by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Guy Who Doesn’t Own Ed Hardy Anything…
Intrigued by the Ed Hardy wines at his local Whole Foods, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Dan Neil performed exploratory surgery on that insatiable branding machine Christian Audigier. The resulting L.A. Times article is a brilliant and funny study of branding gone wild…
Neil, who has a master’s degree in English, writes about advertising, marketing, and automobiles for the L.A. Times. So, yes, I’m a massive fan. How can you not dig a journalist who comes up with descriptions like these?
“Wine is a cultivated taste of a delicately cultivated product, a source of savored satisfaction and nuance, a living liquid that rewards reflection and restraint. The haute-trash Ed Hardy brand — as near as I can parse it — represents getting wasted in Las Vegas and leaving your $50 trucker hat in the cab on the way to the airport.”
Yes, business writing that’s not boring. Sing it, brother!
Apparently, Neil also shares my distaste for trucker hats, which are the second-worst fashion crime ever perpetrated on the public. (The first being Crocs, which are the aesthetic equivalent of wearing children’s beach toys on your feet.)
I first wrote about Neil last year in “Dan Neil: Your Automotive Word Slut” (which probably got more traffic from people searching “slut” than “Dan Neil”). If Neil keeps writing articles like this, I’ll just have to keep on hyping him.
Christian Audigier? Not so much.
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