@’s by Johnny Cupcakes!!!
Hey there kids, Johnny Destructo here! I had the pleasure of going to NYCC 2011 for Thursday and Friday and it was awwwwwwesome! Now I'm broke and suffering from post-partum depression. I would have loved to go the rest of the days of the con, but alas, NY is waay too expensive for me to spend a whole weekend in a hotel. But even just the first two days felt like an entire weekend, as there's so much to do, so much to see, so many people's odor to be offended by ...it's all a lot to take in.First up, I was lucky enough to take a couple minutes to chitty-chat with Johnny Cupcakes and what do I do? I call him a dick within the first 30 seconds of the interview. And then later I called him out on his pricing. Sigh. My people skills can obviously use some finessing.
JOHNNY DESTRUCTO (JD): Johnny Cupcakes. Awright, sir, what's your real name?
JOHNNY CUPCAKES (JC): Johnny Cüpcakus, but it's pronounced "cupcakes", it's Portuguese.
JD: Oh? Right on. Ok, um..
JC: I'm just kidding! (laughs)
JD: OH YOU DICK! (laughs)
JC: It's Johnny Earl.
JD: I like the other answer better!
JC: Yeah, sometimes I don't tell other people that I'm kidding, so many people think it IS my real name.
JD: I...I feel very foolish. Thank you.
JC: If it WAS my real last name, when I have a family in the future..my daughter would probably be very promiscuous and my son would get hassled at school, so I'm gonna stick to my real last name with is Earl, for now.JD: Did you just make "Asshole" a verb? "Asshole'd"? He'd get asshole'd at school? (Hey reader, gimme a break it was friggin' LOUD in there. Get off my back.)
JC: No, no ...HASSLED. (laughs)
JD: Oh, well, good, then I'm making that up now. It's mine. Before you were doing this for a living, what were your regular jobs?
JC: I've washed dishes, bussed tables, bagged groceries...and I've worked at a record store. But I've always, between those dead-end jobs, I've always tried to figure out a way to try to make a little extra money, whether it's selling lemonade or having yard sales, or selling candy at school, shoveling snow for some extra money. I just wanted to come up with a way to be happy and work for myself. But even those dead-end jobs helped me discover what I don't want to do for the rest of my life. I feel like any job is a stepping stone to something better.
JD: When you were growing up as a small child, what is it that you wanted to be doing? Is this what you wanted to me pursuing?
JC: When I was a child, when I grew up I wanted to be a magician, or James Bond or Pee Wee Herman.
JD: (Laughs) But this is just how it shook out. So the logo is awesome and simplistic but visually catchy. Was the logo first or was the name first? How did it all tie together?
JC: The name was first. I was working at a record shop called Newbury Comics outside of Boston Mass. and since my name's Johnny, every time I went into work people would call me Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Cupcakes, Johnny Come-Lately when I was late for work, and I was getting t-shirts made for this metal hardcore band that I was in at the time and I thought it would be funny to make a completely random shirt that said Johnny Cupcakes on it. I didn't even mean to sell it, I just wore it to work and all of my co-workers and all of the slightly miserable customers that didn't usually make eye contact with anybody started looking up and laughing "what's Johnny Cupcakes? Where can I get one of those shirts? Is it a bakery, is it an adult movie store? I don't know what it is, but I want to get one of those t-shirts."JD: They had no idea what it was, but they still just blindly wanted it??
JC: Yeah, it was just such a random, catchy name, and so many people kept asking that I just started poking fun at pop culture and replacing popular icons with cupcakes. Whether it's a Statue of Liberty holding a cupcake instead of a torch, a plane dropping cupcakes instead of bombs and cupcake crossbones. There were all these tough guys that wore these skull and crossbones shirts and I wanted to make fun of them, so I replaced the skull with a cupcake...guys thought it was funny, girls thought it was cute and it caused a lot of curiousity and word of mouth just kept spreading ....soon enough I was selling them out of the trunk of my rusty car on my lunch-break, and then I took a risk, quit my job and put 110% into Johnny Cupcakes. I've been doing this for about 10 and a half years now, with little to no advertising, no investors, no education just taking risks and learning as I go and I have an amazing team. As I've grown I've been fortunate enough to hire some of my friends, my family and my mom and my sister, my dad and we just have fun. We don't sell to any stores what-so-ever...
JD: Don't you have stores?
JC: We have stores, but we don't sell wholesale to other stores. So we have 1 store in Boston, Mass and 1 store in Hull, Mass, 1 in Los Angeles, CA and we just opened 1 in London, England.JD: That's bad-ass.
JC: And then we have our website where we ship all over the world: johnnycupcakes.com.
JD: Where are you looking to expand to next?
JC: We are looking to do pop-up shops, just temporary stores.
JD: Kind of like Halloween Adventure seasonal shops?
JC: Yeah, just like a quick little excitement and we'll see. We're just taking things as they go, having fun and we're focusing on our limited edition t-shirts and our packaging. As you've noticed a lot of our shirts are packaged in food boxes, even our store is set up like a bakery...they smell like frosting, the shirts are displayed in ovens, refrigerators...we just have fun with it. We trick a LOT of hungry people that come in really upset because we don't have food. The signs in our windows say "No Sugars, No Carbs, No Fat" and we're not lying, it's all fibers! So we're just having fun and trying to do things a little different and I think with any company, when any one starts any project any band, any clothing line, any restaurant...you want to ask yourself "what can I do that hasn't been done before, and how can I do things differently?" It's important to keep reinventing yourself and keep people guessing, keep people on their toes and it's a good exercise. When I'm not busy I like to speak to kids at schools and teach people things that I wish I knew when I first started, and just trying to help everybody out.
JD: Um.....were the shirts ALWAYS $30? JC: Nope, they started off at $8, but I was using really poopy material. Then it grew to $15 to $20, $25, $30, $35..but we started using much better shirts, much better ink, packaging...limited quantities, not "selling out" anywhere, so we had to pay more, plus we have the cost of all the other retail...
JD: Packaging…
JC: Yeah, but we make sure every customer has an experience..we have fun with it and a lot of our customers are collectors and they come back for more ...we have a bakesale section of our website where you can get shirts for cheaper prices, and sometimes we'll throw in a random shirt in people's orders, sometimes we'll throw in a $20 bill, a candy, a trading card, a pack of batteries and doll's head, just little weird things, fun things that give people something to talk about and a reason to come back to johnnycupcakes.com.
JD: Right on! Well, thank you so much for talking to us, it was a pleasure.
JC: Thank YOU. Alright, take care.
JD: Check out Johnny Cupcakes website here!
JD can be found hosting the PopTards Podcast, drawing a weekly webcomic, discussing movies, comics and other flimflam over at www.poptardsgo.com, graphically designing/illustrating for a living, and Booking his Face off over here. Follow his twitter @poptardsgo. His talkback name is PopTard_JD.
Proofs, co-edits & common sense provided by Sleazy G
