BlogFonk

"I'm just here for the welfare checks." What is PottyMouth™ all about?

PottyMouth™: "As long as you keep making the babies, we'll keep making the shirts."

Creative team: Mark Sloan, Peter Vattanatham, Nico Amman, Chad Rea, Venice, California (US).

Campaign: Website: pottymouthshop.com. T-shirts: 9 designs and growing. Catalog: in the form of a CD jewel case. We're in the process of getting punk bands to record songs inspired by the shirt slogans. Wildposters, postcards, and stickers: the idea has always been to market this brand like a local punk rock band, using the same materials. Rather than pay companies to post wildposters or distribute postcards in free postcard racks, we're posting our flyers over wildposters and replacing the postcards in the free postcard racks with ours. How's that for punk rock!

Idea: Depending on how you look at it, PottyMouth™ is either a company that produces alternative adultwear for babies, or alternative babywear for adults. It was born out of the simple idea that parents dress their children like little cute versions of themselves with their miniature GAP jumpers and Nike booties. But what if you're a parent that doesn't dress like the mainstream? Due to the lack of options, your children are more likely to look like one of your conservative neighbor's other than your own. That is, until now. In a world of sterile shopping franchises, PottyMouth™ introduces a line of children's clothing that boldly stands out from the sissy, vanilla alternatives.

Where: In Amsterdam while working for the "best agency in the world", Chad Rea was working on his book trilogy called Book Smarts that included the line "Children are proof that mom's like to fuck." Dave Bell said, "That would make a great T-shirt" so Erik Kessels designed 50 of them for fun. Not only did we sell out quickly, we made a lot of friends and enemies in the process.

When Chad moved to LA to set up 86 the onions, he took the concept with him and turned it into a full-fledged children's clothing brand, redesigning the infamous starter shirt along with 8 other new designs (which had all come through consumer suggestions) as well as various marketing materials.

Satisfied: So far, so good. It's been fun making them and seeing people react. While the idea behind the brand is solid and could actually be made into a safer, more marketable, mainstream brand, it's always been more fun pushing people's buttons and watching people get bent out of shape for something that is quite harmless. That said, there is an equal number of people who find them entertaining, mostly males, and buy them for their expecting friends as jokes as their are people who take the effort to tell us how wrong we are. Even if babies could read, the truth is, nobody has to actually put them on their kids, they just have to buy them.

Comment: If you have ideas for new shirts or products, please let us know. Rock!

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posted by BlogFonk: Wednesday, January 19, 2005 [#] Erms Suripatty