How To Be First.

We’d been making funny onesies at Wrybaby since we created the category in 2000. When things blew up during the first year, they blew up big. Our designs were featured in the NY Times, Newsweek, People, USA Today, Time, and TV Guide, to name a few pubs. They were even seen on VH1, Today Show, and Live with Regis and Kelly. It’s still unconfirmed, but witnesses swear to seeing David Letterman hold up the funny onesie we sent him on his Late Night comedy show. That kind of exposure is great, but it also creates a giant, burning-man-style beacon that screams, THESE PEOPLE ARE ON TO SOMETHING.

Meet Valencia. She’s rocking the world’s first Super Snapsuit.

If you’re a designer or an entrepreneur, you need to hear the very first thing our very first screen printer told us before things got crazy –“People will rip you off. Stay ahead of them.” He wasn’t lyin’. It wasn’t long before we were inundated with competitors, knock-offs, rip-offs, or all three at once. While Von Maur, Buy Buy Baby, and FAO Schwartz were ordering our funny onesies from the source (us!), Target and Sears were ripping us off wholesale. While our company was doing private label projects with Barneys and Cost Plus World Market, thousands of small businesses were stealing our designs right and left. Café Press was full of people hawking wrybaby designs. When the company started, there was just one little place in the south that offered blank onesies to print on. Eventually we started having garments custom made overseas (way better cotton and fit), and while we did that, garment supply companies started carrying lots of blank onesies domestically. It got really easy for people to do what we were doing, so we decided to go back to making baby things that were hard to make.

Our concepts and designs up top, and below is how Target ripped us off. I appreciate that they doubled the cost of a “Photo with Baby” while undercutting the cost of our original onesie by 75%.

We made fun bath towel sets (that’s what we ended up doing with World Market), we made travel cases for pacifiers, and we made stacking blocks for toddlers among many, many other things. We even made pillowcase covers for new parents! All of these did fine, but nothing ever matched the baby-shower-gift perfectness of the funny onesie. It’s a magical combination of being a product for a very focused age range, that’s useful, provides good theater at a baby shower, and is really affordable. So how would we keep making funny onesies that could be recognized as OUR funny onesies?

In 2007 no one was as bananas for super heroes as they are today. Seriously. Just like there were NO funny onesies in 2000 before wrybaby made them. There were only a couple of people making super hero capes for 8 year-olds, which you’d think would be amazing business. It wasn’t. The problem was this – no one wanted to kill a kid with a cape they made, and no one wanted their kid to die in one. It’s pretty understandable from a parent’s perspective. And, yeah, it’s freaking scary making kids clothes much less SUPER kids clothes. We figured these added up to a pretty HUGE barrier to entry that we could rub our brains on and solve.

OK, nevermind for a sec that they were hard to make. If no one were ape shit for comic book heroes, why would anyone want to buy a super hero onesie? The short answer is because it’s ridiculously hilarious. Look, you’ve got this non-communicative blob who doesn’t even have enough strength to hold its own head up, much less fight a giant menace from planet Krapnoid. Can you imagine strolling a super-infant into a Starbucks? Knee. Slapping. Hilarious. You could even have fun over a bottle of wine with your spouse imagining your child’s future super-powers. There were all kinds of reasons to take on the how-do-we-not-kill-the-child-problem. The answer was surprisingly simple and available all along. It was just hard to make. Take a standard, lap-shoulder baby t-shirt and sew a cape into the shoulder seams. The neck would be SUPER loose. And a baby 0-12 months isn’t THAT squiggly, so as long as you made the cape short enough to not get sat on, you’d be good. As an extra safety precaution we tacked the cape down to the back of the bodysuit in three places, which kept it nice and close. Then, to make it even harder to replicate, we used this cool puffy ink to print on the front. 

The idea for a Super Onesie actually came from the baby journal we wrote for Running Press, The New Parent’s Fun Book (left). You can see where we incorporated the cape into the shoulder seams. And although a baby’s going to do nothing but lay on it, we even did the extra credit of embroidering a star on the cape!

How fun is that puffy ink!? I made it so only some parts were puffy. Like on Super Cute, only the type outline and starts were puffy so the design didn’t get to heavy. Who wants a sweaty baby?

Aside from the darn thing being SUPER safe to wear, there were so many other minut details that we poured over to make this garment from scratch. From fit to color to a cape that wouldn’t end up a wrinkled mess. What a pain!

NPH!!!!!!! I couldn’t believe I was lucky enough to have even the smallest guest appearance in his awesome life. The Super Snapsuits were SUPER well received (sorry, I’ll stop doing that now). For a while they were, at least.

The packaging was on point and the pitch was perfect. When all was said and done we had a SUPER safe, SUPER fun new baby shower gift to offer our boutiques. We eventually added a new Super Snapsuit to the mix – “Super Bad” for kids that may desire a different path to worldwide notoriety. Our invention made it to People.com, but our pride and joy was when Neil Patrick Harris showed pics of his twins wearing them while he was co-hosting Live with Regis and Kelly. Another point of pride was when Ohio State University asked us to donate Super Snapsuits to help reward families who were participating in a study to battle SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy). No one bothered trying to copy our Super Snapuits. And most importantly, no one got hurt. Total win. At least until the super hero craze started. Which you’d think would HELP our sales, but it did not. The opposite happened! Consumers wanted licensed product, no matter how shitty that product was constructed. And, man, they were terrible. They didn’t even have capes, for crying out loud! But that’s people. Sigh. Eventually our Super Snapsuits were attacked online nationally as an affront to women somehow. So when we sold out of our last batch, we retired the style for the time being.

We did so well with those first two styles, we decided to add a villain to the mix. Initially these came locked away in little window box packaging, which in hindsight was kind of dumb because you couldn’t see the cape right away.

We also made everything so bigger kids could be super, too.

That sounds like a sad ending, but it’s totally not! This story is titled “HOW TO BE FIRST”, after all! Hahaha. While the Super Snapsuits were on the market, we were still innovating. A onesie with just a QR code on the front, for example. When the curious scanned it, it would bring up a fake online shopping website saying that that baby had been added to their cart. We invented a baby mystic who offered blind-boxed fortune telling baby t-shirts (you wouldn’t know which incredible future you’d get!). We’re still innovating. You can get free, shareable goodies every month, or you can print our styles on your own with services like Zazzle. This is how, for more than 20 years, wrybaby has stayed profitable. By being first.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Survive Being Hated Internationally.

Yes. It happened to me. I made international news. They talked about it on the Today Show. National radio talk shows hounded me for interviews. A woman wrote me (actually a lot of women wrote, but this stood out) that she hoped I’d have my arms and legs ripped off. What caused such a firestorm? A funny onesie. I’d never gotten bad press before, much less ferociously attacked. Hilariously, it had always been way the opposite. At the time, no one really knew what to do when something as extreme as this happened to them. There was no guidebook. As far as I know, there still isn’t. So I’m going to walk you through what we did when the world decided to hate us. If it ever happens to you, at least you’ll have some idea of what you can do.

Welp, this is it. This is the funny onesie that brought an international troll army to our door.

Let’s back up for a sec. In 2000, a small company called Wrybaby started the funny onesie category. Seriously, back then, the novelty onesie DIDN’T EXIST. I can say this with confidence, because my wife and I started Wrybaby when our son was born. Kelly and I agreed that, through humor, we’d reflect the new parent experience in a way that was 100% true, and 100% funny instead of kind of terrifying. What we made was irreverent, but not vile. It was unconventional, but served our mission. We made hipster baby gifts before our community labeled them as such.

We started with a few designs and suddenly, in 2001, it all went crazy. Wrybaby products were featured in Time Magazine, Newsweek, USA Today…it was bananas. And it stayed bananas for years. Hell, Neil Patrick Harris and his husband introduced their new twins to the world in People Magazine wearing our onesies. Then he showed his babies wearing our super hero onesies on Live with Regis and Kelly. NPH likes us (and we love him right back)! Hahaha.

So’s you have an idea of the kind of stuff wrybaby makes, here are some of 2015’s best-selling funny onesies. Heck, a few are STILL best-sellers. We also had some adorable plush and kid’s backpacks in addition to the world’s first Super Hero onesies.

Not to brag, but this is just a tiny sampling of the kind of press we were used to getting over the last 15 years. People who found our stuff, liked our stuff. It was that simple. That InStyle Magazine page? That’s our Wheel of Responsibility in Christina Aguilera’s kitchen. I can’t even remember how we found out about that.

In 2013, we introduced a new baby bodysuit with a graphic that said “Love Me for My Legrolls”. It sold pretty well. Because what’s the best thing about babies? Smell, cuteness, and all that plumpy goodness. At Wrybaby, we change up our funny onesie offerings every year, and in 2015 we introduced a another poke at the healthy baby’s cherubic condition – but with an ironic twist. It simply read, “I Hate My Thighs”. And, sorry if I’m treating you like an idiot, but here’s the definition of irony – Happening in the opposite way to what is expected, and typically causing wry amusement because of this. My fucking company’s name is literally in the definition of irony! So it was a complete surprise when, for the first time ever, our Facebook page started getting a lot of negative comments. Then a lot of threatening comments. Everyone in our office was freaking out so I tracked down the source. It was a shitpost on Ms. Magazine’s website, authored by their senior editor, no less.

I found that Ms. had a fun little hate segment on their blog called, “We Spleen”. Get it? Don’t feel bad if you didn’t. It’s their clever flip on “I Heart”. Anyway, it’s a page where they trash things they disagree with and then encourage their readers to pile on and troll the hell out of whoever was responsible. Titled Baby Fat-Shaming, they admit right off the bat that “Yes, we know it’s supposed to be funny.” but then postulates that our funny onesie would become a “harbinger of things to come later in a child’s life”. Hilariously, the author spends some time not understanding irony by explaining that “babies’ delightfully chunky baby thighs are some of the most lovable things in the world!” Mm-hm and duh. In the end she asks her readers if she’s “taking it too seriously.” Which was interesting. Because folks who think something is bullshit (and there were many in the article’s comments) don’t waste their time telling all their friends all about it. Because, well, it’s bullshit. And, to be honest, it probably would have quietly blown over in a week if we didn’t do what we did next.

On the left, the Ms. Magazine article. Upper right, the Senior Editor’s Facebook post promoting it to her troll army. Bottom right, our response and her request to divert our donation to her magazine rather than the non-profit created by Ms. Magazine.

Put yourself in our shoes. What would you have done? We weren’t going to take the onesie down. Even if we took it off our website, we were selling to boutiques around the world and “I Hate My Thighs” was a favorite among them and customers who’d already purchased it. So the design would still exist in the world. Besides, we thought the author’s assessment, and her minions’ opinions, were not only wrong, but designed to intentionally stir up trouble. So that ruled out an apology, too. Fuck that.

That leaves defending yourself. But how, when you don’t really feel like you have to? The author herself actually gave us the way forward when she opened it up to her readers. We’d do the same thing. But not the way they’d ever expect us to. Here’s a step-by-step guide to how we fought back.

Step 1. Take a Deep Breath and Be Realistic.

C’mon. It’s the tiniest of companies selling the nichiest of products to an even nichier audience against an historic publication with a fervent audience. It was stupid to think we’d ever “win” anything. And what was winning anyway? That’s the first question you need to ask yourself. What’s in it for YOU? What would make it worth it? Can you strengthen customer loyalty? Can you make money from this? Can you get a lot of exposure? Free press? We decided on all of the above and made a plan to push the conversation in that direction.

Step 2. Turn the Tables.

Near the end of the article, the author took a small break from hating on our “I Hate My Thighs” onesie to muse about how much better it would have been if it said, “I Love My Thighs”.  If you remember, we had done that two years earlier with “Love Me for My Leg Rolls”, which is on brand, funny. So we brought it out of retirement. As much as she had conjured up an affront to women from our irony, we manufactured a challenge out of her criticism. In about three hours we implemented a popularity contest between “I Hate My Thighs” and “Love Me for My Leg Rolls” on wrybaby.com. After all, Ms. had suggested an alternative. We’d let consumers use their dollars to decide which graphic should remain, and we would donate all proceeds to the Ms. Foundation for Women. We even had the balls to call the whole thing “The Ms. Magazine Challenge”. Hahaha. And to be honest, this is why it took off internationally. We made a contest out of controversy and the press LOVED IT.

Step 3. Protect Your Core.

 At this time, Wrybaby was about 70% wholesale with boutiques all over the world. So we called every store that stocked “I Hate My Thighs” to explain what happened and what we were going to do. We told them it would probably get messy and if they wanted to avoid the drama, they could exchange their “I Hate My Thighs” onesies and we’d pay for the shipping. I don’t know what we were expecting, but it sure wasn’t 100% support. Heck, more than a few stores even put them in their front windows instead of taking them off the floor. I love our boutiques. 

Step 4. Punch Your Bully in the Throat When They Think They’ve Won.

Once the challenge was all set up on wrybaby.com and the stores were notified, we hit back. Hard. Oh, not on our socials where we’d hopefully garner some support. Like I said before, people who support you, will. And plenty did. But not as vociferously and viscerally as the people piling on the hate. Which is totally understandable, because who’s got time to throw a ton of energy into fighting a ton of crazy people for a small funny onesie company you happen to like? Our strategy was to catch the hate early and attack it at the source. So we hit back in the Ms. Magazine article’s comments. That way, we’d have a permanent record of OUR narrative to fall back on if need be. You’ll see what I mean in Step 6. I still think our response was appropriately shitty at the top and hilariously enthusiastic at the end when we flipped the script. Believe me, it was so hard to take the emotion out and leave all the spite in.

This was our giant home page graphic announcing our Ms. Magazine challenge. A lot of articles, like this quote from Redbook, claimed that this was all some kind of PR stunt that we orchestrated. Which says a lot to validate our response. Once it was on the Today Show, publications everywhere started holding their own polls to see which onesie people preferred. My favorite was on PopSugar’s website where you checked a box to vote and there was only one reply under it that said, “Where’s the box marked, “Who Cares?” My sentiment exactly.

Step 5. Stay in the Fight.

This kind of thing is both emotionally and physically exhausting. But it’s also oddly exhilarating. We kept our eyes on the article comments as well as on the response to our Ms. Magazine Challenge, while our hands were busy responding to social media comments. We were replying to EVERYTHING and EVERYONE directing them to our onesie challenge on wrybaby.com. We were posting to our followers to enlist their help. We launched carefully crafted emails to our giant list. Eventually, as the story was picked up everywhere, we had to cover all that ground, too. We threw everything at the challenge.

Step 6. Avoid Traps While Capitalizing on Mistakes.

Things quickly escalated to the point where we started getting calls from radio stations across the country. One producer wanted us to go on-air with a child psychologist. Um. No. Hahaha. Pick your battles, friends. Speaking of which, we apparently irked Ms.’ Senior Editor because she sought the last word at the end of day one with a snarky comment to her article requesting we send the challenge donations to Ms. Magazine itself instead a non-profit. How bizarre is that? Why would the Senior Editor of Ms. Magazine publicly divert donations away from the non-profit foundation they originally created? So we called her out on it in the comments. Hahahaha! She later replied at length, clearly exasperated at finding herself on the ropes in the fight she herself started.

In regards to Step 6, I’m sure the author never thought she’d be defending herself to her own shitpost comments section. Hahaha

Step 7. Record Everything and Promote Your Vindication.

Eventually we stopped getting calls from local radio shows and started showing up on the Today Show, the Chicago Tribune, E online, MSN Lifestyle, UK’s Daily Mail, Comedy Central, Redbook, Cosmo… so many places! We promoted the exposure that was in our favor while directing everything to the onesie challenge. Hell, we were only an office of three people, so it was all we could do to manage this shitshow AND run our business. Despite the chaos, I recorded, snapshotted, and saved as much as I could. I felt like, when it was all said and done, it’d be helpful to have some proof that what happened, actually happened (I get to that at the end).

Step 8. Follow Through.

Look, enough is enough and we had a business to run. A week after all this started we announced the results of the Ms. Magazine challenge. Again, in the original article’s comment section. We recapped our narrative of the incident before declaring “Love Me For My Leg Rolls” the winner with 71% of the sales. And, true to our word, we retired not the offending onesie, but the ironic onesie – “I Hate My Thighs”. (Truth be told, we actually sold out of them). Then we followed through with our insistence on donating to the Ms. Foundation and reminded the senior editor and her readers what their mission was before thanking them all for the opportunity to engage with them. See? That’s how to be shitty and classy at the same time.

Our last word on the subject was somehow both positive and full of bile. The senior editor later responded with a seething checklist of “facts” about how we misrepresented her shitty article but by that time no one was really paying attention anymore.

So what happened in the end? Well, it didn’t wrap up as tidily as our onesie challenge. Even when the story eventually died out, wrybaby kept getting hassled by crazy people on Facebook for about a year and a half. Way longer than we thought. And then, some misguided social justice warrior was triggered by our Super Snapsuits, of all things. Two onesies with capes. One read “I’m Super” on the front, the other read, “Super Cute”. He posted a photo of our Super Snapsuits on display in the NYU Bookstore and falsely claimed that the blue one was marked for “boys” while the other was marked for “girls”. And then he said something like “isn’t it a tragedy that girls have to be just “Super Cute”? First of all, we don’t mark gender on anything. And secondly, doesn’t he know that Super Girl wears blue and red? Ugh. Whatever. By this time, we were honestly too tired to fight it. Besides, it was a single jerk, not an actual publication. We couldn’t forge a monetary or PR reason to fight, so we let it go and endured crazy people’s death threats for another 6 months. It was actually more sad and irritating than disruptive.

Today you can still find dusty old archival posts about our Ms. Magazine experience from publications all over the world. But what’s most interesting is how the original article was preserved at the source. It now boldly declares victory at the top – “UPDATE: Wry Baby has taken its “I Hate My Thighs” snapsuit off its website in response to the uproar caused by the following Ms. Blog post!” All the comments are wiped clean, including those from the folks who supported us and our good fight back. There’s a link now at the end of the article directing you to buy feminist onesies in their own Ms. store. Which is why you need to record this stuff as it’s happening. You may want to use it someday.

And what happened to Wrybaby? Believe it or not, that whole Ms. Magazine shitshow actually didn’t do THAT much in sales despite the crazy exposure. Which is something to consider if you think (or your client thinks) the road to riches could be paved in hate mail. It isn’t. Would I do it again? Hell yes. But in the long run, it’s always best to run your business for the folks who get it and appreciate it. Those good people are your people. They’ll support you longer and recommend you more wholeheartedly than any flighty trend hunter or thrill seeker ever will. So keep those guys happy! That’s what we’re still doing at Wrybaby. And between you and me, I heard they might bring back “I Hate My Thighs” soon. ;-)

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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