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“I bought my 70-year-old father the testosterone boxer shorts. He loved them. We're going for where his ego might be.”
Who would want gonorrhea all over their boxer shorts? Lots of people, it turns out. In fact, Roger Freeman has built a comfortable small business on the concept.
His company, Infectious Awareables, sells boxers, neckties, bowties, and scarves imprinted with all manner of dreadful afflictions, from avian flu to West Nile virus and Chlamydia to syphilis. Then there are the designs only a scientist could love: microarrays, neurons, the human genome, and dental plaque—a nod to Freeman’s former career. He’s a retired dentist.
Freeman and his wife Felice Freeman set up the business in Encino, California, 11 years ago, having bought it from a company that was heading toward bankruptcy because it couldn’t figure out how to market its herpes ties. The Freemans purchased the remaining inventory and decided to put an educational spin on the business. Raising public awareness of disease and working with health-related charities—either by making donations or working together on projects—are now key goals of the outfit, along with turning a profit. On the back of every tie is printed a couple of sentences about the disease and its implications. “Mold continues to be a serious environmental issue, with far-reaching health-related, legal, and financial implications,” reads the mold tie. “The idea is that humor is infectious, education is infectious,” Freeman says.
The strategy seems to be working. Just one indication: Freeman and his wife, who handles marketing and customer service, used to go to as many as eight scientific conventions a year to peddle their unique pharma fashions. Now they’ve been able to scale back to just two—the annual meetings of the American Society for Microbiology (in Boston in June this year) and the American Public Health Association (in San Diego in October). “We just do lights-out business,” he says. “For three solid days, we don’t sit down.”
