Strips Tease
What fashion accessory wields the power to attract shoppers, influence sales and excite clothing designers?
The hangtag.
That promotional piece dangling from the armpit of a shirt or the loop on a pair of chinos is doing more than providing size, style number and price. Hangtags with innovative graphics and eye-catching materials are luring customers--consciously or not--to those garments on the racks.
A hangtag might convey a designer’s muse in creating a sweater. It might heighten awareness of the environment or of another cause embraced by the company. Or it might educate--by listing the technological advances incorporated in a snowboard jacket, for example. And, for some young and fashionably inclined, a hangtag is way cooler on a rearview mirror than those pine tree air fresheners. These are, once again, the days of flaunting designer brands.
“A hangtag is a mini billboard,” says Michael Levinson, president of Marika, a San Diego active-wear maker that began realizing the promotional potential of hangtags two years ago. Its ongoing series features models in active poses. On the other side are cheeky messages teasing that, yes, it took a team of “skinny, pony-tailed Euro-trash stylists” to give the models the right look but, because the clothing itself is designed by women, chances are it will flatter you too.
“We don’t want people to take us so seriously,” Levinson adds. “What we do want is for them to distinguish us from the aggressive jocko companies.”
The hangtag has always been around but has come into its own as manufacturers seek to stand out in a saturated marketplace. In this decade of computerized graphics and no-rules streetwear designers with unbridled imaginations and youthful staffs, the hangtag has emerged as an art form.
Flimsy card stock has given way to costlier corrugated cardboard, foam core, vinyl, metal and molded plastic. There are pop-ups and 3-D effects. Rather than being snipped off and tossed out, tags double as decals, postcards, works of art. They are being collected, even traded.
Mindful of this, McElroy Communications Inc. in Newport Beach is creating hangtags resembling trading cards for athletic shoe maker Vans. Cards will spotlight the pro skateboarders for whom the sneakers are named. Surfwear giant Billabong has holographic 3-D tags picturing its pro athletes performing tricks against the waves.
A hangtag is “an image building piece that can have some life to it,” says Thom McElroy, owner of the advertising agency, whose accounts include Fender, Mattel, Quiksilver and Counter Culture. His creative team’s concepts for hangtags that have a post-shelf, post-purchase life include moving images. One, an interactive spin wheel tag, has a window that rotates to reveal different graphics and messages.
The new wave of hangtags pulls you in visually, compelling you to touch the garment. Reading over the copy--whether it’s useful technical information or frivolous fun--gives you an excuse to linger. And then. . . .
Gotcha!
As every good salesperson knows, half of making a deal is getting the customer physically connected to the product.
“Hangtags can be the piece that really seals the deal for consumers. They are the quintessential integration of marketing and design and strategy and emotions,” says Moira Cullen, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
Cullen, who also serves as chair of communication arts at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, regards hangtags as packaging at its most basic.
“There is no box, no case, so the hangtag becomes the distinguishing, differentiating factor. These compact signs are bloated with code. They are a fantastic, potent shorthand,” she says, projecting an image of the garment as an extension of the shopper’s identity, real or fantasized, which is key to the aura and mystery of fashion.
The souped-up 1966 Chrysler Super Sport on 26 Red’s “Lowrider” pant pocket flasher (a card similar to a hangtag but on the pocket) plays up the jean’s low-riding waistline. Look for faux fur on the company’s junior wear tags next season--a nod, perhaps, to glam and camp?
To 26 Red designer John Bernard, hangtags and flashers are integral to “defining each garment to the customer and what it’s about.” In the last year, he’s upped the ante for tag design, considering it as crucial to success as advertising in a highly competitive market.
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The consensus is that international sportswear titan Diesel is the hangtag pacesetter with tags that reflect the irreverent tone of its ad campaign. One, in bold red, white and blue, drolly states that its design team spends “many long and painful hours under the strictest laboratory conditions to achieve optimal results.”
Ecko Unltd. Co., the New Jersey-based urban gear label that has enjoyed meteoric success in recent years, screens its colorful rhinoceros logo on heavy cardboard to project “rugged and beefy,” says co-owner Marc Milecofsky. No detail is overlooked: The tie is coarse twine. “It helps translate to the consumer that we’re very quality driven.” And, he adds, “The goal is to create something you don’t want to throw away.”
Paul Knowles, 16, of Long Beach is sold. Like many of his peers, he sees hangtags as little extras, serendipities that can serve as book marks, door signs or mirror caddies.
He hasn’t decided yet what to do with the tag from his Adidas sneakers. The white and black hard plastic leaf logo on a mini-ball chain could become a key holder. “I don’t want to throw it away because it looks pretty cool,” says the Polytechnic High junior.
For now, it’s with the other tags decorating his bedroom. Just don’t ask him whether it signifies the power of consumerism or an appreciation for good design. Who really cares when it looks cool?
