DUTCH TULIP FINANCIAL (DTF.NYC) SS20 COLLECTION.
Building genuine connection with today’s youth with culturally relevant products We believe it takes more than lazily designed slogan t-shirts to truly connect with today’s young generation who are equipped with discerning tastes. That’s why we adopted a more conceptual approach to our messaging – creating an imaginary finance firm “Dutch Tulip Financial” upon which we develop visual scenarios - to deliver them in designs that are thought-provoking yet sophisticated. We will donate a portion of the proceeds to – CREW, a watchdog non-profit organization whose goal is to reduce the influence of money in politics.
DTFPost (DTF stands for Down To Fix) is the media side of Dutch Tulip Financial. It is a newsletter service that covers the issues that we believe we shouldn’t let slide in a voice that’s familiar to our generation. DTFPost newsletter will serve as a tool to disseminate information about the subject matters we deal with to the youth. We have also prepared a robust resources page that will work as a knowledge base where our readers will find key articles and reports and a list of national and local organizations that would help them get involved as active members of society.
BRAND PHILOSOPHY.
Dutch Tulip Financial aims to offer elevated societal commentary by presenting storylines about social issues where the firm plays the role of facilitator using clothing as a medium. Inspired by the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the first financial bubble, the name of this fictitious institution is meant to serve as an allegorical device and on the surface, convey a façade of import and legitimacy. The quick rise and the subsequent burst of the bubble and the transient life of tulips are meant to represent the exploitive nature of extreme capitalism and the volatility of hype culture. We also wanted to balance out the seriousness of the imaginary firm’s name and add an ironic layer to the brand by utilizing the acronym DTF and its low-brow connotation for our online presence and branding (our URL is WWW.DTF.NYC). We adopted the event-driven approaches from the finance world as our objective is to capture the reverberations arising out of the issues we are facing such as student debt crisis, off-shore tax evasion, and exploitive tactics of fossil fuel companies, and materialize our views about them via our products in a unique design language. On the flip-side, I propose scenarios where money is the accelerator for new developments that would advance the human race as well and you can find more examples of this approach in our upcoming 2020 designs.
SS20 COLLECTION.
10K CHALLENGE.
This t-shirt is a play on marathon participation t-shirts with sponsor logos worn by corporate people we see all the time in the city. However, with this particular t-shirt, all the logos are by companies (real or fake) that exemplified corporate greed at the highest level. Stratton Oakmont, the brokerage company Jordan Belfort ran and became infamous by the movie The Wolf of Wall Street is the main sponsor of this imaginary marathon. Other sponsors include - MADF Securities founded by Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, Pierce & Pierce, the firm where Patrick Bateman worked at in American Psycho, J T Marlin, the brokerage firm that was the background for the movie Boiler Room. Dutch Tulip Financial is also participating as a corporate sponsor and for this t-shirt and we used the neon safety color worn by construction workers for this design to amplify the irony even more.
