Wait really?

They sell this brand at Hispanic supermarkets. This is the equivalent of naming your brand of bread Tee-tee’s. To me it just sounds like subliminal advertising done wrong.

When I attended University, I used to sell knives for this shady pyramid-ish company called Vector. One of the features of their carving knives was the the patented “Double-D blade”. They told us that the blade was intentionally named that way because ‘LoL iT mAkEs YoU tHiNk BoObS sEx SeLLz”. It didn’t help sales. It made selling harder. I made my sales pitch almost exclusively to either women or women and their partners, and naming the blade was awkward at best, and body shaming, sexual aggression at worst.

Subliminal messaging, when done correctly, leave the person thinking about a thing without them knowing why they’re thinking about it. Or at the very least, it leaves them feeling responsible for interpreting something to be sexually when to them it wasn’t intended to be. Like when movie theaters used to splice a single frame advertisement into their movie reels. Using a name that’s also a sex thing is overt: there’s no mistaking that the person intended a double entendre. Frankly, neither is a particularly savory practice. The most honest way to use sex for sales is to just blatantly sell sex.

When selling knives, I stopped naming the blade by name. It made my job more comfortable, and when I felt better about what I was doing, I was a better salesman. It took a little bit longer for me to stop working for the company altogether. As you can imagine, “sLy” product naming wasn’t their only sketch practice.

I went to Brown, so things like this get me excited.

Brown University

I’m not sure what year this was taken, but it’s clearly early last century. The fact that the campus looks the exact same, minus the styles dudes are wearing, it pretty damn amazing. To me.

Not gonna lie, though: I might rock a hat like that were I to ever find one. My partner might not be too happy. :p #brownuniversity