Why our president doesn’t like man purses
We realize the Satchel Pages come to this story a little late in the game, but we thought that last night’s State of the Union speech made today as good a day as any to revisit the famous Tom Bihn “We are sorry that our president is an idiot” labels.
Why? Because what’s been underappreciated in most of the discussion about the mysterious French message is that these tags originated on a man purse.
A quick summary of our tale so far: Purchasers of briefcases and laptop and shoulder bags (AKA man purses) manufactured by Port Angeles, Washington, bag maker Tom Bihn discover that the bags, which are sold in the U.S. and Canada, feature a care label with a few extra lines of French, just below instructions on drying and ironing:
Which means:
Somebody blogs about the label and — voila! A 21st Century viral advertising campaign is born. Company president Tom Bihn claims the joke is on him. It’s both deniable and sustainable. Company sales skyrocket.
Is there some connection between a man purse and presidential dissatisfaction? We’ll leave that discussion as an exercise for underemployed marketing executives. But it is not easy to ignore the fact that when it came time to cash in on their brilliant guerrilla marketing ploy, the Tom Bihn company chose to reproduce the labels on simple T-shirts. (Yes, we heard, all T-shirt proceeds go to Seattle homeless veterans. Maybe that makes it easier than having to explain the whole man-purse thing.)
- Tom Bihn comes clean [Tom Bihn]
- French Label T-shirt [Tom Bihn]
- “Political Spin for the Rinse Cycle” [Direct magazine]
February 3rd, 2006 at 12:59 am
[...] « Why our president doesn’t like man purses [...]
February 3rd, 2006 at 11:01 pm
[...] Tom Bihn bags: Iraq ready and media savvy. But what do they look like, really? And how well do they perform those all-important . . . pursing functions we demand in a man bag? Let’s start with the ID bag, a midsized messenger bag designed to accommodate a laptop-containing sleeve, called “The Brain Cell” (sold separately.) We’ve discussed this before: here’s another bag that doesn’t look like a laptop bag. But it can be. [...]
March 4th, 2006 at 8:08 am
[...] Messenger bags, Baghdad-worthy backpacks, and laptop sleeves from Tom Bihn, plus those famous “We are sorry our president is an idiot” labels. [...]
March 9th, 2006 at 2:40 am
[...] “Idiot President” Tom Bihn prefers to demo the Tom Bihn Brain Cell with an egg-drop test, though we couldn’t tell if the egg he uses is raw or hardboiled. We’ve mentioned the Brain Cell before; there’s also a vertical version, called the Monolith, and a softer, lighter duty Soft Cell, in several sizes. [...]