Jesus Jeans: The Can't Miss Business Plan

Sometimes, I just detest the Christian Church®. By that I do not mean the actual, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. (It’s pretty hard to find these days, anyway.) What I mean is that worldwide business empire, that shameless promoter of all things Jesus®, that producer of insipid “praise” music, that re-seller of cheap t-shirts, bumper-stickers, feel-good, thought-free “devotionals,” that war-mongering, swaggering, American-flag-and-cross-lapel-pin-wearing, pseudo-religion that calls itself “Christian.” You know the one.

This time what they’ve done is stolen my business idea. My intern, Dylan, an incredibly bright young man who’s about to go off to college in the mountains of Western North Carolina, and I developed this fool-proof business plan last Friday. We had a can’t-miss product line, a brilliant marketing campaign, a-take-no-prisoners ad campaign. We knew our market, we knew our supply chain, we knew our multi-million-dollar CEO (co-CEO’s, actually) salaries. We didn’t know our VC’s yet, but, it wasn’t Monday, yet. All things, in time, dear stockholders, all things in time.

What we had was this: a line of denim pants, called “Jesus Jeans,” made in China and marketed through U.S. clothing retailers like Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters. We would launch a guerilla marketing campaign through well-placed product distribution to skaters, mall-hangers and college town coffee drinkers. We would be rich, in no time. Or at least by Christmas.

The jeans themselves would be nothing special, except for the great label. It would read “Jesus Jeans™. Savior Ass.” The inside label (which might have to be affixed after import, thus allowing us to claim “Made in the USA” status) would read “This garment made by godless Communists for Christians to proudly proclaim their faith.”

We’d have great tie-ins at Christian bookstores, Christian radio shows, full page ads in Charisma and Christianity Today. We’d get interviewed on the 700 Club and TBN. We’d pay for product placement in the next Left Behind book, where Rayford Steele would cut down a legion of Nicoale Carpathia’s demonic hordes while wearing our jeans.

But then we Googled it. And we found out that somebody already did it. Better yet, we found the Jesus Clothing Company and 14,199,000 other people hawking Jesus clothing (I’m not making it up, try it.). But here’s the best part: the Jesus Jean logo was rejected by the UK patent office “because the name is deemed ‘morally offensive’.”

Apparently the UK patent folks never Googled “jesus clothing” because they would have found out that Christians only find homosexuality morally offensive, not the attachment of their Lord’s name to pieces of cheap clothing and its hyper-promotion via every known marketing channel in the universe.

So, folks, sorry there’s not going to be an IPO. We’ve been dotcommed, before we even had our dot com.

Wait…. How about “Satan Jeans.™?” Now there’s a way to lose your ass. I like it, don’t you?