Most recipes come from books, but John Earle found his in the form of a nickname, and has since cooked it into a successful clothing line. Known as “Johnny Cupcake,” the 24-year-old entrepreneur used hard work and dedication to turn his alias into a hip new clothing line, which shares the name, and a successful store that opened on Newbury Street in May 2006.
“I started everything as a complete joke when I was working at Newbury Comics in Braintree,” he said. “I had a bunch of random nicknames, the name Johnny is really easy to throw something at the end of … like Appleseed and … Cupcake.”
At the same time, Earle was learning the art of T-shirt-making while interning at a silk-screen shop.
“I was going to make T-shirts for my band, and I thought it would be funny to make a couple that said Johnny Cupcake,” he said. “I wore it at work and everyone kept asking about them.”
Earle played around with different designs, and stumbled upon what is now the most recognizable feature of his product line – a cupcake over crossbones.
“It was kind of poking fun with pop culture,” he said, “where the cupcake is over the cross bones, especially since the skull and crossbones were really popular at that time.”
The idea caught on, and soon people were coming to Newbury Comics looking for Johnny Cupcake T-shirts, which Earle conveniently stored in the trunk of his 1989 Toyota Camry.
“I would pretend to go to the bathroom, so I could get them in the trunk of my car,” he said.
Lucas Dunn, a long-time friend of Earle’s and now the manager of the Johnny Cupcakes store and headquarters in Hull, Mass., attributed part of the popularity of Johnny Cupcakes to the curiosity the name and logo evokes.
“I think John really did something brilliant, and I think it had real effectiveness,” Dunn said. “Look at the name Johnny Cupcake, it’s applicable to every person. It’s really an unbelievably catchy name. Even more so, the trademark logo is so successful. People just love it. Seeing the hard versus soft, the cross bones and the cupcake. And it’s nothing more than what you see, but it still sparks peoples’ curiosity.”
The intrigue of the Johnny Cupcakes product line spread mainly through what the creator called “an unbelievable amount of word-of-mouth.
“One person would tell 10 people, 10 people would tell 100 people and it would just spread,” he said.
Earle also used his music industry connections to get his T-shirts featured on the backs of some of the industry’s top artists-including OutKast’s Andre 3000 and members of the band AFI. According to Johnny, a model on the first season of Bravo’s fashion show Project Runway also sponsored one of the shirts. The shirts got so popular that Johnny Cupcake would even outsell Johnny’s band’s merchandise at some of the band’s gigs.
While Johnny was on tour, his mother and sister were producing the T-shirts at their home in Hull, but the unanticipated popularity of the product line made it hard for the two to keep up with the increasing demand. In 2001, Johnny decided to leave the band and dedicate his career to the Johnny Cupcakes line.
“I realized I couldn’t half ass both things, when I had to do 110 percent for one thing,” he said. “So I made the decision to leave the band and do Johnny Cupcakes instead.”
When Earle decided to dedicate himself to his clothing line, he immediately began searching for a way into the extremely competitive business.
His first steps were a Las Vegas trade show -where store owners from Japan, Australia, Italy and England picked up his shirts for their stores – and an online store he ran from home.
“Things kept growing every day,” he said. “It went from the trunk of my car, to my house. Then it spread out all throughout the house. The whole house was covered with boxes. Eventually my dad even built half of my attic to stock things in.”
After running out of storage space in his house, Earle took an old friend up on an offer to store his merchandise in a garage down the street from his house.
While Earle and his father made over the garage with the intention to merely store the products sold online and via other stores around the country, the garage eventually became the first storefront for Johnny Cupcakes.
Although Earle’s original intent was not to start a store out of the product line, it wasn’t long after he started the store in Hull that Johnny brought his shirts to Boston.
Earle describes his decision to start another store, this one at 279 Newbury, as “completely impulsive-I saw it was available and all these ideas popped into my head.”
While the decision to start the store may have been impulsive, according to Dunn a lot of preparations were made to ensure the store fit the dynamic of Newbury Street.
“I honestly think his product really became itself in the past year,” Dunn said. “We’ve really started getting to know exactly where we wanted to be and how we wanted to look. We became a lot more picky and special. That definitely helped us come into this culture on Newbury.
“You have to have it be perfect and I think it’s the biggest step we’ve seen,” he continued. “You have to come there ready with a perfect product. Newbury is pretty much the part where people are shopping. You’re there with the Rugby’s and the Lauren’s, you better make sure you have the same level of product.”
The 600 people who waited in line for hours the morning of the store’s grand opening were rewarded with homemade cupcakes for their patience.
When the customers were allowed inside the store they found it modeled after a bakery, complete with antique machinery, including a dough mixer and an oven.
The store was so well designed, in fact, that Earle said many of the customers on Newbury Street come in “thinking it’s a bakery, and they leave with something and come back for more.”
While much of the clientele at Johnny Cupcakes on Newbury is composed of wanderers or dessert seekers, according to Stacey Lu, an employee at the store, the products also seem to be particularly appealing to members of the “hipster” scene and people in their late teens and early twenties.
“A lot come in because he has limited edition T-shirts and that brings a New York style theme to Boston,” Lu said.
Earle said a couple of customers drove nine hours from Toronto, Canada just to snag their limited edition T-shirts opening day.
Although he briefly considered the idea of spreading his shirts everywhere, Earle also thought: “‘I don’t like it when I buy a shirt for myself and I see two people at the mall wearing the same one.'”
After realizing many of his clients also valued originality in their wardrobe, Johnny chose to make all of his T-shirts limited editions.
“I’d write numbers on the shirts, up to 200 and that would be it,” he said. “People were willing to spend double the price just to have something that only 200 people have. Everyone has a little bit of a collector in the back of their head.”
While Earle is looking into starting stores in London, England, and Santa Monica, California, he maintains that he doesn’t want to open too many stores for fear of “spreading the product too thin.
“If there are too many near each other, they’ll lose value,” he said.
For the same reason, he has turned down offers from Urban Outfitters and other big chain stores interested in selling his shirts. “I know it keeps growing, but I don’t want it to grow too much … People like what no one else has.”
Abiding by his theory that if “you’re going to be a bear, be a grizzly bear,” Earle continues to put 110 percent into anything he does, and advises fellow entrepreneurs to do the same.
“Ninety percent of people do nothing with their ideas,” he said. “I’m just real observant and really picky. I never went to school for business. The idea or luck has nothing to do with it. You have to have the drive. Not be in a relationship at the time, put more money into it, pull all-nighters, be willing and you have to put 110 percent in anything you do.”