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Seibei!

eric — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 06:59:18 +0000

One of the cool things about being in the indie tee industry has been getting to know a lot of awesome artists and entrepreurs from around the globe. Unlike the corporate world, there’s a real sense of comradery present within the smaller tee brands. We keep in touch via each others’ Flickr and Twitter accounts and will occasionally do tee trades.

One such brand that I’ve personally followed for awhile is Seibei. Chances are, if you know your indie tee brands you’ve probably heard of it already, because the owner and designer, David Murray, has worked his butt off for the last five years making awesome stuff. You can read the full story behind the brand here (I really need to get my story up on my website!).

One thing that makes his stuff so appealing is its unique sense of wackiness, most of which comes straight from its creator. This consistency is really important in branding, and it’s that unique voice that every brand owner needs to find and polish to be successful.

Awesomely, David has just launched a new version of his website, which now features a second language to choose from (Japanese) and a bunch of other cool things to explore. So go check it out!

(David sporting one of his new tees. Gotta love the VHS collection in the back!)

And just for the record, I’m doing this because Seibei and David are both awesome, and not because David’s old site listed me as a partner and drove tons of traffic to Linty Fresh…

Designs up for scoring…

eric — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 23:25:59 +0000

GO VOTE!

And the word of the week is: Candidness

eric — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:22:49 +0000

Today’s English lesson with one of my students was pretty interesting. She recently started working for a Chinese company that finds English-speaking Western teachers (primarily Americans) and hires them to teach seminars here in China. Lately, most of our lessons have consisted of her showing me copies of the emails she’s been sending out to these teachers and asking for my input. Usually the grammar and word choice mistakes are minimal, but there are often suggestions I have regarding the tone of her writing. In English, there’s a tricky balance between formal vs. stuffy and casual vs. sloppy, and it’s not something that can be tuaght overnight.

But one of the bigger problems is actually pretty easy to correct, and it applies to business and branding, so I thought I’d share it here.

As I’ve mentioned before, Chinese culture places a heavy emphasis on “face”. As a result, people put themselves through great pains to create or maintain a reputation that may not necessarily reflect the truth.

A simple example of this is a scenario I experience regularly when shopping. If I walk into a grocery store and ask a random employee where a particular product is, I will get one of two answers. A) It’s over there, or B) We don’t have that item here. The employee will tell me this whether the item is actually over there or not, and whether their store carries it or not. In the entire two years I’ve been here, no one has told me “I don’t know” nor have they proposed a solution to find the answer from someone who does. This puzzled (and infuriated) me when I first got here until I realized what it stemmed from: they were simply saving face. They believe that to say they don’t know would reflect poorly on their abilities as an employee.

This save-face-at-all-costs mentality has a chokehold on businesses here, and a situation that my student mentioned today demonstrated this. Her company has been working tirelessly to organize a seminar here in China taught by foreigners and attended by expatriates. Because of schedule conflicts with one of the professors, the seminar was cancelled. So, under the direction of her boss, my student sent out emails to the attendees explaining that they would be refunded due to the class being… “full”. A lie.

Why lie? Because a cancellation, in this company’s imagination, would look bad to the attendees, while a “full” class would create the illusion of high demand.

Of course, this company forgets that it is dealing with Westerners, who view this matter from the exact opposite angle. I encouraged my student to think about the consequences of this lie, and how it would affect the business down the line. Eventually, attendees would talk, and would find out about the cancellation, and realize the company had lied. And when us Westerners are lied to, it pisses us off. We consider it a breach of trust, a personal affront, and are wary to proceed any further with the relationship.

So if you own a company or are thinking of starting one up, know the concept of CANDIDNESS and make it a pillar in your enterprise.

Sure, we’d all like things to go smoothly 100% of the time, but the fact is that there are too many variables sometimes, and people make mistakes. If and when that happens, be candid about it. If the problem can be fixed, propose a solution, implement it, and move on. Sure, your customers may be momentarily inconvenienced by your fault, but in the end, their trust will grow, provided they can guarantee you learned from the experience and it won’t happen again.

This concept of candidness and transparency goes beyond how you handle your mistakes, too. It should be reflected in the very persona of your company, which is easiest to maintain if it’s an extension of yourself. If you’re a small startup running things out of an attic space, say it. You won’t scare customers away. In fact, you might actually attract folks looking to support the little guy.

Who isn’t?

eric — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 00:50:44 +0000

I’ve actually been using twitter for a few years, but haven’t been on it much since I’ve been in China. But I’m getting back on the ball. I post designs in progress and crazy foreign stuff that happens to me here. It’s basically the cliff notes of this blog.

Say hi!

Another Non-LF Design

eric — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 01:08:59 +0000

Yawn. Got up late this morning. Slept pretty ok, considering that my bed has barely any padding to cover the metal springs. Anyways, some good news was waiting in my inbox. A design I submitted to Threadless is now in the running and up for voting. If you like it, drop by and vote!

Non-LF Design

eric — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:40:07 +0000

If you follow me on Flickr, you may have seen this piece from my photostream yesterday:

It’s an odd piece for me in the sense that it doesn’t look much like my style, but hey, broading my stylistic horizons is probably a good thing to try once in awhile. It’s abstract, obviously, but not so much so that you can’t make out what’s going on if you take a closer look…

Anyways, it’s up for voting at Design By Humans. If you like it, drop by and vote for it!

Post-Modern Popularity

eric — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:23:32 +0000

Aside from running Linty Fresh and doing the occasional export, each month I spend a few hours teaching English. It’s a common job for Westerners here (probably 90% of the ones I know do it for a living), and the pay is pretty good. In the past, I taught as a substitute at preschools and kindergartens, which was ok, but it had its downsides. For example, kids. I mean, I love the and all, but 2 hours every morning of rambunctious two and three-year-olds can be exhausting.

But the English teaching I do now is pretty cool. I call myself a “Western Culture Tutor”, because my lessons are more than just vocab lists and practice with grammar and tenses. I really encourage my students to analyze and express themselves. These two skills are sorely lacking in the Chinese education system, and most of the folks here will readily admit it. Here, it’s all about memorization and passing tests.

The sad thing is that being able to pass an English test does not necessarily equate to being able to speak it. I’ve met a fair share of English majors here that have difficulting understading basic questions, and a lof of their responses use American English from decades past (eg: “You are a clever man!” instead of “You’re a smart guy!” and “Today the weather is pleasant” instead of “The weather’s nice today”) Occasionally I look through the English textbooks at bookstores here, and it’s kind of horrifying.

So, for my lessons, I stress things like analytical thinking and observation skills. For example, reently I had a student watch “The Truman Show” as it relates to the concept of Reality TV, which doesn’t exist here in China. I had the student then analyze why it doesn’t exist here. It took awhile, but her answer was an eye-opener.

See, Chinese culture, like most of Asia, places a huge emphasis on status and appearance. (The English term “losing face” comes from Chinese) To do anything to shame yourself, your family, or your government is considered an extreme disgrace. Public humiliation is considered one of the worst forms of punishment. So, the idea of appearing candidly on television where all your faults are exposed to the world is not just unappealing to Chinese, it’s terrifying.

The exact opposite is the case in America, where we encourage exhibitionism. The adage “all press is good press” is wound up tightly in our culture. Think YouTube. So many of these internet sensations we’ve seen in the past few years are just normal people doing silly things that we hope we’d never get caught doing. (1, 2, 3, 1, 4, 5) But we can’t look away. And interestingly, it’s our obsession with this second-hand embarrasment that sends them on to fame and fortune. Whatever shame they may have felt initially from finally realizing we were all laughing AT and not WITH them was quickly replaced by the thrill of a few million iTunes sales and guest appearances on late night talk shows. Who’s laughing now?

Pretty interesting how cultures can be so different.

Ah, China.

eric — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 09:44:59 +0000

I just can’t get a break this week. So many things have been going wrong. The latest was waiting for me in my inbox this morning. The magazine I just started doing comics for rejected my latest submission. See if you can figure out why:

Life in the Middle 02 – “The Maddening Mattress”

Now, as a westerner that has never been to China (and I’d imagine that’s most of you reading this), let me first explain a few things about this place. Firstly, as I’ve mentioned numerous times before, this is a great place to live. The Chinese people are generally very hospitable and kind, and especially so to foreigners. But there are certain things about the mindset here that are really tough getting used to. And this comic, for me, was a way to get some of that off my chest and entertain the expat population here.

Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. As I explained a couple posts back, the majority of readers are English-speaking Chinese. So the humor is more or less lost, since the things I’m griping about are completely ordinary to them. So it just comes accross as criticism.

So before I even send these things off to the editors, I sit down with a few close friends (that are local Chinese), and we discuss it. Is it offensive? Should I not be talking about these subjects?

For this comic, I had three big concerns. The first was my depiction of the Chinese girl. As you can see in the comic, she looks very stereotypiclaly Chinese. Let me be clear: In all my ethnic sensitivity, I would have NEVER, ever depicted an Asian person this way before coming to China. In America, we’re pretty sensitive to political correctness. But when I got here, I found out pretty quick that they depict themselves the exact same way in cartoons. In fact, Chinese often refer to themselves themselves as “黄人“ (pronounced huángrén, meaning “yellow people”.) So I followed their lead and went for the stereotype. My Chinese friends had no problems with it, and couldn’t figure out why I even asked about it.

My second concern was the side joke about the “Injustice” mattress. I put that in there because it’s something a lot of people complain about here. Like anywhere else, there’s a pretty big divide between the upper and lower classes, but here, it’s virtually impossible to cross that divide. Realizing that the ones that read this comic are probably more educated, and thus closer to that upper eschelon, I wasn’t sure if they’d pick up on it. Half of the friends I showed it to got the joke, and the others had to have it explained to them, but the reaction was unanimous – leave it in!

The third point was the second to the last frame, with the story behind the waterbed. Here’s why I put it in: 99% of the Chinese movies I have seen are tragedies. They being sad, they end sad, they’re sad in the middle. People love them. It seems like a movie doesn’t even need a storyline, so long as it can make people cry, it’s a huge success. So I figured I’d exploit this a bit for my comic. Of course, my fear was that I’d strike the wrong nerve. The fact is that there IS a lot of sad stuff that has happened here, and making any suggestions that it’s due to the *powers that be* isn’t usually a good move. Again, my friends didn’t seem to mind and in fact found it to be strangely hilarious. So, with their approval, I sent it off to the editors.

The email I got back included this gem:

…It’s brilliant, but I personally want to avoid the suggestion of kidnapping and rape.

Huh?! Were we even reading the same comic?

In all fairness, the guys that run this mag are very cool and reasonable people. However, they aren’t publishing a magazine in America. Things are so, so, so different here.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Steal This Idea

eric — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:07:34 +0000

As I’ve written previously on this blog, being in China has broadened/sharpened my perspectives on a lot of things. One has to do with branding, which China, on the whole, has loads to learn about. The key to good branding is VALUE. Value perceived by the customer, and value cultivated by the brander. Both parts must exist for a brand to succeed.

There are loads of businesses here in China, but it seems that less than 5% understand much about branding. They might snag a picture of a Brad Pitt or Scarlett Johansen to promote their latte, but inevitably there’s a coffee shop accross the street doing the same thing, serving the same latte (and it isn’t very good). In the end, someone looking to buy a cup of joe is just going to go to whichever place doesn’t require crossing the street. The idea of doing something different totally escapes these businesses. So I started thinking, ‘What are we, as western companies/businesses/brands doing wrong?’

I recently watched the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, and if you haven’t seen it, you should. It speaks extensively on the topic of “perceived” versus “actual” value. Although the factuality of the documentary is in some dispute, the notion is worth attention: an up-and-coming amateur street artist (with little artistic talent or vision) piggy-backs on the success and styles of his precedents, manages to generate a lot of buzz, opens a gallery, and launches himself into artistic famedom, selling prints for tens of thou$ands. It’s the emperor’s new clothes, but this time the emperor paints and wheatpastes.

Point being, popular opinion is a strong force. We like our individuality and separateness, so long as we can find like-mindedly individual and separate people to read our tweets. It’s the paradoxical epitome of our modern culture.

Well, it worked for this guy. (His name is Thierry Guetta, by the way) And it’s working for a lot of the brands out there now. However criticized by the ones who only found recognition through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, the shortcut method CAN and DOES work.

But there’s a saturation point. It’s that point where people start realizing that all these brands, however different, are really all the same in their brand-ed-ness. What comes next? Same thing that always happens when people figure out they’ve been had. A revolution.

So I was thinking about all of this the other day, this notion of brand revolt, and I recalled a conversation I had with a friend awihle back. We imagined a brand that went to the extreme. A brand that was so heavy-handed that it would serve as its own critic. A brand like this would have no appeal beyond its own claim of value. No pretty design, no artistic merit, no pretty cataloges. Simply an entity with a high price tag. An anti-brand.

I think it could just work.

Drawing comics in China

eric — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:34:43 +0000

So back in January a friend of mine from the states came out to visit, and we decided to try snowboarding here in China. Amazingly, it was actually pretty awesome, although the snowpark was litterally in the middle of this old Chinese village on the outskirts that had happened to have a mountain. The snow was man-made so it was a bit strange to look down from the peak and be surrounded by fields and farmers and little brick buildings with locals selling rip-off Burton gloves and Salomon boards. But it was cool. You get used to things being out of the ordinary after awhile here.

Anyways, I got a cold before going snowboarding, and the ice and snow only made it worse, so that by the time I finally got back home I was so bad I could barely get out of bed. I scheduled a doctor appointment and the prognosis was almost immediate – pneumonia. I was given meds and told not to go outside for a couple weeks.

Being pent up that long was kind of nice because I was really tired and needed a break from everything for awhile, but I got restless pretty quick. I started sketching, writing, and brainstorming my ideas. One of those sketches was this cartoon kid turning into a muscular superhero type and throwing a cab into a river. The idea was sparked by a recent experience I had. After coming back from another city by train, a bunch of cabbies tried to rip me off for a ride back to my house. They thought I wouldn’t know better. Then I started thinking, “I wonder how many other foreigners have been through this same thing here?” From the ones I know, A LOT.

So that gave me an idea: why not make a comic strip about my life here? There are so many stories that I’ve got from my two years here, and many of them are the same ones shared by other expats in China. So I put together a rough draft and sent it off to the largest foreign-read magazine in my city.

A few days later they replied – they liked it! They asked if I could do it as a monthly feature and wanted me to come in and meet them in person. I was stoked, and in a few days I’d met the publishers, had agreed on a fee, and quickly put together a high-resolution final draft for printing. This included translating it into Chinese, since the bilingual nature of the magazine is part of their publishing agreement. After sending that in, they replied: Eric, we love your comic, but the Chinese don’t. Call us.

(see the original comic)

It turns out that 80% of the magazine’s readership is English-speaking Chinese locals, and they were offended with my depiction of them. But the frustrating part was that they wouldn’t say why. They just didn’t like it, and the magazine refused to print it. The publishers were puzzled, and I was too. Weren’t Chinese people aware of all the fraud happening at their local train station?

So I decided to call up one of my local friends here to get a Chinese viewpoint on things. The problem, she explained, was not the fraud being mentioned, but the fact that there were three Chinese cab drivers trying to rip off a foreigner, and no Chinese standing up for the right thing. She explained that locals would feel this was a criticism against the entire population of Chinese, rather than just these few unsavory fellows.

I thought that was oddly sensitive of them, but for a nation that is very concerned with their reputation in foreign arenas, it made sense. I guess. The solution was easy enough: in the last frame, where I turn into a hulk-like monstrosity and chuck a car into the river, just add some locals behind me saying “throw it! throw it!” in Mandarin. Huh.

But the fact that 80% of the readers were Chinese made me want to do something completely different. So why not flip the tables? Instead of criticising the craziness of life here off the bat, why not pick on myself a bit and then slowly shift the focus over time? It seemed like a safer bet. So for the first comic, I made the following strip.

(click to see full image)

When I was done I sent it to my Mom and Dad and their reactions were priceless: “You are going to offend a lot of Americans.” Really? Honestly, if any reader truly fails to see the irony of the character’s sentiments… Well, I don’t know what.

In any case, it’s out there, on magazine stands all over the city, and the next episode comes out in a few days. I truly am living a life in the middle…