#16. NAT AND ARMAND - "Someone who writes greeting cards."

Friday, April 1, 2011

#16. NAT AND ARMAND - “Someone who writes greeting cards.”

Nat and Armand

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

Let’s talk about rejection.

When I said 100 Interviews would be a book a little while ago, I wrote that I had signed with a literary agency. The next step is to sell the book proposal to a publisher. So far, that has not happened.

In an effort to understand how I can improve, I told my very sweet literary agent to forward me all passes from editors and publishers she gets regarding 100 Interviews.

Last night, I had a panic attack in bed. Heaving. Crying. Physical pain.

In my inbox were three pages of rejections.

Three pages of people saying my writing wasn’t good enough, that they didn’t believe in 100 Interviews, that they didn’t “get” it. Three pages of people taking something I work so hard on, reading it and saying, “meh.”

You’re not supposed to take it personally. But I do. I am a person.

“You get the rejections first,” my agent soothed. “Anyone who is interested in it has to get it through sales and their bosses. It takes time.”

And I get that. I do. And I apologized to her; for being a baby, for not understand the process, for worrying every day that it isn’t going to sell and everyone who reads this page is going to suddenly and collectively realize that I suck.

I’m never happy when something good happens because my first thought is: “This could all go away in an instant.”

As is usual with this project, it’s fitting that the people I talked to yesterday, Nat and Armand Prisco, are creative types.

Nat and Armand are a young couple that runs their own greeting card business called “Uncooked” out of a rented office space in Soho. The cards are quirky, slice-of-life deals with nonsensical, yet sweet phrases and cute, simplistic artwork. Some of their writing goes a bit off the rails. (One ‘love’ card reads: you’re so beautiful i want to rip off your face and nail it to my wall so i can look at you whenever i want.) It’s certainly not for everyone.

Armand explains, “It’s called ‘Uncooked’ because it’s raw, a little undone, not as perfect.”

“It’s the stuff you blurt out without thinking and then, can’t ever take back,” Nat adds.

Nat, with bright blond hair done up in a side ponytail, is a copywriter with a knack for the off-color or absurd. Her husband, Armand, has dark hair and eyebrows and is an artist and illustrator with an adorable, clean sensibility to his drawings. They’re a ridiculously good-looking match.

There’s also a lovely stamp of independence surrounding their “Uncooked” creations - a do-it-yourself and love what you’re producing to-hell-with-anyone-else feel.

And they have literally said, “to hell with anyone else.”

As a huge ‘Mad Men’ fan, I’m stunned when Nat and Armand tell me they met in the early ’00s while working at McCann Erickson, one of the world’s most prestigious advertising agencies. It’s no Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, but it’s no cardboard box either.

Nat was a 20-year-old summer intern from New York University who got hired as a copywriter (a highly unusual move for the company) and Armand was a secretary who got promoted to artist.

“She was so aggressive,” Armand says, still sounding a bit awestruck by Nat’s quick climb. “She would steal briefs from the printer and walk into meetings and present them and no one knew who she was.”

The company loved her brash confidence so much, they asked her to drop out of school and work for them. She did.

At the same time, they were promoting Armand and the two started working together as a creative pair. They already knew they liked each other because they had been desk neighbors during Nat’s three-month internship. They started talking after Armand threw a rubber chicken at her head as a joke. Another time, he dumped the contents of his desk over her head. Nat was charmed.

But eventually, the rigid and conservative nature of their workplace got to them.

Through-and-through, Nat and Armand, as individuals and as a team, were a couple of weirdos. They didn’t want to make traditional, boring commercials. They wanted to create work that was on the stranger, perhaps creepier, side. With big-name accounts like AVIS, Black and Decker, environmental defense and Spirit Air, there wasn’t much room for experimentation.

“Did you ever get in trouble?” I ask.

Armand laughs, “All the time. They were always scared to execute any new ideas.”

Most notably, the two spent $1.2 million shooting a series of three spots for Rubbermaid in 2003 involving putting a little person inside a large rubber container. The objective was that the small actor’s feet stuck out of the bottom, thus personifying the tupperware containers.

“They were hilarious,” Nat says. “Everybody loved them but they thought they were too creepy. The head of Rubbermaid hated them because they were too dark and weird.”

“Now, things have changed,” Armand says, noting that McCann Erickson is just getting into viral content for advertising. “Now, they would have run them.”

Not being mainstream has benefited them in their “Uncooked” business, and given them some great opportunities, but often interested mainstream parties chicken out and shy away in the end.

For example, Nat tells me they were working on an animated TV show for the Disney Channel called “Uncooked Land” for two years before recently being told the show wasn’t going to air. Focus groups had found “Uncooked Land” to be “too weird.”

They’ve both adopted a sort of “it happens” and “it was a good experience” attitude about the whole thing where I would have been incredibly frustrated. But I can see that the TV show wasn’t their main interest, though they’ve said they will shop it elsewhere, when their card business is so beloved on the Internet. I can relate. When the mainstream doesn’t quite “get” it, it’s nice to find solace in those that do.

Before Nat and Armand decided to dedicate themselves completely to “Uncooked,” the pair also freelanced for MTV, creating short promo animations. One features a tap-dancing ham. They worked there for four years to bring in extra money but quit recently to devote everything to “Uncooked.”

Beyond a card company being practical because it initially had low costs, the couple was drawn to the freedom of being in charge of their own product endgame.

“We were bored,” Armand says. “We wanted to do our own thing and for a writer and an artist working together, there’s not much you can do other than posters or things like that.”

“Those stupid skills,” Nat laughs. “So not practical.”

They started out in 2004 with 40 card designs and a little booth at a stationary show at the Javits Center on 34th street. The show had 5,000 different independent card companies. Armand guesses at least 3,000 of them were new that year and that 90 percent would close after the show. “Uncooked” was not one of them.

“We just put shit up on the wall and got this amazing response,” he says. “We did a year of research and went to card stores to see what works and what doesn’t work. What voids there were in the market.”

Soon, their cards were being sold in Urban Outfitters, Borders and a slew of smaller stationary shops. Their amazing ideas were even being ripped off by other companies, in what both say is a bizarrely competitive greeting card market.

“Maybe these cards aren’t stupid,” Nat says they finally thought.

“I always had really weird ideas,” she says. One of the ‘love’ cards reads: you’re so cute i want to yank off your head, stick it in a jar and keep it next to my computer.

“Most cards are so generic and that doesn’t work for this,” Armand says. “It doesn’t have a distinct voice or look or a unique point of view. We want to appeal to the masses but in a unique, different way. We can also push the edginess because the look is so innocent and simple that it takes the sting off.”

He uses his laptop to show me a ‘weird ones’ card that reads: i’m so sorry i forgot about your birthday. my greedy hamster put me on such a strict diet, i can’t seem to think straight lately. And another that says: what’s great about birthdays is that for one whole day, people have to be nice to you. even the people who think you’re a slut because of how you dress.

“We don’t want everyone to get it,” Nat says. “Because then, that means it sucks. People have a way of talking that we want the card line to capture. It’s the way friends talk to each other or how girls talk to a guy without being too mushy or guys talk to a girl without being a loser.”

Armand smirks as she talks. There’s a fun dynamic between the two where Nat is a bit more outrageous and Armand seems simultaneously amused, captivated and protective of it. For instance, when I ask about learning the right business practices from scratch, Armand says before “Uncooked” hired sales representatives, he and Nat would go out to stores themselves to sell the cards.

“But if someone didn’t like them, we’d get mad and frustrated because they’re our babies,” he says, smiling. “And then, Nat would say something obscene and we’d never be able to go back to that store.”

Looking over my rejection emails, I don’t blame her and I almost wish I had a Nat who’d give these publishing houses a swift verbal kick in the balls for me.

Right now, “Uncooked” has a two-month-old blog, animated cards, magnets, a gum brand and over 10,000 Facebook fans. I’m impressed by the number and when they tell me they get orders from the middle of nowhere Canada and from soldiers stationed in the middle of the Indian Ocean — one fighter pilot was such a fan that Nat and Armand sent him 300 free cards to distribute to his friends, so they could mail them home to their families.

And the only person whose opinion really matters to one of them, is the other one.

“I know if she doesn’t like it then it sucks,” Armand says. “If one of us doesn’t like an idea, that idea is dead.”

“Do you think mainstream card companies will always exist?” I ask. “Or will they be phased out by more creative people?”

“There are so many people in the world that are just bland,” Armand replies. “They need things to be in the middle but it’s just bad. Plus, people always think they can write greeting cards, but they spend five minutes and then expect it to be genius. Her skills,” he says, gesturing to Nat, “didn’t come over night.”

Nat nods, “They developed over time into a style that could be mine,” she says. “I’m just fortunate that I finally found something where it translated well.”