Origin
I wanted to make some hats: baseball caps that were western-themed, with slogans I'd been collecting. I was heading to Under the Big Sky Music Festival in Whitefish, Montana, and I had the though: what if the hats weren't just merch? What if the way I sold them was the story itself?
The Brand
Cowgirl Down is a fictional character and a brand built around her. She's a sad, disappeared cowgirl femme fatale whose story unfolds over three days at the festival. She gets herself into trouble and then disppears into thin air. Nobody knows where she went. The ambiguity is the hook. The brand identity sits somewhere between rodeo typography, 1970s desert print ephemera, and highway signage. Gritty, lost-and-found, undercurated, underdesigned.
The System
The marketing, the product, and the narrative are all the same thing. Flyers posted in women's restrooms and festival grounds, designed like wanted posters with pull tabs at the bottom, drive people to the website. The website follows her story in a Gossip Girl-style daily dispatch format: Day 1, she shows up. Day 2, she's spotted again. Day 3, she's gone. Each dispatch names real bars in downtown Whitefish and builds on the last. The hats are woven into the narrative but never hard-sold. You discover the brand the same way you'd discover a piece of gossip.