Fritinancy

Underwear Week: Startups

It’s Day Three of Underwear Week! Time for some news of the new.

TechCrunch, to which I turn for the latest info about gadgets, gizmos, and Google, surprised me a couple of weeks ago with a guest column by research analyst Ross Rubin about, of all things, four new underwear companies. The tech angle? All four startups had sought crowdfunding to build their businesses; two succeeded, two didn’t. My angle? The companies’ names, naturally.

Thinx (pronounced “thinks”) was started by three women in New York City who saw a need for leakproof, stainproof underwear that women can wear confidently during their periods (referred to in the Kickstarter video with inexplicably coy euphemisms like “that time”).

“QUAD-DRY BreatheTECH” provides “a leak and stain resistant support matrix that’s got you covered.”

 

The project met its funding goal, but the name falls short. Yes, it’s non-descriptive (remember, that’s a good thing), but the spelling makes it look like a knockoff—or a spinoff—of the successful Spanx brand, and the “think” concept strikes me as off-target. The customer doesn’t care how much thinking went into your product, and she doesn’t want to have to overthink her purchase. (“Think” is also overused in branding to the point of meaninglessness.) The dull, redundant tagline, “Rethinking Women’s Underwear,” doesn’t convey a benefit or convince me to buy.

The bottom line, so to speak: an interesting product that could better realize its potential with a more effective, less derivative name/tagline combination. Something sassy and unexpected is what’s called for here.

By the way, a tip of the hat to columnist Rubin for working “panty ante” into his copy.

Snowballs (“Cooling underwear for conceiving men”) also addresses a serious problem—male infertility—and it does so with candor (in the pitch) and humor (in the name). “Testicular cooling has been shown to increase sperm count,” the website informs us, “particularly in cases of varicoceles, and we’ve created an comfortable, organic product that will help you succeed naturally before investing thousands of dollars in other risky, more invasive solutions.” I love the product name (and also the Procreativity.net domain name), but backers balked, possibly put off by the product’s high market price ($65 to $80).

Don’t give up, Snowballs! I’d love to see you pitch on “Shark Tank.”

JockGods is a decent name, but slightly misleading if what you’re selling is “high-quality underwear designed for men and women”: both “jock” and “god” suggest that these undies are for guys only. There’s also nothing particularly distinctive about the product. I’m not surprised that the project failed to meet its funding goal.

Helux Gear has a clear, straightforward pitch: there’s a need for “ergonomic” (supportive) men’s briefs with a practical, accessible fly. The name has a nice resonance, suggesting both “luxury for men” and “helix” (suggestive of the unusual design of the pouch). “Helix” also sounds powerful, elemental, and science-y, and the logo makes it stick. Backers apparently agreed: they funded the project with room to spare.

 

Previously on Underwear Week:

Cheekini.

True & Co. and the MILFs.

Underwear Week: True & Co. and the MILFs

It’s Underwear Week again here at Fritinancy—time to get down to basics and revisit our foundations. During the last Underwear Week (has it really been three years?), we wondered why bra sizing makes no sense, admired the Camelflage brand name, examined mirdles and other shapewear for men, and held our noses at Huggies’ “diapers full of chic.”

This time around we kicked off with a newish underwear-ish word, cheekini. Today we travel from the orchestra to the balcony, so to speak, to see what a nice bra company like True & Co. is doing with a naughty acronym like MILF.

 

“Mom I’d Love to Fit” temporary tattoo, free during the promotion.

 

True & Co. MILF ad.

It’s for Mother’s Day, you see. Truly! AdFreak called the campaign “odd” and advised True & Co. to “apologize, act contrite and enjoy the attention.” Instead, True & Co.’s blog went on the offensive about the offensive term:

MILF – the term brings to mind pervy frat boys but who says they should own an acronym? MILF (Moms I’d Love to Fit) is about the best people in the world taking 5 minutes out of their busy day to treat themselves to a proper bra fitting and get a new bra. … We meant the pun and we meant it in good fun. We think there’s nothing objectifying about a woman owning her sexuality. We’d be proud to be considered a MILF (Mom I’d Love to Fit).

San Francisco-based True & Co. was born in 2011 after Michelle Lam, a former principal at Bain Capital Ventures who became frustrated after trying on “20 different bras, one after the other, in what seemed to be a random trial-and-error sequence,” according to a profile in Fortune. Lam and a partner developed a quiz to help women shop for bras from home. The company was originally called Bra & Co. but launched in May 2012 as True & Co.*

This is not the first time an advertiser has attempted to “reclaim” MILF. Back in 2007, Spirit Airlines advertised a “Many Islands, Low Fares” sale with fares as low as $9 for flights between Fort Lauderdale and the Bahamas. When asked whether he’d known about MILF’s offensive connotation, Spirit’s director of communications claimed to be shocked, shocked. “The most obscene thing we’ve noticed,” [he] said, “is what other carriers have charged to fly the Caribbean before Spirit’s $9 fares.”

(Want to overdose on underwear? Go here.)

__

* Before the MILF kerfuffle, True & Co.’s major claim to newsworthiness had been a lawsuit filed by True Fit, maker of personalized-fit technology used by Macy’s and Nordstrom, which asserted that “True & Co.” infringed on its mark. True Fit also sought to prevent any use of “true” in connection with personalized-fit technology. In March of this year, the U.S. District Court denied the motion.

Word of the Week: Cheekini

Cheekini: A style of women’s underwear with moderate coverage in front and on the sides and a raised cut in the rear that covers some but not all of the buttock cheeks.

Victoria’s Secret Bridal Cheekini Panty.

The style sometimes appears, with minor variations, under different names: boykini panties, boyleg briefs, hipster panties, booty shorts. All are marketed as comfortable, panty-line-less alternatives to thong underwear (disparaged by detractors as “butt floss”).

I first discovered cheekini on the Victoria’s Secret website, but the term is neither original nor exclusive to that retailer. JC Penney sells cheekini panties under its Flirtitude label; it also sells visually similar boykini panties and hipster panties. I also found cheekini panties by Steve Madden, Betsey Johnson, and Felina.

The earliest citation I found for cheekini is a July 2006 blog post, “Cheekini Is the New Thong!”, that credited DKNY with coining the term. However, a search for DKNY cheekini underwear came up empty-handed, or -cheeked, and all the images on that 2006 post have vanished.

I found the most extensive definition for cheekini in an unexpected place: a blog called He Wears Panties (“a friendly place to discuss lingerie and women’s clothing with men who wear it”):

Cheekini panties are clearly a play on the ‘bikini’. The general idea of the cheekini is that the rear of the panty is cut quite high across the buttock, leaving a fair amount of cheek showing whilst also reducing panty lines in the process. These are a viable alternative to thong lovers who are growing tired of feeling as if they have a never ending wedgie.

Cheekini is yet another variation on the linguistically productive bikini, which was adopted in 1946 as the name of a new French swimsuit as “explosive” as the nuclear-bomb tests that had recently taken place on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

Read my previous posts about -kini and -ini:

• “Put on a Suit and You’ll Look Cute” (bikini history; plus skirtini, tankini, monokini, microkini, burqini).
• “New -kini on the Block” (trikini)
• “Logic-ini” (-ini in the comics)
• “-Kini Season” (nun-kini, Babi-kini, spring-kini)
• “Bikini and Beyond” (the whole -kini catalog, for the Visual Thesaurus)

Get It Off Your Chest

Moist jeans may be the Next New Thing; moist bras, not so much. Fortunately, there’s an app—a nappy?—for that: the Wick’em moisture-managing bra liner.

 

For consistency, shouldn’t it be “to keep ’em dry”?

 

 

As a brand name, “Wick’em” is assertively descriptive if a bit too reminiscent of Hang ’em High. (I’d like it better if the brand were spelled Wickham and the styles were called Lady Wickham, the Dowager Countess of Wickham, and Mistress Wickly.*) There’s no way to make “wick” sound elegant, and the apostrophe takes it even further downmarket.

The folksiness of that eye dialect is at odds with the boardroom-stiff brand voice of Wick’em’s parent company, Coconut Grove Intimates (whose other products include adhesive bras and which is headquartered, incongruously, in Ontario, Canada, far from any coconut groves I’m aware of). There’s that “moisture management” descriptor, for starters. And on Wick’em’s About Us page I learned that Coconut Grove Intimates is “an industry leader in the development of solution-oriented bras and bra accessories.” Maybe Hank Hill should be the corporate spokesman.

 

 

Hat tip to Corporette for the Wick’em link.

 

P.S. If you’re goin’ to go droppin’ letters, at least get it straight. It’s “Wear ’n’ Care”—one apostrophe for each of the missing letters in “and”—not “Wear N’ Care.”

__

* And I’d really like to rename the product Bosom Buddy, but it’s taken.

December Linkfest

A new language quarterly, aptly called Babel, brings linguistics to a general audience without dumbing down the subject. Published at the University of Huddersfield (UK), the magazine covers “issues relating to many different human languages” – and some non-human ones, including, in the first issue, Venusian. I’m already looking forward to the second issue, which will include an article about “the secret linguistic history of brand names.”

*

At Word Routes, Ben Zimmer recaps the year in words and picks his word of the year. (Surprise – it isn’t fiscal cliff.) I published my own list earlier this week.

*

Do not ask science-fiction author John Scalzi to write for free. No, really – don’t even think about it.

*

In the 1920s, when TV was still in its infancy, retailers used fake television broadcasts to trick customers into entering stores. Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog explains how it was done. 

Faked TV demonstration from 1926, via Smithsonian.

*

From caucus to urbane: the words that spiked each week this year in look-ups at Merriam-Webster online.

*

Catalog love: Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend. He’ll “build you a table and then have sex with you on it.” (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

*

From Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire, the best (worst) typos, mistakes, and correrctions [sic] of 2012.

*

Holly Buchanan of Marketing to Women Online picks the  commercials that did the best job of marketing women in 2012. She has strict criteria:

In order to pass The Buchanan Test a commercial must do three things. It must feature women who:

1. Are outside of the home
2. Are in a role other than that of "mother"
3. Are NOT doing yoga

(For comparison, see Bechdel Test.)

*

“So it looks like the New Orleans Hornets are going to change their name to become the Pelicans.” A defense of the new team name by Barry Petchesky at Deadspin. (Naughty language advisory.)

*

From my favorite info-viz site, Muckety (“Mapping the paths of power and influence”): The Trump Fund for the Gutting of Red Herrings and other think tanks we’d like to see in 2013.

*

I grew up in Los Angeles and always wondered why the Ralphs supermarket chain didn’t have an apostrophe in its name. Now, thanks to Los Angeles magazine, I know: the business was founded (in 1873, at Fifth and Hill streets) by George Ralphs.

*

“Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention”: Matt Haughey on why he loves Twitter and hates Facebook.

*

Something to play with while you’re waiting in line to see The Hobbit, which opens in theaters today: the hobbit name generator and the Elvish name generator. (Via @Wordnik.)

*

Like it or not, the “fiscal cliff” metaphor is here to stay. Linguist George Lakoff explains why.

*

“I sculpt baby names from love, from hatred, from the reality of this hellhole of a world that you’re forcing an innocent life to endure.” Bob Powers, artisanal baby namer, at McSweeney’s. Yes, he jests. Mostly. (Via Karen Wise.)

*

Over at The Atlantic, sociology professor Philip Cohen asks: Why don’t parents name their daughters Mary anymore? (Also via Karen Wise.)

*

From Copyranter: The best men’s underwear commercial ever.

*

According to Helen Sword, author of a column for the New York Times and creator of something called the Writer’sDiet test, a “zombie noun” is any noun (proliferation, formation, indication) that “cannibalizes” a verb. Now linguistics grad student Josef Fruehwald, blogging at Val Systems, delivers an incisive counterpoint. “Ain’t nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees,” says he.

*

Via the brilliant Maria Popova at Brain Pickings: Alice in Wonderland as a subway map.

*

And to all a good night.

That Word

Alas, it does not mean what they think it means.

 

 

Alas: An expression of grief, compassion, or alarm; also used to express sorrow, regret, or apprehension of danger or evil.

I think what the copywriter may have been searching for was voilà! or aha! or presto! Alas, we’ll never know.

Now that my holiday jolliness has curdled, I may as well unload a few more complaints:

1. Why is she getting dressed the night before the party?

2. Enough with the ’twas-the-night-ing – and all the other rusty holiday clichés. (The subject line on this particular email, I’m sorry to say, was “’Tis the Season for Super Duper Shaping.” No, ’tain’t.)

3. If you’re going to parody a well-known poem*, you must at a minimum get the rhyme and meter right. “Snug” does not rhyme with “glove.”

*

Previously in That Word: Sophistry, servile, infamous, arriviste, bupkus, unrequited.

__

* Tip: Don’t.

Follow the Bouncing Bra

(This is the second of two posts about Title Nine, the sporting-goods company for women. Read the first post here.)

I’d been thinking about Title Nine for a few days before I visited the Berkeley store, because I’d recently received an email from the company that looked like this:

 

Bounce—jiggle lines and all—turns out to be the name of Title Nine’s everyday bra brand.

It’s an odd name for a bra brand, to say the least.* And it’s especially strange coming from Title Nine.

Some background: Title Nine built its reputation on selling sport bras that have been tested for various activities and assigned “barbell” ratings. The more barbells, the more support. There’s a four-barbell bra called the “Bye-Bye Bounce Bra”; another is called the “Bounceless Bra.”  The maximum-strength bra—a five-barbeller called “The Last Resort”—is said to “completely eliminate bounce.”

So why is the non-athletic bra brand bounce-positive? Where’s the consistency? Or is the name a joke I’m not getting?

Here’s another odd thing.

Each bra style in the Bounce department has a name, and many of the names are, yes, jokey: Get Busted, M.F. (not what you’re thinking), Full House, A Bolder Holder. (Who else remembers “over-shoulder boulder holder”?)

Then there’s the Things Unseen Bra.

 

I’m a nonpracticing Jew and no expert on Scripture, but I do recognize “things unseen” as a New Testament catchphrase. It appears—as “things not seen” in some translations—in Hebrews 11:1 and in 2 Corinthians 4:18, and it refers to faith (“the evidence of things not seen”).

If this is a dog whistle, it’s a pretty irreverent one. (I’ve seen no sign of Bounce or Title Nine having a religious mission. Christianity isn’t part of the T9 brand manifesto as it is for, say, Sierra Trading Post, Chick-fil-A, and some other well-known US companies.)

Then again, I notice that Bounce also carries an Amen Bra—for A cups only, haha—and a skimpy, secular Blessings Top. And the company’s bra-fitting experts are Bravangelists. So maybe what we have here is a little wink-wink, nudge-nudge—some tittering, if you will—about “uplift.”

But “Bounce”? Sorry, it’s just flat wrong.

__

* Yes, I know that Procter & Gamble makes a Bounce brand of clothes-dryer products. Not a concern: it’s a variation on the but-that’s-a-car-name non-issue. Different categories; zero conflict. (But see also Jessica’s observation in the comments section.)

___

Previous posts about brassieres: Mr. Bra, Brayola, Why Bra Sizing Makes No Sense, Bra-llelujah.

Title Nine Scores, Fouls

I had some errands nearby, so I stopped into the Title Nine store in Berkeley over the weekend to see what was new with this local brand. 

A bit of background: Title Nine was founded in 1989, taking its name from Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex to any person seeking the benefits of any federally funded education program. Title IX opened doors to girls and women who wanted to play sports in school; Title Nine sells non-technical sports gear and clothing. The company has 19 retail stores—none in malls, the website boasts—243 employees, and a manifesto.

Appropriately, there’s a lot of playful, you-go-girl energy in a Title Nine store. This poster typifies the spirit:

“You are so busted!” is very cute. The medallion touts the company’s “bravangelists”: also nice.

I actually laughed out loud at this sign displayed above the entrance to the bra department—excuse me, the “Home for Unruly Girls Support Center.”

If you don’t get the joke in “unruly girls,” see the Online Slang Dictionary.

So far, so good. By the evidence, Title Nine is a company that makes a big investment in copywriting, and that’s a good thing. The attention to words carries over into the dressing rooms—or so I thought until I encountered this sign:

 

“Have a Fit!” is fun. So are the other headings: Containment, Mind the Strap, Be Smooth, Know the Terrain, and Think Straight. Then I read the very last sentence: “The bra should lay straight.”

Aha! So Title Nine’s editorial department has an Achilles heel after all: the lay/lie fault. The bra should lie straight, if you please.

(Listen, I get that a lot of people mix up lay and lie, and in fact I tolerate “lay” for “lie” in casual speech. But I can’t condone its appearance in published prose. And that includes marketing copy: See my critiques of the Hanes Lay Flat Collar, the SpeedSleep ad, the Back2Life back-pain “solution.” This is why professional copyeditors were invented. They know this stuff. They can help.)

I picked up a fall catalog to see whether the dressing-room sign was anomalous. Nope: The error is even worse in the catalog (insert, page 7), where in addition to the lay/lie error we have a comma splice:

“The bra should lay straight, if it rides up, it’s still too loose.”

There needs to be a period—a colon would be OK, too—after “straight.”

The “lay” error persists on the website:

I leafed through the catalog to distract myself from all this lay-ola. Unfortunately, my eye fell on an even bigger boo-boo—in a name with a trademark symbol, no less:

 

Page 19, fall catalog.

I was drawn to that “Wooliscious” headline because in all the time I’ve been tracking -licious compounds—see here, here, here, and here—I’d never come across a -liscious. It looked odd, and I wondered whether it was a clumsy attempt at a portmanteau with “luscious.” Nope again: In the product copy—and on the Web—the word is spelled “Woolicious.”

I’m guessing Title Nine’s lawyers have already pitched a fit over this mistake, so I’ll leave it at that.

In my crappy photo you can just barely make out the name of this garment: “The Swacket.” It’s “more than a sweater—not quite a jacket,” the copy says. Honestly, is that the best they could come up with? Because all I can think of is the poor sacrificial fracket.

I’ll have another post about Title Nine later this week.

If the Bray Fits

As we ladies know, shopping for a bra that fits properly requires advanced degrees in math, mechanical engineering, and patience. If it isn’t the weird size system (in the US, anyway) it’s the creepy salesman. And still we are doomed to a Sisyphean failure loop: 80 percent (or 85 percent or 99.9 percent) of women are Doing It Wrong, as we are repeatedly reminded.

So it’s encouraging to see a startup—based in Israel—dedicated to helping women find “a good bra that fits just right,” in the words of founder Orit Hashay.

If only they could have found a name that fits better than Brayola.

 

Cue the donkey.

The logo—nicely executed to resemble a lingerie label—does its darnedest to lift and separate the pink bra from the black yola. There are just two problems. First: Most of the time we’ll see the name in only one color. And second: In English, “-yola” is not a suffix. But “-ola” is, especially in commercial names. Its history goes back to Pianola (a mechanical piano invented in 1895 or 1896) and thence to Victrola (1905) and Crayola (1903, coined from craie, the French word for chalk, and ola from oleaginous).

And let’s not forget payola, supposedly coined from pay and Victrola and defined as the payment of cash or gifts in exchange for airtime.

Crayola, payola … Brayola. It’s really, really hard to get past a long-A sound in the first syllable.

And I wish I didn’t hear an echo of bresaola (breast-ola?), the Italian cured meat.

Brayola gets lots of love from loyalist commenters who visited a recent TechCrunch post. Good for them. But I must call it as I see it: The company name is either a cross-linguistic blunder or an attempt at humor that falls, well, flat. There’s nothing like the suggestion of bray to make you look like an ass.

If Ms. Orit Hashay had given me a call, I’d have said: “You’re in Israel, girlfriend! Name the company Bra Mitzvah!”

Read my other underwear posts.

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.”

__

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