People's Pops on the High Line!

Ladies and gentlemen, today's lesson: dreams do come true.

The first time I was ever on the High Line, the beautiful, re-purposed elevated railway-turned-greenway that runs up the west side of Chelsea, all I could think about was how much better-looking and happier everyone on the High Line would be if they were licking ice pops.

I can't help it, I think that way sometimes.

Ever since that first brilliant vision, we have been harassing the nice folks at the High Line to give us a chance to prove ourselves right, and they have finally done so. We are up there for 29 days (until Aug 20), from 12-9:30pm, and as it turns out, my surmise was correct. Everyone on the High Line armed with a pop or shave is better-looking, happier, or both.

My pictures aren't super good, so go and check it out for yourself! Sundown with a yellow plum & mint makes the quotidian a celebration.

Wacky But Worth It

There are tons of things about our business that I lament us not having adequate time to plunge headlong into developing: an inventory system I can run on my iPhone, an automated payroll system that accounts for our highly irregular hours and staff, a more eco-friendly and attractive packaging solution….the list is a million miles long and growing every day. But I must say, the thing that goads me most unrelentingly is what to me represents the biggest of our many missed opportunities: our shop’s incredibly banal freezer display case.

Initially, we were hoping to have real pops on display behind the glass, but that dream quickly died after the lights at the top of our freezer kept melting them all down. So we whipped up a batch of wax pops and popped those in the case. It looks okay, but….

Ok, hear me out. Envision a world in which our freezer served as the stage for a fantastical diorama similar to the Washington Post’s extremely awesome annual Easter-time Marshmallow Peeps Contest. (Highlights from this year: “Where the Wild Peeps Are,” and “White House Party Peepers.” Seriously, check it out.) I mean, the glassed-in part of our freezer is 5’x 1’ x 1’… basically a few times the size of the shoeboxes with which we all made dioramas in elementary school. I have visions of scenes like “Ice Pops At The Beach” or “Ice Pops Hit The Disco.”

Joel jokes that the scenes should be true to life at the people’s pops, a retrospective of Summer 2010. Yeah boy. I can see it already. How about “Nat Getting Hit By A Car,” “Dave Nearly Getting Mugged While Van Shopping In Harlem,” “The Rhubarb Delivery Is Too Heavy To Get Off The Truck And Has To Return Upstate To The Farm,” or “The Fire Sprinkler In Our Freezer Explodes, Flooding The Entire Kitchen.”

Maybe depicting these scenes in miniature could bring us one step closer to being able to laugh at them. Is this art therapy?

Of course, we have no money to pay for a pop-themed diorama, and no time to do it ourselves either. But I always thought that it could be a fun project for an art school professor to give to his or her class, where everyone would get a month in the spotlight or whatever. Aren’t some people out there studying visual merchandising or window dressing and looking for experience, for something to put on their résumés? Or it could be a fun thing for an artist with too much time on their hands to quickly get a ton of exposure. A lot of people walk past our freezer case, and what’s a better example of public art than a sculpture in a pop shop?

So, people….who out there can make my dreams come true??

Seriously—email us at people[at]peoplespops.com if you have any ideas!!

The Three Stooges On Ice

The number of ways in which this snippet eerily parallels our business is embarrassing...and hilarious.

Open Letter To The Worst Bank In The Known Universe

Dear Chase,

YOU SUCK.

Why?

Ever since we opened our business bank account with you (see the hopefulness in our eyes on that very first day), you've done nothing but TREAT US LIKE SHIT.

We have no debt and impeccable personal credit. You started us on $500 worth of credit (for a BUSINESS!--my Amex gives me $10,000), citing our youth and inexperience. Since then, we have been good, responsible, solvent customers who pay bills on time and deposit money regularly. (Also, we are older!)

Every time we ask for more credit, you turn us down. We STILL have only $500 of credit.

You’ve turned down every loan for which we’ve ever applied, and as well as every line of credit (including one through the so-called Small Business Association).

You charge us for withdrawing change (hello, we run a retail shop).

Most egregiously, you ALSO charge us every time we DEPOSIT over $10,000 a month. Yes, Chase Bank, YOU MAKE US PAY TO GIVE YOU MONEY.

This month, you charged us $60 just to withdraw and deposit money.

Your customer service is also appalling. Your employees don’t know your own rules and your managers can’t explain them.

Let me sum this up here. We are a successful, growing, three-year-old business with $500 worth of credit that gets charged to deposit money.

Thanks for ^%$&% NOTHING!

Sincerely,
Nathalie, David and Joel

p.s. See you at HSBC.

Some Thoughts On Strategy

In other big news for the week: Inc. magazine put us on the list of Brooklyn's Best Entrepreneurs, alongside a privileged cohort composed of the likes of Brooklyn Brewery, Etsy, Steiner Studios.....what? If this continues, we're actually going to start taking ourselves seriously!!

We're a little baffled by the attention. Last week, we got an email from a professor at Brigham Young University who was taking a group of business students to New York and wanted to know if we'd be willing to take a few minutes to talk about "the strategy behind People's Pops as an emerging brand."

Strategy? Is that what's happening while we're drinking wine on the sidewalk as we paint our sandwich boards? (one of which was stolen off 15th street today, btw, so if you see it, tackle the mofo!)

We like being flattered, so we said yes, and after a long day in the kitchen, I sped over to the shop, spattered with raspberry juice and the rotten pong of things left perennially undone. The nineteen students--clean-cut, well-mannered, inquisitive--had spent their morning at American Express and their afternoon at Johnson & Johnson. They looked at me and David expectantly. I told them our story, all of it--of how making pops for a one-day market with my prom date and his roommate most unexpectedly turned into a vibrant, dynamic business (manufacturing, retail, wholesale, catering) that, daily for the past three summers, has had us toeing the delicate balance between euphoria and despair ever so unpleasantly schizophrenically.

There's no secret, or if there is, it's still unknown to us, too. Our story works because it's actually a true and believable story, not something a marketing executive had to dream up. Our product works because it's carefully made using quality stuff. Our business works because we treat our suppliers, our customers, our employees and ourselves with respect, trust and affection. (And because we work our asses off.) The hype? I have no idea where it comes from, but I'm grateful for it. I'd like to think it's due to the reasons above--is that unrealistic?

The business school students had polite, pointed questions: "Have you considered franchising?" "Can you identify your most persistent bottlenecks?" "Will you be taking on investors?" I answered them to the best of my ability, knowing that sounder, more measured business owners would have spent time actually talking to each other about things like this. We don't, because anytime we come close to having 30 seconds to take a macro look at the business, the freezer fails and the van overheats.

So the monster grows, and we just try to keep up: that's our strategy. But I feel good about how, despite everything, we continue being capable of keeping the most important things about our business intact: good local fruit, happy customers, and having fun with each other. Actually, wait: maybe that's our strategy.

Our T-shirts have arrived!!

Although Rue is smiling ultra-uncomfortably, our *brand-new* t-shirts are actually ultra-comfortable....the American Apparel cotton/poly blend. We're selling them for $20 and have unisex sizes S, M, L and XL.

For this, many thanks to awesome UT Austin art professor Jason Urban, who sketched the yellow pop on the design at left. We saw this incredible t-shirt he did for Threadless, and asked him to work with us, and to our great delight, he agreed!!

Many thanks to Brooklyn screenprinter Crown Prints for their good work, too. Next stop: tote bags?

People's Pops (TM) No-Fail Diet

My cousin recently saw this picture in Julia Moskin's recent New York Times story on shave ice and told me, basically, to stop, sit down and eat a sandwich.

It's true. While I haven't exactly been mistaken for Kate Moss yet, I am definitely channeling a Giada-big head in the pic. And yesterday when I left my apartment in a big rush (as usual) I had to make a U-turn a minute later to change my pants, which were literally falling off my hips.

In fact, we've all lost weight, partially because we're racking our brains over what the hell to do this winter. So that's why we have decided to market, once the ice pop season ends, the People's Pops No-Fail Diet (TM). It goes like this:

1. Work every single day from dawn to midnight.
   
2. Work every single day from dawn to midnight.
3. Work every single day from dawn to midnight.
4. Work every single day from dawn to midnight.
   
5. Work every single day from dawn to midnight.
6. Work every single day from dawn to midnight.
7. Work every single day from dawn to midnight.
   
8. Work every single day from dawn to midnight.
9. Work every single day from dawn to midnight.
10. Forget to eat.
    

Between freezers on the fritz, vans on the fritz, and employees on the fritz....as David put it in a text message last night, "We're really pioneering new ways to lose money."

It's okay, New York City. We've still got the essentials: two arms, two legs and a nicely toned set of asses from all the heavy lifting. And as Joel responded to David's text last night, "I like making lifelong friends the hard way."

Awww.

German tourist: Felted a People's Pop at Home

We get some pretty far-out emails, but this one took the cake. It was from a nice woman named Anna Franziska, and its entire contents are in the subject line above. Attached was this picture:


What could be a better thing to find in your inbox on a Sunday morning??

Thanks Anna Franziska! You made our day!

We're in Whole Foods!!

Okay, truth: we're in one Whole Foods (in the gelato case of the one on 97th and Columbus).

But still!

It may have taken three years, but we finally feel like this:



Flavors this week:

• Rhubarb & Mint
• Strawberry - Basil
• Plum & Sour Cherry

Joel will be in the shop doing a little demo tomorrow from 4-8 pm. Upper West popsi-fans, go in and high-five him! He will be wearing Hammer pants!!

HOW PSYCHED ARE WE????

Cease and Desist!!

A rather terrifying letter recently burst the bubble of good vibes that has surrounded our shop since we opened.

“This law firm acts as outside trademark counsel to Unilever Supply Chain, Inc., and its affiliates (“Unilever”),” the letter said. “Because POPSICLE® is Unilever’s registered trademark Unilever must request that you replace all of the references to ‘popsicle’ and ‘popsicles’…with proper generic terminology such as ‘ice pop(s).’ We ask that you please provide us with written confirmation of your compliance with the foregoing by Friday, May 7, 2010.”

Well, okay.

Here’s the story of POPSICLE®.

In 1905, eleven-year-old Frank Epperson fixed himself some powdered soda and water and left the container outside with the stirring stick still in it. That unusually cold night in San Francisco, the mixture froze, and the first-ever “Epsicle” was born. Eighteen years later, now in Alameda, Epperson started selling “The Frozen Drink on a Stick!” at Neptune Beach. He applied for a patent a year later and sold the rights to what he now called “Popsicles” another year later (1925), to the Joe Lowe Company in New York. Over time, they became so iconic that during World War II the Eighth Air Force Unit chose them as the symbol of American life. Over the last eighty-five years, the horse-drawn cart that sold POPSICLES® to schoolchildren in Nebraska (also carrying the first ice-cream man!) has morphed into a veritable fleet of trucks that cover the land selling water, high fructose corn syrup, gums, colorants and preservatives to people, young and old, all over the country.

In 1989, Good Humor, a subsidiary of Unilever, bought the rights to POPSICLE®.

Today, two billion POPSICLE® ice pops are sold annually.

The End.

Sort of.

In June 2008, Joel, David and I decided to see what ice pops made using local fruit in season might taste like, and, sort of by accident, subsequently began making on a regular basis what we called people’s popsicles. We got rubber stamps made with the name, and stamped our sticks with them. As time elapsed and the pops became a regular gig, we bought the domain name peoplespopsicle.com and got business cards made. Et cetera.

Shortly thereafter, we figured out that POPSICLE® was a trademarked term. So we switched gears: bought peoplespops.com and, when we formed as an LLC in 2009, did so under that name. But we’d been lazy about using the word “popsicle” on our blog. Can you blame us? I mean, at this point POPSICLE® is such a ubiquitous word that it rolls off the tongue more easily than “ice pop.” It’s like Kleenex®, or Xerox®—pervasive to the point of generic.

But it isn’t generic. And there’s the rub. Not only is Unilever the only party legally allowed to use the word POPSICLE® for anything, they are also legally obliged to defend any infringement on their trademark if they hope to keep it. As my friend Adam Prizio explained to me (his law practice, Law for Food, specializes in helping food producers and farmers): the law is concerned with the situation in which somebody might be confused into believing that People’s Pops are a Unilever product, and there are lots of reasons why Unilever wouldn’t want that. “It’s a problem,” Adam said, “because the term has entered into the vernacular but retains its status as a trademark. So an odd consequence of this situation is that I think you can buy things called ‘popsicle sticks’ but you can’t make ‘popsicles’ with them for commercial use.” Although the trademark has largely been genericized, it’s nevertheless still enforceable within the commercial sector in which it originated. And in fact it must be enforced, unless Unilever wants to risk losing the trademark, which for two billion reasons each year, they obviously don’t. The expense of taking us to court, if it came to that, is fully worth it to them.

To us, it isn’t. So we replaced every “popsicle” on our blog with “ice pop,” a task made easier by the fact that Unilever’s lawyers had FedExed us 17 pages of our blog with every infringement circled. We repainted the word “popsicle” on the back wall of our shop and cut the –icle off our rubber stamp.

Look at us, threatening the big boys! Don’t worry. We promise, whatever they’re called, our ice pops still taste better.


POSTMORTEM 06/01/10:

Wow, did this post get snapped up by the media.

Bloomberg
Grub Street
Gothamist
Village Voice























(New York Magazine)

And look what else we found flaunting Unilever's dictates!