The Greg Smith Takedown – Opinion Journalism or Crisis Communications?
Mar 15th
Yesterday, lots of people read the Greg Smith Op-Ed in the New York Times as it got passed around like a Honey Badger video. Smith took apart the business practices at Goldman Sachs, basically painting the investment bank as a the sort of evil, clients-last and profit-first corporation that everyone loves to hate. The only thing he didn’t mention was whether they rub their hands together and laugh maniacally in the derivatives sales meetings.
Today, Scott Mayerowitz, an opinion journalist for the Associated Press, issued a withering takedown of Smith’s piece. Employing the use of third party experts and amusing vignettes about other dramatic departures from employment, he trivialized Smith’s assessment of Goldman Sachs to the point of near absurdity. Smith, who stood tall like a hero less than 24 hours ago, was by the end of Mayerowitz’s piece diminished in stature to a self-aggrandizing and petty man who was slandering his long-term employer to make some money from a book and get a few minutes of fame.
Far be it from me to suggest that any journalist is on the payroll of a Goldman Sachs PR firm, but this piece is a perfect piece of crisis communications. You couldn’t ask for more from a PR flack trying to stave off that Greg Smith-induced $2 Billion drop in market value.
If this piece wasn’t bankrolled, then it’s probably just Scott Mayerowitz being smart enough to hitch his wagon to the hottest viral news story of the day. It’s a great way to sell copy and get eyeballs on your work. (In fairness, he’s not exactly alone in doing so.)
Whatever the case, Goldman Sachs owes Mayerowitz a debt of gratitude. And I hear they have the means to pay.
Who Owns Your Brand Redux: When Fans Go Crazy
Mar 15th
After last night’s post about brand ownership, I came across this:
MASS EFFECT 3 Protests Prove Annie Wilkes Is The Patron Saint of Fandom
Fandom’s worst side comes out as gamers rage against the end of MASS EFFECT 3.
[snip]
See, there’s a group of fans – a very group of fans – who hate the ending of the game. That’ll happen; endings are hard and it’s a rare franchise that sticks the landing. These fans have every right to hate the ending, and to complain about the ending and to bitch and moan. It’s how it works – you sell me this game/movie/book and I get to tell you what I thought of it.
But these fans are taking it another step. They’ve launched a campaign to get BioWare, the makers of the Mass Effect games, to change the ending of the game. They’ve started a Facebook page where they have about 30,000 Likes, they’ve gotten a lot of press from the gaming media and they’ve even set up some donation drive to the Child’s Play charity, which has raised $40,000 so far. Called Retake Mass Effect 3, the goal of this movement is to get BioWare to offer new alternate endings that make them happier.
This is simply retarded. Video game fans clamor and cry for games to be considered art. Well guess what, guys? Art is the result of a vision, and the vision is not yours. It’s the vision of the creators of the game. You don’t have to like that vision, but it is what it is.
Here’s the cold, hard reality: Mass Effect doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the writers and the designers at BioWare. If you don’t like what they did with this story, then feel free to stop consuming their product. But you don’t have the right to demand that they bend to your whims and change the story they wanted to tell because it didn’t make you happy. That’s the ultimate sort of entitled childishness that gives fan communities a bad name.
This isn’t what I meant by allowing consumers to co-own the brand. (And no, I didn’t say the words “co-own” but that’s what I was driving at. I should have said it, because it’s an important concept in this discussion.) The thing is, there are varying degrees of brand co-ownership. If someone wants to make a cool Droid or Apple sticker because they’re a fan of your brand, that’s a good thing. If someone posts copyrighted pictures from your site on Pinterest, but it links back to you and drives traffic and you make money, that’s also a good thing. Co-opting, fair-using, and remixing your product is, in my opinion, a boon. Imitation (and reproduction, to an extent) are the sincerest form of flattery.
If, on the other hand, brand fans (“brans”?) think that they should be able to dictate the strategic or artistic direction of your product lines or organization as a whole, that’s crazy talk. That’s where the line should be drawn.
On another note, all of this reminds me that I don’t yet even own a copy of Mass Effect 3. I bought ME2 on the day it was released. I guess I’m working more and gaming less these days. Next thing you know, people will start accuse me of being a grown up.
Who Owns Your Brand?
Mar 14th
Technically speaking, a “brand” is the intellectual property of the company or organization that owns it. Legally, a company has the right to enforce restrictions on its brand. It can protect its intellectual property from infringement, it can stop people from using the brand name in vain, it can squash grassroots efforts to make use of the brand in merchandise or apps or (insert use here). The question, though, is whether the legal right translates into the right thing to do.
The answer I keep coming up with when I ask myself how brand watchdogs should handle these issues is that they have to be very careful, or they can wind up looking like they’re punishing a good faith effort. It doesn’t always matter who is legally in the right. The marketplace has changed, and customer/member/fan collaboration in branding identity through mashups (Chevy will never forget the nightmare of that initiative) or parody ads, or unofficial apps are all a part of being a corporate entity in a social world. There were probably half a dozen Netflix apps for the Droid before the official one came out. They were all unofficial, and none of them were very good or even streamed content. The best you could do was add things to your queue. But they filled a void while people waited for the real thing, and they didn’t stop people from jumping on the real thing when it arrived.
Google the phrase “Who owns your brand” and read some of the stories on the first page of results. I found this one in particular interesting:
Most advertisers dream of the day their work goes viral. But the latest ad campaign to light up the internet wasn’t created by an advertising company … nor was it commissioned by the client it named.
The situation, while far from common, demonstrates how the lines of brand ownership have blurred in recent years.
“Historically Hardcore,” a series of print ads comparing historical figures to modern celebrities, climbed to the top of social bookmarking sites last week. Most people attributed the work to the Smithsonian Museum, since its name and logo appeared on each ad. In reality, the ads were the creation of students Jenny Burrows and Matthew Kappler.
“We got an assignment from a teacher, telling us to do print advertisements for the Smithsonian Museums that appealed to teenagers and college students,” Burrows wrote in an email on March 21. “They’ve been online since 2009, and haven’t gotten any response until this past week.”
No one knows why the ads went viral two years later. But after getting a call from a Washington D.C. news anchor, Burrows decided to tell the Smithsonian that she was the designer. The Museum replied not with enthusiasm, but with a demand to remove its name and logo from all instances of the ads.
In my opinion, the Smithsonian botched that, badly. They chose to issue a cease and desist order instead of co-opting the work. And the work was good. And funny:
I also tend to agree with this assessment of who owns a brand, at least in the “who imbues a brand with value” sense of the word:
We marketers like to think that social media is primarily a set of tools for our marketing purposes, but in reality, social media is also a strong set of tools our consumers use to share and influence opinion about our brand. Our consumers now have “the channel of me.” Consumers’ opinions now create the “reality” of the brand — if enough consumers say negative things about your brand, your brand loses its credibility, and (thankfully) vice versa.
There are two main ways we can react to this change: we can fight it or accept it. I highly recommend accepting it. If we fight to retain control of our brands, we are likely to hold on so tight that we suffocate the flexibility and outward-looking awareness our brand needs for survival.
On the other hand, if we can accept the change and step into our consumers’ “channel of me,” we can gather valuable direction for the success of our brand. They can (and will!) tell us how they expect our products to work, and what they expect from our brand. When we let go of the notion that we own our brand, we have an incredible opportunity to fashion the brand that our consumers want.
If you’re in the position of protecting your brand from customers or fans using it without your permission, tread lightly. You have every right to make sure that it doesn’t infringe on your intellectual property rights in a way that is damaging. From your perspective, they may be trampling all over a name and reputation you’ve worked hard to build, but to most people, they’re just fans trying to create something built on the foundation of your good name. That makes them good guys by default in the eyes of their peers, and if you play “hands off our brand!” then you become the bad guy.
Enforcement actions on those playing fast and loose with your brand may be legally sound, but you will lose big in the realm of public perception. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what your brand is built on in the first place?
The Incredible Shrinking Steve
Mar 14th
As any fat person can tell you, taking a profile picture for your Facebook or Twitter account is daunting. You have to throw so many away. You want the one that makes you look just ever-so-slightly less fat. And you tend to update often, being unsatisfied with what you had before. (If you’re like me, and hate seeing yourself in pictures anyway, it’s even worse.)
So, I was going through some profile pictures I took over the last month, and I had an idea. I decided to make this:
Now, these are just camera phone pictures. That I took of myself. And I’m guestimating at the weights, because I haven’t been keeping a journal or anything (though I should have – I need to find a good tracking site for weight loss.) Also, it is not an intentional psychological trick that my head is closer to the camera in the first (looking larger) and further away in the last (looking smaller). I just picked the pictures that seemed to be in generally the same position, so a comparison could be made.
When I put these side by side, I can see it. I am at the phase of weight loss when people start to really compliment you. It’s a good place – 21 pounds lost, and about 4 inches off my waist – but I still look at myself and see how far I have to go. So it’s helpful to look at myself and see how far I’ve come. And if there’s one place in particular that I am glad I’m slimming out, it’s my face. I’m tired of being a fat-head.
What I don’t have is a picture of me at 304lbs., which is where I started the year. (For that matter, I don’t have a picture of me at 312lbs., which is where I was at the end of 2008, and the most I ever weighed.) I do have a nice collection of pictures of me just being fat, though. Like this:
Or this:
Or even this, where it appears that I am dangerously close to transmogrifying into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (notice how the camera can’t even focus because I’m so globular):
Once, to put things into context, I made another comparison image. Years ago. Because for the last decade I’ve been constantly freaking fat, but I didn’t always used to be:
Oh, the Huge Manatee!!
Granted, I don’t want to be that skinny anymore. After high school I was healthier:
And even in college, not so bad, despite that tent of a hideous shirt I was wearing:
And actually, that last picture is right around my goal weight. Around 240. That picture was taken in Europe, in the Fall of 1999, and it was a very good time. I ate like a horse, but I hiked the world, and I had the stamina to do it. I wasn’t carrying around an extra 60 lbs or so, which is how I started the year this year.
The Primal Blueprint has been good to me. I’ve been at it just a couple days shy of two months, and it’s not getting harder. If I knocked out the few drinks I have on the weekends, I’d probably lose weight even faster. But slow and steady, right?
To be honest, I never post pictures of myself. Certainly not the unflattering ones. The only reason I’m doing it now is because I’m convinced that I will not be that guy anymore. I’m not going back to the fatty fatterson club. Life is too enjoyable to ruin it by eating the wrong things, laying around, and feeling and looking like crap.
275 lbs. is the next major milestone. I’m hoping I can hit it by April.
To Protect and Serve – Or To Target and Collect?
Mar 13th
Allow me, if you will, a small rant.
The age-old police motto that we all know is, “To Protect and Serve.” I want to believe that this is the motive of our police forces. Sadly, their actions speak louder than their sloganeering does.
I can think of one time in my life – precisely one – when a police officer actually protected me from danger. I was driving with a friend in Irving, Texas, near the old Texas Stadium, and a group of guys on motorcycles decided to start causing trouble with us. After one of them cut us off, and my friend (a motorcyclist himself) kept his pickup close to the rear of the bike in front, they began to surround the truck. They started hitting the doors and the windows while the guy in front kept trying to slow us down to force us to pull off the road. There were four of them and two of us, and while we were bigger than they were, I have no illusions that things would have gone well for us. Just as I was about to slam the passenger door into the assailant on my right, a police cruiser fired up its lights and sirens and three of the bikers sped off while the cop chased the other one down. I was relieved that we didn’t have to resort to violence to defend ourselves, because the odds were that we would do everything we could to keep from being pulled off onto the shoulder. The altercation had taken place as 60MPH, and I really didn’t want to add vehicular manslaughter to my record at 18 years of age.
It’s been 16 years since that happened, and I can’t think of a single thing a police officer has done for me or my family that has actually assisted us. Even when Jamie’s mom was murdered, we had to tell the police where to look for her body, we had to find the dental records, and we had to prod the investigation along. Eventually, they did find the perps through ATM camera footage, and I’m grateful for that. But that was detective work. The guys on the case were not beat cops, riding around in cruisers, harassing the innocent.
Am I being too harsh? Maybe. It’s a hallmark of American Conservatism to honor those in uniform, whether military, firefighters, or police. As a civic virtue, I think you could do a lot worse. But harassing the innocent is hardly an overstatement. Police forces are deployed to collect revenue for their municipalities, counties, and states. From what I see, this is their primary job responsibility. If you’re reading this and you haven’t ever gotten a ticket – for anything – you’re in the minority. I’ve only personally ever gotten one speeding ticket in my life, but that’s not the only sort of ticket out there.
Yesterday, for example, After a really long day at work, I walked out to my car to find a ticket from the Fairfax Police Department on the windshield. The offense? I had expired stickers on my VA license plate. Not expired by months, mind you. They were not even two weeks late. And I have, in fact, already renewed my registration. I just didn’t get a chance to put the stickers on yet.
Now, if a police officer had stopped me, I could have showed them my temporary registration letter. It’s in my car. Or, if a police officer had used the laptop that I see in every cruiser – which is used to do things like search DMV records – they could have just seen that my registration was up to date. But that didn’t happen either. Instead, they were trolling around in the bottom floor of a parking garage looking for cars they could ticket. That’s right – I was parked in the sub-floor of a dark garage, and they found my car and ticketed it. I can see the argument that a police cruiser that gets blown past by a high-velocity speeder needs to pull that guy over before he hurts someone. But the activity that resulted in a ticket on my windshield was predatory, plain and simple.
It’s only a $50 fine. I think that’s intentional. $50 isn’t a lot of money. Sure, it’s a decent dinner for my wife and I if we feel like going on a cheap date. It might buy you a new dress shirt or a pair of shoes. But is it really worth taking several hours off of work to go fight the ticket in court, with no guarantee that you’ll win? My time is worth more than that. But in principle, I want to fight this. Because it’s absurd, and obscene.
Just a couple of weeks ago, my wife got a ticket too. She was in what she thought was a 35 mile an hour zone, but it apparently had just dropped to 25 MPH. And there was a cop, hiding in the trees, pointing a radar gun at oncoming cars. I’ve seen this before. Cruisers sitting at the spot where a speed limit changes, just so they can grab you if you’re too slow on the brakes. But at least a police car sitting out in the open reminds you to check for a speed limit change. Hiding in the trees? Again, that’s predatory.
Police don’t seem to like it when their actions are scrutinized. Now they know how we feel. I think a lot of people resent the police. That’s not a healthy business model for the forces of justice. They need people to trust them, not fear them. If they’re doing their job, that’s how people should feel. Safe. Protected. Looked out for. Instead, everyone hides their wallets and looks the other way.
It’s time for a new way of doing things. Unfortunately, as long as the almighty dollar is what’s at stake, you can count on them looking for you, taking the revenue they need by force.
Barefoot/Minimalist Shoes – The Search Continues
Mar 9th
The primal movement and the barefoot/minimalist shoe movement go hand in hand. Mark Sisson, who is the author of the Primal Blueprint, also promotes the use of shoes like Vibram Five Fingers, but makes mention of other good minimalist shoes. It’s all about going back to a more natural way of eating, living, and exercising.
I try to walk every day of the work week for at least 30 minutes on the trails around my office. The problem is, I haven’t had a pair of decent shoes for walking in years. If you believe the barefooters, I’ve never had a decent pair. So I wind up walking in my dress shoes, or in a pair of beat up old Sketchers that give me blisters. They’re also about 3 years old.
So I’ve been looking for good barefoot shoes. I figured it’s worth a try. Jamie ordered me a pair of Merrell Trail Gloves, and they arrived two weeks later. I opened the box, excited about how light they were. I put them on…and they were way too tight. They were a regular pair, and I have wide feet. I don’t always need to buy wide shoes, because some are just made that way. The Trail Gloves were not. They felt good, I loved the way they hugged the floor, but they just wouldn’t be comfortable. So we packed them up, brought them into Dick’s brick-and-mortar store, and were told that they didn’t have the Trail Gloves in 2E. Instead, we exchanged my pair for a pair of womens’ Trail Gloves for Jamie. That was a couple weeks ago, and I’m not sure she’s taken them off since. (OK, I exaggerate…but not by much.)
She can’t stop talking about them. She loves, loves, loves them. They’re comfortable, quiet, and understated. She can wear them all day without her feet getting sore. They look and act like ninja shoes – she got the black ones.
So I’ve been trying to find out how to get a pair that fit. I’ve heard rumors that Merrell is releasing wide width versions of the shoes this month. The website has a page for a “wide” version, but it doesn’t say if it’s a single E or a 2E shoe. I want to try them on in the flesh and make sure they fit before I have to go through another multi-week process of ordering, waiting for shipping, receiving, trying on, and having to send them back if it’s not right.
In the mean time, I continue to walk without decent shoes. Which is bad for both my feet AND my shoes.
Today, I decided to take another look around the Internet, and I found some shoes by a company called Altra. Altra makes the Adam – which looks like a slipper/aquasock hybrid but gets rave reviews from everyone who buys them, as well as the Samson, which is basically the Adam with a different upper and laces. I found this review of the Adam (and later the Samson) at Birthday Shoes in particular to be helpful, and in addition, it comes with a chance to win a pair from the manufacturer. Since I have a feeling I’m going to want to own several different pairs of minimalist shoes from different manufacturers, I’d love to win these so I can try them out while spending my limited shoe budget on something else. I like the look of the Trail Gloves a lot, but the reviews of the Adam sound like it’s probably going to be the best fit for me.
At the end of the day, I really prefer to try a shoe on before I buy it to make sure it will fit. It’s lovely that some of the online stores have easy return policies and free shipping, but it still takes time. I’d rather not spend the next month walking around in work shoes, work boots, or clunky Crocs. I need to settle on one of these and get moving.
Steve Skojec – The New Movie Trailer Guy
Mar 5th
So, I am getting an obnoxious chest cold. And my voice is going. And when my voice goes, it gets deeper first. A lot deeper. Which of course makes me think of Don LaFontaine (may he rest in peace!) Which means I have to record at least one “One Man With One Mission” movie trailer voiceover. Because I’m ridiculous.
So here it is. If you have any requests, leave them in the comments. If I get to them before my voice goes (or comes back) you can have one of your very own! And then people can look at you like there’s something wrong with you, too.
The Importance of Inconvenience
Mar 2nd
When I was in college, my mom had a baby. This new child, my youngest brother, was almost 22 years younger than me. It was a very exciting event in our lives, and I thought it was cool to come home from school and hold this little guy in my arms, thinking about what it would be like when I would one day have my own children. I’d walk him, sing him to sleep, play with him – all the things I knew I’d do one day when I became a father.
My youngest brother, Louie, and me.
One evening, I was watching TV while I was holding him so my mother could make dinner. He got increasingly fussy, and I got increasingly annoyed. I wanted to watch my show, and he was getting in the way of that. This was before the days of DVR, so there was no pause button, no ability to record and watch it later. I wanted to go dump him off on mom and get back to The Simpsons, but on some level, I knew that was a pretty silly thing to do. I should just figure out what he needed and take care of it, my own wants be damned. I was faced with a choice between the needs of this helpless little child and my own desire to be entertained, and I was actually struggling with that choice. I don’t like to be inconvenienced, and that’s that.
And that’s when it struck me: selfishness really gets in the way of the important things in life.
Lesson learned? Not a chance. Sure, that thought stuck with me. I think I even chose my brother over the show that night (what a hero, right?). But selfishness remained a feature of my life for however many years its been since that day.
Fast forward to today. I have a wife and five kids. I’ve had to learn to give up lots of shows, lots of sleep, and lots of lousy days at work, and lots of other things to take care of my family. In some ways, I’ve learned to be a lot more generous than I was when I was younger. For example, I used to be pretty stingy. Now, I have no problem writing a check, or providing food to be given to the hungry. Yesterday, my wife and kids dropped off 15 meals at Catholic Charities to help the needy. I’m happy to know that my money is going to good causes. Just so long as I don’t actually have to do anything about it myself.
I remember how once, in high school, I helped the Missionaries of Charity do a Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless. It was a moving experience. One I never did again. I can think of several examples of charitable activities I’ve dabbled in, only to let them go because I just didn’t feel like doing them. I had to get up early, or give up a Saturday, or spend my coveted free time working on something other than what I wanted to do.
You see what I’m saying? I’m awful at this stuff. In the reigning trio of social justice buzzwords – time, talent and treasure – treasure is the only one I’m willing to part with. And that only in reasonable quantities.
But I’ve been thinking lately about all of this. I’m at a point in my life where things have reached a certain stasis, and every waking thought isn’t occupied with getting a roof over our heads or a steady job or better relationship with my wife and kids, or all the myriad things I’ve worried about day and night for the past decade. Sure, I’m still working on improving all of those things, but in a very real sense, I’ve come up for air and realized that life goes on without me and my concerns. The world isn’t the big, bad, scary place that I thought was keeping me down. It’s a place that’s certainly full of big and bad and scary things, but it’s also full of opportunity. For success, for financial gain, for happiness, for joy, and for acts of charity.
Another experience sticks in my mind from college. During my semester abroad, I traveled a good bit in former Soviet Bloc countries like Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. I’ll never forget arriving at the train station in Krakow and seeing a young man with no arms sitting in a blue t-shirt, a withered paper cup between his stumps, begging for coins. I looked at him and I just knew with certainty that he wasn’t born this way. He lost those arms in an accident, probably working (at a far too young age) with some kind of machinery. And there was nothing to be done about it. His life went from promising to painful, just like that. And I saw this repeated again and again – the poverty, the squalor, the lack of shelter in the bitter cold of these countries where my ancestors worked and lived. The images are burned in my memory. I made a commitment to myself at that time that some day, when I was successful enough, I’d go back and find a way to help those people.
That was over a decade ago. I don’t know if there’s a charity there that helps these people, but I’ve remembered the commitment I made, and I want to find it. Or something like it. In a way, it’s not even as much about the people I could help as it is about me. Maybe that’s just another form of selfishness, but I don’t see how I can ever really become a better man than I am today unless I go outside of myself, out of my own head and my own problems and do for others. I hope that even if I start a journey toward charity for the wrong reasons, it will be transformative enough that I’ll begin doing it for the right ones.
I’ve had the benefit of being surrounded by family and friends who would drop anything to help me, or even perfect strangers. My wife is that kind of person. My grandfather was that kind of person.
I want to be that kind of person too. And I’ll never get there unless I learn to not just accept, but embrace inconvenience.
Write in Your Own Voice
Feb 29th
I’ve become increasingly convinced that writing in my own voice is important. But I’ve been writing almost as long as I’ve been talking, and frankly, I write a lot better than I speak. Chalk it up to ADD, lack of confidence, or daydreaming, but my speech meanders even more than my posts.
Even so, I think there’s a need to achieve synthesis. (And yes, I would actually say a sentence like that out loud.)
One of the things I’ve noticed recently is how much more serious my writing is than my speaking. People who know me personally know that I’m passionate – opinionated, sometimes angry, and often funny. I make a lot of jokes. I also swear a lot. More than I should.
It could be related to the fact that I’ve written for Catholic or politically conservative audiences for so long, but I tend to clean up my speech a good bit when I type it out. Gone are the damned swear words, the wit, the excessively controversial or risqué statements. I very rarely type out the words, “That’s what SHE said!” And I never make jokes about enemas.
Perhaps this is aspirational. I want to be a smarter, more mature guy than I am in real life. Maybe it’s stylistic – we all learn to write with a good bit more formality than we speak, and if we read a lot, this style is picked up through imitation. Either way, I think that my real self and my written persona need to talk about a merger. I think the real me could do with an image upgrade, and the written me could stand to loosen up a bit. I need to stop writing for what I think my audiences expect, and write what I want to talk about with all the enthusiasm I’m capable of. Then, I think it’s safe to assume, whatever I’m saying will come out better.
And brevity ain’t so bad either.
Make Your Own Stuff. Save Money. Feel Cool.
Feb 23rd
Have you ever watched shows like This Old House or Survivorman or MacGyver and wondered how people learn the skills that essentially allow them to fabricate pure awesomeness using nothing but their bare hands?
I am proficient at the creative arts. I can write, photograph, draw, whip up a graphic design, cook, etc. But somehow that doesn’t translate to manual dexterity. I am not – I repeat, AM NOT – a handy guy. The rule in our house is that when something starts to break, I’m not allowed to touch it, or I’ll break it worse. Granted, I’ve enjoyed a few small victories. I installed a dishwasher and two ceiling fans in the house we lived in 7 years ago, but I also moved away shortly after that, so who knows if it’s still standing? Jamie, on the other hand, is a whiz with her hands. She can make, fix, bake, braid, bend, twist, glue, mix – you name it. And it just about always comes out well.
But just because I’m at a disadvantage when it comes to MacGyvering, doesn’t mean team Skojec can’t come in for the win. Especially when it saves money. And lately, we’ve found a few tricks for doing just that. Most notably, we’ve begun making our own laundry detergent and deodorant. And it’s cheaper and works better. I mean, a lot cheaper and a lot better. The detergent gets out just about any stain you could ask for, and costs less than a buck for about 10 gallons. The deodorant is unscented (though you could add scent if you wanted to) and works longer than my Speed Stick Ocean Scent. I’d guess it costs us less than a quarter to make a stick, but I’m not sure. The most expensive ingredient in the deodorant is the cosmetic-grade coconut oil, and we got a five gallon bucket of that for nothing from someone on Freecycle.
Now, compare that to buying Tide, even at Costco, or a two pack of my Speed Stick. Tide in the family size is roughly $20 at the best price you can find. We go through 1-2 of those a month with five kids. And Speed Stick is a cheap deodorant, but it still goes for about $4 a two pack, and lasts maybe a month or two for just me. There are two other people in the household using deodorant, though, and we can make enough for all three of us for less than a buck. (There are a number of health benefits to using homemade deodorant vs. the chemistry set you buy in the store.) I haven’t added up all the savings we’re getting from this, but I’m guessing it’s significant overtime. Detergent alone was probably costing us at least $500 a year.
Next up, we’re going to tackle making our own dishwasher soap. We’ve got all the ingredients, we just need to do it.
And I should mention something else: it’s easy. This isn’t like homebrewing (which we’ve also done) where you have to invest a whole bunch into equipment and then buy expensive ingredients and do a ton of work and then eventually wind up with a beer or bottle of wine that’s 50 cents or a dollar cheaper than you get in the store. Homebrewing isn’t something you do for financial reasons. You do it because it’s fun. But with these common household products, you can make them with items you probably have lying around the house, or can buy on the cheap. Off the top of my head, I don’t know the exact recipes we use, but I’ll give some close estimates based on what I could pull off of Google with a 2 second search.
Homemade Laundry Soap
- 1/3 bar Fels Naptha or other type of soap, as listed above
- ½ cup washing soda
- ½ cup borax powder
~You will also need a small bucket, about 2 gallon size~
Grate the soap and put it in a sauce pan. Add 6 cups water and heat it until the soap melts. Add the washing soda and the borax and stir until it is dissolved. Remove from heat. Pour 4 cups hot water into the bucket. Now add your soap mixture and stir. Now add 1 gallon plus 6 cups of water and stir. Let the soap sit for about 24 hours and it will gel. You use ½ cup per load.
Ingredients:
6-8 Tbsp Coconut oil (solid state)
1/4 cup baking soda
1/4 cup arrowroot powder or cornstarch (arrowroot is preferred)Directions:
Combine equal portions of baking soda & arrowroot powder.
Slowly add coconut oil and work it in with a spoon or hand blender until it maintains a firm but pliable texture. It should be about the same texture as commercial deodorant, solid but able to be applied easily. If it is too wet, add further arrowroot powder/cornstarch to thicken.
You can either scoop this recipe into your old deodorant dispensers or place in a small container with lid and apply with fingers with each use. Makes about 1 cup. This recipe lasts about 3 months for two people with regular daily use.
Homemade dishwasher detergent (soap) recipe
1 cup borax
1 cup washing soda
1/2 cup citric acid
1/2 cup kosher salt
You’ll notice a common theme in these items. Baking or washing soda and borax are real workhorses for home cleaning and do a great job. And they’re really cheap. These two things should make you smile again and again.
I’d like to take some of these thrift projects to the next level, and start making real handicrafts that are also useful around the home. We’ve talked about making some artisanal soaps, homemade candles, and so on. I think that could be fun, even therapeutic. I’ve said it before, but I’m a maker in a doer’s job. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as I have an outlet for my creativity. It can be tough to make time for that – it’s been a while since I’ve taken any photos, done any design work, or sat down and sketched out a drawing or painted a picture. But projects like these, gardening, and so on – they’re good for you. They can also save you money and even make you money. So get on it!
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