as my brother was CONDOM KING OF THE CARIBBEAN CROWNED
I'm not sure how it all happened.
I guess you could call this story, how do I ended up selling at a trade show flooring to name everything with sex. Or, as my brother, the condom was King of the Caribbean.
It is a sordid history of shamelessly hustle in with some good old-fashioned guerrilla marketing and public relations and mixed with more production values than Titanic.
In other words, yet another marketing story.
The debt, and it will be to blame lays directly at the feet of my brother, Victor Wong.
A New York, and the former art director at Seventeen Magazine and YM, Victor, brilliant, talented and sometimes certifiably crazy, he decided was tired of cooking to pastel pink and green neon-Teeny Bopper cover any season. He needed a challenge off the dirt of New York.
So from about a decade ago, he went back to the place of our birth, Montego Bay, Jamaica. latex fashion . (Do not ask me how, but our parents had emigrated there from China in the 1950s, their children coalescence into a volatile mix of Marley and Mao.) Are
My father had a grocery store, a glorified Becker really started, and Victor happy again the store, downsizing his career for the joys of the sale of milk and flour in exchange for sunshine, some decent fishing and a chance again to dabble in mixed media.
During this time I avoided Visit the Victor for good reason.
The last time I came with my wife, Sharon, we had visions of sipping Pina Colada spotted on a sunny beach. Instead, we ended up wrapping and packaging of meals of salted fish that like in a twisted way, we kind of - sort of like the fools who pay to paint the fence in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.
But it was inevitable that Victor would expire of boredom. His creative juices were not through the creation of signage such as "Banana chips, two for a dollar", or the saturated brilliantly concise "Shoplifters will be shot."
So the wheels started to spin again. And this is where the marketing part of the story comes in.
Jamaica in the middle was a fear of AIDS, and the newspapers were calling for a public awareness campaign to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. One of the biggest problems was the lack of condoms by men and teens. Wearing a condom was just not a cool thing to do. But it cost lives.
Clear on the other side of the world in Asia, the specter of AIDS had already taken a toll in Thailand. In response, some of the best condom manufacturer in the world had concentrated around Bangkok, to fight the AIDS crisis. And then, in 1997 stalled the Asian economy and the Thai baht plunged deeper than a cut-Marlen Cowpland.
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