Original music by Matt Setter and friend Sean!
Original content by Matt Setter and friend, Sean!
Original music by Matt Setter and friend Sean!
Original content by Matt Setter and friend, Sean!
Hey, this is Pate.
jme:And I'm Jme.
Pate:And we are Motley Zoo Animal Rescue, and this is
jme:Rescue Shit.
Pate:Beep.
jme:In this episode, we are going to talk about Motley Zoo's merchandise, which is our Go ahead.
Pate:Our brand.
jme:Yes. Our brand Motley Zoo's brand. We were cool with branding before being a brand was even cool. Obviously Motley Zoo has some pretty unique branding and we really like to play on the music theme and have some fun with the designs. There's some interesting things about our merchandise so we just wanted to talk to you about it today and share with you some of the fun. Our branding started with my husband Bryan, who is also on the board. He was a co-founder of Motley Zoo with me, and he is the genius behind the aesthetic of Motley Zoo. He started with the. Uh, Motley Crew, Dr. Feelgood logo. Mm-hmm. and he adapted it to have a dog on one end and a cat on the other instead of skulls. And that was the original Motley Zoo. We call it the classic logo, and that is what drew Pate in initially.
Pate:Mm-hmm, it did.
jme:She saw that. And so, yeah, my husband, thankfully, is a really amazing artist and that set us apart and set us ahead in terms of our branding. And from there we took the zoo part and I envisioned zebra print. Right animal print, zebra print. And so zebra print is our thing. And besides like orange, bright orange, bright green, and purple, kind of those really vibrant colors, are black and white, zebra or silver and gray, zebra, those are the things that we pair with it to kind of make sure everybody knows it's Motley Zoo. And that includes our cars.
Pate:Right.
jme:Why don't you talk about that?
Pate:We were fortunate to actually win our first Motley Zoo vehicle, which was the Highlander. This was back when Toyota was doing the
jme:100 Cars For Good.
Pate:Correct. And we just really needed a vehicle- you did for sure.
jme:Yeah. The brakes kept failing and I mean, I guess the car that I had, they didn't design it properly. And I mean, I drive like I have animals in the back cuz I always do have animals in the back.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:So I'm not a super hard breaker. But anyways, my car was really kind of kaput, we couldn't afford to get another one because I wasn't paid. I was doing this full-time, unpaid and we really just couldn't afford a car. So it was very important that we win a car. I would say too, we needed to know the community was behind us.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:Like we were going through a period where we were a little worried about community engagement and support. And it was kind of like, if we can get the community behind us for this, then that's great and if we can't rally people, I don't know, we might need to rethink this whole being a charity thing. But they'd done this contest for a few years and we'd watched and waited and finally we were able to apply and we sent in a short video. And back then, man, doing videos was hard.
Pate:Yeah.
jme:It, it was very difficult.
Pate:It wasn't like your quick on the phone thing.
jme:Oh gosh, no. It was so hard. So we sent in a quick video and out of 3000 charities, they accepted us.
Pate:Right.
jme:And that was really a big deal. And every day for a hundred days, five charities would go up against each other.
Pate:Yeah. Competing.
jme:And when we looked at who was winning anytime it was an animal organization, it won. It won over everything else, which was a little surprising. But when we found out on our day that we were one of two other animal organizations that day, I literally fell outta my chair and was like, why???
Pate:Do we have to compete against another animal organization?
jme:Yes. So we had to compete against two other animal organizations.
Pate:One was a sanctuary.
jme:Yes. And we actually ended up becoming friends with her because of that. We had a month to prepare.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:We. pounded the pavement. I made stickers for people to put on their calendars. We went to the dog park, we went everywhere. And I don't think there was anyone in Redmond that didn't know about this contest. It was hard because we really had to rely on people to vote. And if they didn't vote, then it didn't count.
Pate:Right. And it was pretty, it was a close, it was a close, close match.
jme:No.
Pate:What are you talking about? It was...
jme:We had 40% of the vote.
Pate:Really?
jme:Yeah.
Pate:Huh? Okay.
jme:I remember sitting on the couch that night watching the results come in. Refreshing, refreshing, refreshing. And what worked for us in this instance, particularly for the people who didn't know us, was our branding.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:I mean, you know, people chose us because we were Motley Zoo.
Pate:Right.
jme:And so we did win and sorry to the sanctuary and the big cat place that didn't win, but the clock struck nine and we were in the lead, and Bryan and I just looked at each other and he's like, I think we just won. I think we won the car. And I was like, I think we did too. And that was one of the really big triumphs of our early days. That was in 2012.
Pate:Mm.
jme:And so it was a 2013 Highlander. And why don't you tell everybody about the fun that we had with...
Pate:The wrap?
jme:The puppies.
Pate:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was after we had won that we got a call from our friend in Bellingham who said that they had a pregnant Chocolate Lab. And at the time they didn't tell me that this was a very cat aggressive, Chocolate lab until after I got her home. Needless to say, I know I didn't either until she got home and I had three cats. And needless to say, she learned not to be cat aggressive and actually ended up being adopted to a family that had a cat.
jme:Oh, good for you.
Pate:Because we won from Toyota, we decided to name her Toyota and her babies were named after different vehicles. And it was a very, very long, labor for her. I felt so bad for her. It was her first litter. She was scared. She didn't understand what was happening to her and so we bonded. She's a good girl and...
jme:She had a lot of puppies too.
Pate:She had 11 babies. She had five chocolates, and then she had a very hard time with the middle child who happened to be a yellow lab that we named Highlander. So it was five chocolates, little Highlander, and then five more chocolates.
jme:So we designed a cool wrap.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:For the car. And we thanked Toyota on the wrap and we put baby Highlander on the wrap because he was unique. He was different from all the others. Sadly, he ended up being special...
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:In a health way.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:A health condition way and he passed.
Pate:Yeah, he passed away when he was three months.
jme:So he is immortalized on our car. We didn't wanna change it at that point. We thought it would honor him.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:But Toyota got a kick out of us naming the animals after the cars. And they thought that was really funny. So they sent us a letter and...
Pate:When we picked up the car, we had Toyota, the dog with us to pick up the Toyota Highlander.
jme:Yes, yes. And one of the newspapers was there. It was really fun and it was wrapped with a big red bow, which was very exciting.
Pate:I don't remember that.
jme:Yeah, it's black too. Underneath our wrap, which is zebra striped and the people who did the wrap, they were very excited about doing it, but they also said it was the most difficult car that they'd ever done cuz they had to make the...
Pate:Zebra stripes match.
jme:Stripes match up on the bumper and all that stuff.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:But they did a really great job with it. I think the next design that we came up with was the ACDC one, where it's just MZAR with the bolt in between. Yeah.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:That one I really like a lot.
Pate:That was a really good one, except it wasn't that big of a seller.
jme:No, it didn't sell very well.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:And I really thought it would.
Pate:No. Yeah.
jme:But I still like that one.
Pate:It's nice and simple to the point.
jme:Yeah. I don't know. I was surprised when it didn't sell very well.
Pate:And Aerosmith. Walk this way.
jme:Yeah. We had an Aerosmith one, which instead of the wheel, right. Wheel and wings, I think it is.
Pate:Yeah. It's got the wings on it for sure.
jme:It's a paw print and wings and I painstakingly drew Motley Zoo in Aerosmith-y like font.
Pate:Maybe you need do it bigger?
jme:Yeah. It wasn't as popular as I thought it would be.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:The Pits Rock was.
Pate:Pits rock. Yeah, Pits Rock, Mispits, Hissfits. Those are our three major ones. And Bryan does designs still every now and then, but we've had other volunteers who are graphically design oriented, step up and start doing their t-shirt designs. So now we've got Bonehemian Rhapsody. We've got Claws and Roses.
jme:Mutt-allica.
Pate:Mutallica, Mutallica. For all the David Bowie fans out there, we have a Ziggy star dog and a kitty star dust design, and they're quite popular. The Ziggy Star dog is a french bulldog and the cat just a cat.
jme:A silver tabby.
Pate:It's a Nebulon. No, I'm joking.
jme:We do have a list of ongoing ideas. And so sometimes our volunteers will pick one of the ones that we already kind of have an idea about.
Pate:Bully Eilish.
jme:Yes. And then they'll execute it. Other times they come up with something on their own. But we always express them too, t his is where we're gonna get super duper picky.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:About the design....
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:And it has to be exactly right for it to be...
Pate:The Motley Zoo branding.
jme:The Motley Zoo branding. More recently, over the pandemic, introduced a new brand of ours, which encompasses a lot more types of designs, and it's called MZ Behind the Seamz, Motley Zoo Designs Behind the Seams. And that came to me when I was thinking of what we want our store to represent. Why are we different? Why buy stuff from us? And it was because there was gonna be an animal behind the seams of each design.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:Literally one of our animals is represented in every design that we sell. And the funds go directly to help support those animals and their vet care. We decided too, when they get adopted, if their bills aren't paid yet, they stay connected to the shirt.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:Because many times we have thousands of dollars worth of vet care and just because they...
Pate:Gerard. Gerard Way.
jme:Just because they got adopted doesn't mean that we actually paid for their vet care with those shirts. So that's why you'll see animals that are on there that, may be already in a home, but we are still technically t icking down the funds for the cost of their care. Remember when I was writing behind the seams and I accidentally made a typo? And so the"mms" in seams became MZ.
Pate:MZ.
jme:And then I was realized it was MZ at the beginning, MZ at the end.
Pate:Uhhuh.
jme:And I was like, oh, that's...
Pate:That's perfect!
jme:Genius. It was accidental genius, which is a lot of our successes. Accidental genius. So behind the seams is S E A M Z.com.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:In doing this store,"mz behind the seams", we decided that the Motley Zoo branded stuff, the stuff that we're really, really picky about, and the artists have to understand and be willing to work with us on hearing our input and all that, t hat we would also have a more free line. So we call that the Black Label Line.
Pate:That's the MZ...
jme:The Motley Zoo Black Label. And those are specific. Motley Zoo designs and they're, music themed, band oriented, whatever. But then the rest of the designs can be much more loosely based, more animal themed, rescue based, adoption based. And so they're not Motley Zoo specific brands. It's animal loving, just animal support ideas and the volunteers, could come up with whatever they want there.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:And during the pandemic we had to make a pivot. So let's talk about what we did to get this brand going.
Pate:We had to consider that especially with the pandemic, everyone working from home, our daycare model was not working.
jme:No. Yeah. Everybody stopped coming to daycare.
Pate:Yeah. People stopped going to daycare. People stopped leaving their houses. But rescue did not stop. Some shelters actually stopped during the Covid pandemic. We never did.
jme:No.
Pate:We took in animals, we took in a lot of animals. We still did our adoptions. And we still had to pay for all these special needs that we were still getting, in addition to just your normal vet care.
jme:So we have different categories for our shirts, and of course there's the Black Label and then there's, Pacific Northwest focused or cat focused or whatever. And then there's the Litter Box. Why don't you tell people what the Litter Box is?
Pate:Well, it's kind of like Rescue Shit. It's censored. It's our more, I wouldn't say our risky designs.
jme:No.
Pate:But it's just for mature audiences...
jme:Not safe for work, or children, potentially... not vulgar, but just maybe using some...
Pate:You know, insinuations.
jme:Yeah, like the one that Fern did with the yoga dog licking its own butt. It's actually really cute and funny, but you know, it's a dog licking its butt. So...
Pate:Yeah. And your six year old doesn't need to go to school with that.
jme:No, that's probably not a good idea for that.
Pate:We're always looking for design ideas, designers.
jme:Well, even if you just have the idea for the words...
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:Or the concept, you can't draw it yourself. Even that helps.
Pate:Yeah, definitely. And it all goes to the animals. So if you have an idea, definitely reach out. We would love to see if we can put it on a shirt and help out more animals that way.
jme:Each of the guest artists have their own categories and they do get a small royalty. Most of them tell us to just donate it and they don't really take it, but... We have one girl that lived in Brazil.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:And she was communicating with us. And she did the Shine...
Pate:Shinedog...
jme:Shinedog and Shinemeown designs with our guidance.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:She said, I love your stuff. I want to do something. And, and so we told her, these are some of the d esigns that we have in our heads that we haven't had time to do. And you know, just beware too, if you pick the Black Label ones, that we're gonna be extra super duper critical. But that's just because it's very particular what we want for Motley Zoo. But if we use your design, then we will give you a free shirt. Our shirts have even been seen on some celebrities. One of my favorites is Doyle from The Misfits, and he also has his own band and he really likes the Ace of Spays design.
Pate:Yeah.
jme:And he wears like a medium, so it's super tight and he he cuts it so it fits him just right. But yeah, he's a pretty ripped dude.
Pate:To show his muscles.
jme:Yeah. He wears that a lot when he does signings and different interviews. And who else has worn shirts?
Pate:I've seen Barry Kerch, the drummer from Shinedown. He's got a Mispits shirt and I saw it on his social media on Instagram that he was tagging cuz he was working out because he's very, he too is very fit. And, when we go to these events, the concert events and, and things like that, we normally do have some shirts that we do give the band members and we will upon occasion see them....
jme:Yeah, they're really going to town today. When we have a public facing booth where we sell the merch and maybe have an animal or two that we're showing off. And then we're often staged behind the scenes. We bring some of the merch back and put it on the table and we invite the artists to kind of take a look and we'll go get them whatever it is that they are interested in.
Pate:Another thing about our shirts is kind of like how we run our rescue. It's quality, not quantity. And so we wanna have quality product as well. And that's why if anyone knows, Jme has a background in fashion design, so she's gonna be super picky about material and...
jme:The fit.
Pate:Who is it called? Yeah.
jme:Next level.
Pate:Okay. I wanna say NextGen I don't know why I wanna call it Next Gen.
jme:Yeah. So we tested a few shirts and we tried them out to see which ones felt good. And, you know, there are some that are cheap, but they feel like cardboard.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:Like you feel like you're wearing a sandwich board sign. And we didn't want that. So we pick next level and they have some really soft, nice fabric and they wear pretty well.
Pate:Yeah.
jme:And for the hoodies, it's really important that they don't pill. I hate when they pill, and so
Pate:Hoodies are really hard.
jme:Yes.
Pate:Like our, our shirts is next level and they've been great, everything like that. But our hoodies, we...
jme:Yeah, it's been hard to find the right hoodies. And we've gone through a few different brands, a few different varieties and Independent Trading is the one that we've settled on, and we really like them. But my only problem with them is that I like my sweatshirts kind of fitted and even
Pate:I like mine baggy.
jme:Well, even the extra small is like humongous.
Pate:Really?
jme:Yes. So it's like for any woman that's small, that wants a relatively fitted hoodie, we don't have that. I would say most people are probably in your camp. So you know, I'm not trying to buy clothes to cater to me, but the ones that we sell for the unisex sizes don't fit me. So I'm always on the quest for new good blanks that have the full range of sizes, including the women's kind of fitted size. One of the reasons we felt we needed to make a pivot with our revenue stream, was because the screen printing process is really expensive. You have to pay for a screen for each color. You have to pay for a setup fee every time you want to get those shirts done. And so we would try and order, as big of an order as we could, but meanwhile we'd spend a couple thousand dollars on an order. And that's all we...
Pate:The whole order wouldn't, wasn't bought.
jme:We'd make it up over time.
Pate:Right.
jme:Selling that. But we don't sell that many that, you know, we would sell through.
Pate:And then we'd have like a lot of one size sizes and then yeah, just, just selling them and having them. in storage.
jme:Yeah. Stocking the inventory stock became a really big deal. A very expensive process. And yeah. You know, it never would fail that someone would order the one shirt that we just ran out of that size.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:And so we'll have a whole run of shirts, but we'll be missing mediums. And in order to get more, we have to do a bunch more, like a couple dozen to make it cost effective. So we just need a few mediums, but we have to order a ton. So we had talked about this new technology at the time and it was called direct to garment, DTG. And back then in those earlier days the technology wasn't that great.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:The ink didn't stay on.
Pate:Right.
jme:It came off, and the prints weren't that great but I had gotten a sample from Epson of this shirt printed with D T G and it, I don't know, it was some kind of wizard or troll or something, and it was like for a sports team. And I thought, I'm gonna put this through the wash periodically. And so I would just wash it all the time to see if the ink came off.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:And it didn't. By now too, it's like five years later and I'm thinking if this shirt still looks good five years later and I've been washing it on and off, and now the technology would be that much better. this DTG thing might be something we should look into.
Pate:Right. We talked about it a lot just because every time we had an event, like we would go to Paint in the Grass where it's a three day festival in Auburn and we would sell a lot of merchandise during these events.
jme:Yeah, that's a probably our biggest, you know, merch event during the year.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:And, you know, the other thing about keeping all this inventory and stuff is that we had to decide...(space). No, but we had to decide if a design was really good.
Pate:Right, yeah.
jme:Or if it was really gonna sell.
Pate:Right.
jme:So we had to edit ourselves a lot.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:We couldn't just try out a design.
Pate:Right.
jme:We had to commit to it.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:So that was the other thing is that there were lots of things we didn't know maybe would be good sellers, but we couldn't try it because it was too expensive.
Pate:Yeah. It's an expensive commitment. Whereas now with it direct to garment, you can make as many designs as you want and you only print one shirt at a time. There's no setup fee. We're now making like a hundred percent of the proceeds because ink is not that expensive.
jme:And that's also because they're designed by volunteers.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:They're printed by volunteers and the only thing it costs us to do so is the shirt.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:And the ink.
Pate:Right.
jme:And we can put unlimited numbers of designs online and if nobody buys it then we don't have to sell it. Yeah. So we can put even designs we're not really sure about up, and if they sell, they sell. If they don't, they don't. And we only print it when someone orders it. We ended up with one of those economic injury disaster loans we put that towards this technology, which again, Pate and I had talked about it for many, many years.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:It is a significant investment, but we decided it would be a really good one for us. And not only could we print shirts for us, but we could print shirts for other charities.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:For schools.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:For things like that. And we actually do a fair amount of print shop orders, including the bakery across the street.
Pate:Right. Kringles.
jme:Mm-hmm. The printing process is actually really fun. It's literally like an ink jet printer for a t-shirt. So instead of paper going through it, a t-shirt goes through it. And there are some videos online, that you can see on our. Social media and, and Facebook page or whatever about how the shirts print out. But it is really cool to see the shirts printing and it's very exciting. It's tricky sometimes there's a process and you have to learn the process and I've taught a few volunteers how to do it and they do it really well and then they move away.
Pate:Thanks. Dom and Fern.
jme:Well, and Anya.
Pate:Oh yeah, Anya, yeah. Yeah. And she designs, yeah. And both actually all three of'em design shirts for us as well.
jme:Yeah. They all design some really cool shirts but sadly they moved away and so that's been hard because, it can be time consuming- but we're not selling such huge volumes that I'm constantly printing t-shirts, but it's...
Pate:But we should.
jme:Really, we should be. There is no reason why we shouldn't be selling more shirts. However, what it really comes down to is paying for advertising on Facebook, and we don't do that.
Pate:Word of mouth people. Word of mouth.
jme:Yeah. So spread the word. Check it out. Oh, and we were on Animal Cribs once,(oh, yeah) years... And that was, it was Pits Rock, right?
Pate:No. No pits rock was on Villas vo, how do you say that?
jme:Yes. Pit rocks. It Pits and Paroles.
Pate:Yeah.
jme:One of our volunteers went to the shelter in New Orleans and gave some shirts away. And so every once in a while watching Pits and Paroles, we'll see the Pits Rock design on some of the workers there. But no, Animal Cribs is a show where they redo people's houses and they. make their houses more pet friendly, and then when they're there, they'll find a shelter or a rescue to help support. And so the show came in and redid our cat lounge at the time in our old building, and they made it cool. They made it look like a club. So we had all these, you know, posters on the walls...
Pate:Well, it was the Showbox.
jme:Yeah.
Pate:So it did...
jme:So it really did look like a club. And then we had all these shelves and we had musical instruments and we had lots of fun things for, the animals and, even real keyboards and drums and things like that. It was really fun. But every time that show airs, we get a bunch of t-shirt orders.
Pate:Mm-hmm.
jme:Because people see the shirts and all our designs and they go look us up. And then they order their shirts. And actually, when I went to Oregon, I went to a antique shop and I was buying like a big old lumberjack saw like the two person kind.
Pate:Uhhuh. Yeah. Weirdo!
jme:I like old farm tools. And the guy in the store saw the Motley Zoo car and he's like, oh my God, I saw you guys on Animal Cribs. He's like, it was you. And I was like, yeah. So it was kind of funny that they recognized me from the show.
Pate:A hundred percent of the proceeds of our T-shirts go to the animals. And every t-shirt has an animal that it represents in our rescue, either past or previous. And previous I mean current,
jme:Previous and past.
Pate:Current or past. So it's a mixture of Roadies and Rock Stars. And if you see a design that you like, you can go to our webpage at www.motleyzoo.org and go to the"Shop" tab and peruse the many, many different styles and graphics that we have for our shirts.
jme:Yeah, and if you have any ideas yourself, we encourage you to send those over to us. You can also go straight to our store at MZ Behind the Seamz. And Seams is spelled with mz at the end...dot com.
Pate:That's all the time that we have for this episode. This is Pate.
jme:And I'm Jme.
Pate:Rock On.
jme:Rescue. On.