Fritinancy

Naughty Names

There are names that push the envelope and names that push buttons. Here are three names that do both—one of them deliberately, one of them wrongheadedly, and one of them seemingly without a clue.

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On one level, Bootie Babe, a nail polish and fragrance brand, is a playful pun on “beauty.” On another, it’s one more example of the assification of American branding. (See my previous posts on this subject: “Booty Pageant,” “Bottoms Up,” and “Cheeky!”) You could say the callipygian packaging is cute … or lewd.

 

Image from Pinkii.

The company, which is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2011 by Mark O’Hara, whose previous experience had included forming a 15-piece funk band called SuperBooty. According to the website, O’Hara launched Bootie Babes singlehandedly, designing the logo and website, applying for trademarks and patents, and overseeing product development. He clearly had fun with color names, which aim to appeal to tweens and teens. The purple on the left, above, is called Purp Slurp, and the blue is Hella Baloo. (Whether the overt sexuality is appropriate for this demographic is a subject I’ll leave to other critics.)

Unfortunately, O’Hara also seems to have taken the DIY approach to the rest of the brand language, which is an amateurish, trust-deflating mess. Here’s a line from the “Info” page:

SuperBooty President and CEO Mark O’Hara wanted to create a humorous, bold and truely [sic] unique beauty product that would literally “stand out” from the competition.

And the product name is misleading. This is a bootie—i.e., a short boot:

Gentle Souls “Barne Voyage,” via 6pm.com

And this is a booty:

Beyoncé, via Viennie V. (The headline on the story is “Beyoncé’s Booty Is Inspiration for Rare House Fly’s Name.”)

Yes, they’re pronounced identically. But their different suffixes are clues to their different meanings. And wouldn’t “Booty Babe” make a clearer reference to “beauty”?

Then again, maybe not.

(Hat tip: The Beheld.)

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Erin McKean tweeted me a photo of Sloshee margarita ice pops and wrote: “Saw this at the grocery store and thought you’d enjoy the name.”

 

Well. The name is an obvious pun on “slushy/slushee/slushie,” a generic term for a syrupy-sweet crushed-ice beverage. Unfortunately, Sloshee also evokes “sloshed,” a synonym for “intoxicated.” Alcoholic beverages can promise romance, adventure, and sex, but getting wasted? That’s a no-no.

But that may be the least of Sloshee’s troubles. For one thing, the company (based here in Oakland, I regret to say) can’t decide whether its name is “Sloshee” or “Sloshees.” (I couldn’t find a trademark application, so maybe the founders are still making up their minds. Or they may be lost in a product-testing haze.) The website admits to “a year of business and legal hurdles” before the 2009 launch. The copywriting hurdles still haven’t been surmounted. From the About page:

Sloshees started in July of 2004 after observing how fun and refreshing popsicles can be after a hot summer day. We thought to ourselves, wouldn't it be awesome if popsicles had alcohol in them? The idea was formed over a few beers but it took almost 5 years to solidify into a business.

“A few beers”? Next time, try coffee.

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And speaking of stumbling over hurdles, reader Stacey Kimmel-Smith, an equestrian who blogs at Behind the Bit, sent me an email about a clothing brand she’d seen at a tack shop in New Jersey.

 

 

“The company is European,” Stacey wrote, “and I wonder if maybe they selected the name without knowing that it sounds like a ‘bad word’ in English.”

When I finally stopped laughing, I checked out the Horze website. It’s replete with unintentional humor:

Who is Horze? Click here to see a movie. [Safe for work!]

Team Horze. [Cheaper by the dozen?]

This is the nature of Horze. [They’re born that way.]

Try it out yourself: Imagine strolling into a tack shop and saying, “Show me your Horze.”

There may be a cultural excuse here: Horze is a Finnish brand, launched in 2003 as an offshoot of Finn-Tack. Surely, though, there must have been at least one English-speaking person around to warn the founders that changing the S in “horse” to a Z results in “whores,” not Equine Zorro.

When I shared the Horze link on Twitter, Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) reminded me of this much-shared writing exercise posted on eBaum’s World:

 

Pom Mystery

I learned about the battle of the Poms in Lara Pearson’s trademark-law blog, BrandGEEK. Ms. Pearson writes that POM Wonderful—which in less than a decade has transformed the ruby-red seeds of the pomegranate fruit into an agribusiness-slash-consumer-products empire—is suing another beverage company for trademark infringement. The other company, which Ms. Pearson doesn’t identify by name, sells a drink called Pompis Energy.

 

Logos from BrandGEEK blog.

The complaint alleges that “defendant intentionally designed its Pompis energy drink product to copy the inherently distinctive POMMarks, used and made famous by POM.”

“I gotta say,” Ms. Pearson writes, “looking at the images above, I just don’t see what POM’s fussing about, but then again, maybe I’m missing something.”

Cheeky!

I received this email from the shapewear company Spanx yesterday, under the subject line “Introducing the Perfect Pick-Me-Up”:

“Manage their assets.” Geddit?

It’s not every woman who wants to augment her derriere, but I’m happy to learn there’s now a name for the little tushy-embiggeners that will do the job: butt-lets.

Here’s Spanx’s web copy:

SPANX introduces its cheekiest product yet—the Booty-Booster Short. This style, which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase fanny pack, is best for those who want more junk in their trunk! Now you can achieve the look of a naturally round rump thanks to this highly constructed, booty-enhancing design with optional butt-lets that add a cheek size!

(Another line on the Spanx website reads “Free shipping . . . no butts about it!”)

“Butt-lets” is almost certainly a pun on another bit of industry jargon: “cutlets,” or even more explicitly—as in the case of a product from Miss Oops—“chicken cutlets.”*

Here’s what that product’s web copy says:

Feeling down? Here’s something to perk you up….Chicken Cutlets by Miss Oops! These silicone breast inserts are perfect to perk your girls up and add some cleavage without going under the knife.  Each pair comes in a plastic travel case.  Chicken Cutlets will increase your bosom by 1 full cup size.

I haven’t been able to determine when “cutlets” replaced “falsies” in the lexicon of nonsurgical breast enhancement, but when the New York Times addressed the topic in a May 2009 story about the Miss California beauty pageant (“The Beauty of Chicken Cutlets”), writer Tara Parker-Pope adopted a wide-eyed tone:

“There’s plenty of ways of getting to more proportion without doing breast implants,” [pageant director Keith] Lewis said. “Many of the girls use chicken cutlets.”

What?

“You use chicken cutlets,” he said. “You use tape. You use anything that you can to enhance the line. There’s lots of tricks of the trade.”

I was surprised the show’s co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez didn’t ask for a clarification of the chicken cutlet line. Is it widely known that pageant contestants stuff their bras with raw poultry? Wouldn’t this place them at higher risk for salmonella infection?

As it turns out, a “chicken cutlet” is the common term used for a silicone bra insert that is used to create the illusion of larger breasts. Apparently they get their name from the fact that they look like cuts of boneless chicken.

More about Spanx here, here, and here. Bonus link: If you’re a New Yorker subscriber, or can cozy up to one, Alexandra Jacobs’s story about Spanx, from the March 28, 2011, issue, is a riot and a revelation. To take just one example: It was in this article that I learned that “apex” is industry jargon for “nipple.”

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* Did you think yesterday’s chik’n post was the last you’d hear about chickens for a while? Hah!

Bottoms Up

Last week I wrote about the booty-fication of American brands, as evidenced by Old Navy’s Booty Reader and Booty Pop Panties. Once upon a time, a slang term like booty would have been an advertising taboo (tabooty?). But once the barriers fall, they fall hard. Booty now seems as innocent and quaint as “You bet your sweet bippy.”

As evidence, I submit this new slogan from 135-year-old denim pioneer Levi Strauss & Co.

Booty Pageant

When did booty cross the line from vulgarism to acceptable—even ubiquitous—marketing lingo? No doubt the 1997 Jamie Foxx vehicle Booty Call—which critic Roger Ebert called “the raunchiest sex comedy I can remember”—popularized what had previously been primarily street slang.* And the poster provided a helpful visual definition.

 

In 2010, however, brand booty-fication is less salacious than simply—well, cheeky.

 

Gross-Out Names

I thought we'd hit bottom, brand-name-wise, with MomSpit "no-rinse cleanser," which I wrote about last week. But no. Look what else I've added to the Ew Files:

• Butt Paste diaper-rash ointment. (I confess I've given this product as part of a new-baby gift; the mother pretended to be amused.)
• Tough Titties Nipple Rub ("for nursing mums"), from a company that calls itself Least Likely 2 Breed. (Via Wes Phillips, who also contributed MomSpit.) The Least Likely 2 Breed stable (repository? arsenal?) of reproductively themed products also includes...
• Bad Ass Booty Balm, a competitor of Butt Paste, and ...
• Mother Effer's Va-J-J Jelly, a personal lubricant that seems poised to cash in on the, uh, hoohah over the va-jay-jay word, and ...
• Roid Rage, "the classiest flashiest hemorrhoid remedy on the planet." (It's on the Least Likely home page, but doesn't seem to be for sale.)

Moving northward, anatomically, we also have:

• Chicken Poop lip balm--yes, you put it on your mouth. Entrepreneur Jamie Tabor, a k a "Simone Chickenbone," says she got the name from her grandfather's advice for dry lips: "Rub chicken poop on 'em--that way you won't lick 'em." (Hat tip to my fellow namers at Catchword, who are not responsible for the Chicken Poop name.)
• Alligator Poo Lollies--yes, you put them in your mouth. They're pillow-shaped hard candies "handcrafted from pure sugar crystals, intense flavor, and lots of hard work." This one also came to my attention by way of Catchword, which spots a trend here: "2008 will be the year of the Poo. You just watch."