A good fashion rule of thumb is never wear in public anything branded with your company’s logo. First, you could wind up as a post on Dudes in Startup Shirts. But also, if you do something that people don’t like, it could really explode in your face.
By way of example, if you reserve a soccer field that almost nobody knows can actually be reserved and try to kick people off it, it could easily become something of a cultural flashpoint. By now we’ve all seen the video, and, to be fair, the real villain here is Rec and Park, selling access to public space without any enforcement mechanism, or much notice. Talk about “awkward and disastrously weird.” They had to be kidding themselves if they didn’t see this coming. (And the gentrification subtext is gross enough, but do we really need an app to play in the park now?)
That two-week-old video was unquestionably the topic of much brunchtime chatter over the weekend, and Mission Mission even made a meme out of it. It’s lighthearted, but what makes people go so ballistic? Yes, the entitlement and the obvious ethnic clash are factors, but it’s also the fact that they’re wearing Dropbox- and Hiscox-branded jerseys. That’s why, as SFist caught, this otherwise minor incident is drawing official corporate apologies via a press release and tweets. For their part, the tech bros apologized, too — to the community, but revealingly, also to their employers.
If the dude rolled up in a plain black t-shirt with a swoosh on it, would Nike’s social media team feel compelled to intervene? Probably not, even though Nike is an actual sports apparel company and Dropbox is not. Startups’ dominance of San Francisco, and corporate dominance of everyday life, can’t get any more visceral than the spectacle of some guys groveling before their employers for having a non-violent, shouting-free confrontation, on their own time, just because they were wearing a logo.
[Via: Uptown Almanac and SFGate]
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