pottery Barn or even being in Pier One. I would imagine that there were tens of thousands of these same prints sitting in people's houses across the US. I would never have met the artist and his girlfriend who was helping him man his booth.

I feel hopeful. A sign. 17,000 buyers of handmade goods in one weekend. I hope this is the direction we are headed. It is so beautiful. A utopia of consumption because in this sort of consumption is a very real exchange made between humans. It is warm and fosters positive human interaction. The other model of consumption is one-sided. It is cold and dark.

baby clothes, cool baby clothes, hip baby clothes, organic baby clothes and hopefully soon more handmade baby clothes.

Labels: handmade baby clothes, handmade goods, holiday craft fairs

"ok i know you are going to hate me for saying this but if you are selling the same crap that amazon does then it probably wasn't made in the US. and, if you did make it i doubt that amazon is selling it unless you are the manufacturer and are getting a large % of sales and traffic from amazon....just saying and although it does throw a huge wrench into small physical retailers that sell the same products as amazon and it is enormous competition, maybe physical retailers should be looking at selling locally crafted goods rather than made in china name brand corporate stuff that amazon sells. whoa...what a concept. and then, if physical retailers picked up more locally made goods the entire landscape of retail/wholesale would or can i say IS changing. change hurts."

I got slammed pretty quickly by a small retailer. i deserved it. my post was a bit offensive. but what i wanted to say was perhaps even more offensive so i didn't post it on my facebook page. 

*note before reading this know that i have never and will never own a retail store so i have no experience in this arena. this is just me opining away and has no basis in reality. my thoughts. little to validate them with. just so you know, i claim no expertise in brick and mortar or retail in general.

but, i really do think there are huge changes happening in how people interact with one another. for me personally what the internet alters the most is that it allows direct connections between people who previously had layers between them. it removes the curtain, layers of curtains. a fan can interact with a star, a politician directly with his constituents, it allows groups to form internationally and chat with one another directly, it allows the musician to connect with his audience, an author to connect with her readers, it removes the middle man. 

the US is a land filled with middle men and tons of corporate opaque curtains, thick black out fabric blocking out loads of light.

the internet is a beautiful thing in wiring individuals TO individuals. 

she accused me of supporting a morally bankrupt corporation with ethically unsound business practices. i am not supporting amazon's way of practicing business but i do amazon's site and the way they sell things is indeed the direction things are moving. and if it was not amazon it would be some other site that allowed manufacturers to directly sell to their customers, small stores to sell their goods online, people to sell their used books, etc etc.

she said that amazon was putting her and all other small businesses out of business. this is pretty much true. that i was supporting a corporation that was destroying our communities. amazon is putting all retailers out of business but not all small businesses.

and after talking with her i had to really and am still thinking whether or not i should be selling my manufactured goods through amazon. because i don't support their price cutting and competitive practices and in selling my line to their customers i am supporting them. plus what amazon is doing with the publishing industry freaks me out!

but i do believe that it isn't amazon but rather the internet that is leading to retailers demise...amazon is just making it happen at the speed of light...along with an economic downturn.

what i really wanted to say on fb and to this retailer but i did not was that i kind of thought that there was much less purpose or function to having so many physical retailers anymore and not just because of amazon. she would have the same struggle even if amazon did not exist. amazon was just a shadow of what i imagine is to come. that yes, i agreed with her. that there is no way that she can compete with etailers. she has overhead, a real store to run etc. 

she argued that she offers far more to her local economy than me an etailer, employing people, renting space paying taxes. i disagreed. etailers pay the same into their local economies as brick and mortar. their employees salary is paid directly from our local community was the only real difference i could see. at least here in oregon where there is no local sales tax. in states that tax, yes the physical retailer does contribute a sales tax but this is currently under discussion and will probably change.

what i wanted to say is that i thought brick and mortar resellers should perhaps go out of business if they could not find a way to compete with etailers.

retailers had a purpose when there was no internet. they would travel far and wide gathering a collection of unusual goods that could not be found elsewhere. people would enter their doors finding treasures and willingly pay the prices required to keep the retailer in business.

but now there is the internet. everyone can see what everyone else is selling and they can sell it for less.

plus, everyone is selling the same stuff in their stores because they all go to the same damn shows and buy the same shit. their mix may be a bit different but for the most part you find the same stores in pdx that you find in sf.

so what i am saying is that maybe amazon (albeit in a nasty big corporate kill all competition sort of way) is moving us closer to what we could be because in my mind if her store can't compete with etailers then that would indicate to me that her store doesn't really serve a purpose to the community anymore.

sure she keeps a few people employed and purchases from local manufacturers but what she is really doing is purchasing goods, doubling the price and from these sales supporting a store front that sells basically the same stuff that is in a gift store in sf or in nyc or somewhere else in pdx and paying sales people to sell this mix and rent for a place to store this stuff.

what i didn't say on fb is it seems like a bit of a waste of resources for so many physical stores to be offering the exact same products as competing etailers because all the store owners go to the same wholesale shows and see the same manufacturers season after season. 

so instead of these shops selling the same sorts of mixes that one sees in other stores in other cities and in webstores, these same spaces could be filled with manufacturers, clothing designers, small publishers, printers, growers, bakers/chefs, manufacturers, artisans, crafters creating these goods locally, having their own showrooms, employing people to make these items and then selling these items at a bit above what they would to retailers (20% above wholesale or a bit more to cover showroom costs). then locally manufactured goods would be set at a price that was competitive with overseas pricing and the internet connects the manufacturer directly to their customer rather than having to go through storefronts. Win Win. 

I am not saying that there is no use for retailers because there is. lots of manufacturers don't want a showroom or to sell directly. they are going to have to hire someone to build them an online store or to run their online channels and to interact with their customers. lots of people want to see objects,  feel the weight in their hands, touch the goods, test them out, last minute gift shoppers. people who love to pop in and out of shops spending their days off work shopping. retailers aren't going to die. but the reality is that the internet does mean retailers are going to have to change their mix to more local and away from what everyone else has. i love what this shop is doing. crafty wonderland took it's favorite crafters and put them in a showroom. i don't see them being undersold on the internet. perhaps the biggest issue facing these sorts of shops is it costs more to manufacture small and these stores are having to mark up enough to support their overhead. this makes these sorts of products pretty pricey. also getting people away from shopping on the internet and interested in goods that don't come wrapped in corporate packaging is a challenge. i don't really know the answer but maybe it lies somewhere in retailers instead of opening their own shops partner with manufacturers.

etsy, ebay, and amazon are the first of these channels but others are moving in this direction. google with their checkout, paypal with a community of stores,  zappos moving into clothing, yahoo stores, shoot maybe even some sort of craigslist not for profit shopping site could start in and take over. the landscape changes so swiftly. 

but what doesn't change is that the middle man is much less necessary than ever before. 

the woman who makes beautiful corsets will be in her shop making her goods while customers come by to try them on and buy one, or perhaps pull out a scanner to try and find it cheaper somewhere else only to discover it is the same price on amazon and across the web because the seamstress is the one selling them through all the other channels and she is not a gigantic corporation who produces overseas so she does not give enormous volume discounts.

just my thoughts. my opinion. don't rake me over the coals for them. i am easily swayed. my opinion might change in a snap if amazon decided to crush my business model. 

ps amazon offers some of the same items i do in my store for far less. i tend to drop those products as soon as that happens because i can't sell them for the same price and make $.

pss i sell loads of other cool baby clothes and unique baby gifts for new moms from many manufacturers. that was for google...

 pss i read a lot of sci fi and was a star trek fan. i don't imagine anyone in star trek spent a lot of time shopping.

Labels: amazon bribes customers away from small businesses

last night an acquaintance came over to do a trade. i had a photo lightbox that i never used and she has some amazing handmade glass jewelry. my daughter saw this beautiful glass leaf and i saw a spider pendant and an octopus pendant. she saw the funny kids shirt with the word ambivalent on the front and not ambivalent on the back and had to have it for her four year old boy.
and a hoodie with the galaxy swirling around in silver with the words Center of the Universe.

she was searching my site for other stuff because we loved so much of her jewelry. she said i just love the one unorganized liberal but my husband would hate it because he doesn't want to use our child as a billboard.

i get that. we got criticized in 2004 in the washington observer and also on the view by the blonde woman...whatever her name is for just that.

and our retort was but how do you not use your children as a billboard every single day when you dress them in their polo shirts or batman shirts or vans slip on or nike running shoe for the tots. Unless you are a waldorf parent who blocks commercials and media from accessing your kids brains then your child is most likely parading around in or playing with something from some corporation.

my argument is why not use t-shirts with strong/political ideas on them for generating a discussion on what you believe and why you believe what you believe and then letting your child decide if they want to billboard the same idea or not. because whatever your child is inundated with enters their psyche.

and finally, it isn't easy to wear t-shirts that express one's opinions but t-shirts generate discussions, thoughts. you are publicly casting your vote for an idea or belief. you are building out a visual of yourself so others can demarcate or categorize you. in wearing a t-shirt with a strong statement you are standing up for what you believe in.

is this such a bad thing to teach your child?

Labels: child as billboard, t-shirt billboard