With the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals canceled this spring due to the pandemic, Neon Cowboys, maker of colourful, battery-powered, light-up glow hats, LED cactus earrings and different equipment catering to the celebration crowd, was dealing with a 90 % drop in month-to-month income.
The model wanted to pivot, and quick. Enter the glow face masks, now promoting for $38 on the Orlando, Fla.-based model’s e-commerce web site.
“It’s been loopy with the pandemic determining how we may make one thing the client needed to purchase that may really feel helpful at the moment,” mentioned model chief govt officer Asia Corridor (whose father is L.A. clothier Kevan Corridor). “We thought, perhaps if we are able to make masks that glow, they are going to final by the pandemic to the following pageant season, every time that’s. And prospects have been loving them to a level we weren’t anticipating.”
Corridor received into the hat enterprise in 2014, shortly after faculty, when she reworked 13 plastic-injected ice buckets into her first prototypes. “I used to be attending a number of nation music festivals on the time. I observed everybody was carrying Daisy Dukes, cowboy boots and cropped tops. I beloved the tradition however was protruding as a minority, and needed one thing that represented L.A. and was extra fashionable.”
“I knew neon wire was already in the marketplace, and thought like a neon signal you see to seek out the bar, which is such an emblem in nation music, that may very well be a hat,” she mentioned of the designs (she’s offered 10,000 and counting) which were worn by Kacey Musgraves, on HBO Max’s “Legendary” ballroom tradition competitors present and extra.
The blue and pink face masks use fiberoptic cloth, are USB rechargeable, have a number of mild settings and are washable and water-proof. “We offered out of our preorders,” mentioned Corridor. On Juneteenth, she launched black glow masks, with earnings break up between the Grassroots Legislation Undertaking and Digitalundivided, which presents mentorships for Black and Latino feminine enterprise homeowners. “Final month, through the time of making use of for grants and PPE [personal protective equipment] loans, we truly obtained $100 from them, and it was comforting being seen in that method,” she mentioned. “So we needed to present a second of encouragement to them.”
Corridor can also be seizing the second to work on some neon protest indicators. “A fist with a lasso and rainbow, that may be extra of an artwork piece,” she mentioned. “We’re having conversations with our prospects. There’s a lot to be mentioned within the nation area, and we realized we do have extra of a voice than I believed, particularly amongst Millennials. Neon Cowboys is a model born out of me looking for my identification as an American, and we’ve a substantial LGBTQ following, too. We need to construct a model about what Americana may very well be sooner or later, and try this by mild and attire.”
Neon Cowboys’ glow masks.
Courtesy/Andrew Taylor
