Targeting

Yesterday, I made a powerful and disturbing discovery at Target. And I added to a long list of evidence that basic advertising does work.

First, a little background: I am a bit of a fashion whore, and I am often (if not always) looking to make sure I get the best deal possible on anything I buy. However, I won't skimp on quality when it comes to most things. I am willing to pay a reasonable amount more for something that won't break or fall apart quickly.

So for the past few weeks, I've noticed that Target is promoting the Champion line of athletic apparel on television. The ad I kept seeing was the blood-red, crudely animated, drawn sequence of a brother running straight towards the camera in Champion gear, with Eric B. and Rakim's "Don't Sweat the Technique" playing in the background. It barely registered the first time, and I didn't think much of it -- but the fact that a Rakim song was playing made the ad stick in my mind.

However, once I started biking again last week, I realized that the dry tech shirts I brought back from South Africa might not be enough to handle the load.

[For those who don't know, "dry tech" shirts are made of a synthetic fabric that wicks away moisture from the skin and allows it to evaporate more easily into the air. These shirts are often the lightest and most breathable shirts you will find; they keep your skin drier, and they don't get clammy and/or clingy the way cotton does. Because it dries fast, the fabric can be machine- or hand-washed and hung to dry in a matter of hours. Companies like Nike and Adidas were among the first to offer this fabric to the public, but now just about every athletic manufacturer offers the stuff with a different name. Nike calls it Dri-Fit; Adidas calls it Clima-Cool or Clima-Lite...you get the idea. In fact Under Armour has become a hit product by producing an entire clothing line around breathable 'moisture management' fabric.]

Anyway, I first discovered the stuff when I bought an Adidas workout shirt from Marshalls. Because I've always produced fountains of sweat whenever I exert myself even a litle bit, it was love at first wear. But I found that the shirts rarely found their way to discount clothing stores, and that the regular price was often prohibitive. After all, I wasn't about to start spending $30 per t-shirt.

Then Under Armour came out, and I discovered the magical world of dry-tech underwear. This was a monumental step, though an expensive one; they cost $18-$20 a pop. Only a couple of other designers dabbled in this area (DKNY and Calvin Klein), and their dry wear options were just as ludicrously expensive. I bought a few nonetheless.

All these factors are among the reasons why I brought back 4 muscle shirts and 3 t-shirts made with breathable, sweat-wicking synthetic from South Africa. They weren't the highest quality, but they were dirt-cheap (6 USD).

Last night, I discovered that all the previous limitations have changed.

As I said earlier, the commercial led me back to Target. I also rememberd going to Target a few months ago, and walking past a clothing rackwhich was home to what appeared to be dry-tech t-shirts. But since I never shopped at Target for clothes, I just kept walking. But seeing the Champion brand, and remembering what I'd sen before, le me to think that perhaps Target might be a good source for this stuff. And I was right.

Not only does Target carry Champion-brand dry-fit shirts -- they also carry a couple of other, more ghetto brands as well. All of them were lighter in weight and higher-quality than what I'd brought back from overseas. And they only cost $10 to $15 bucks each!!! On top of that, Champion also made dry-tech underwear, which was shocking considering how few clothing lines exist in this area even today. Again, they cost about $10 - half of what I was accustomed to paying. the Rockville location was picked clean of a lot of this stuff; I actually had to go to the Gaithersburg Target to find the stuff I ended up with.

[There is one downside to the dry-tech shirts: you can't really wear them as undershirts to formal clothes. The reason? Simple. If you sweat a lot, your sweat would end up getting transferred from your t-shirt to the outside...which would result in your dress shirt getting a lot of the sweat from your undershirt. Until they start making dress shirts out of this stuff, I'm probably going to have to stick with cotton tees when wearing collared shirts.]

Then I made an even more intriguing discovery: Target actually carries decent clothes.

They had shirts with velvet patterns, a whole line of rock-band shirts and hats, and a shockingly large section of those trendy shirts you see advertised on Fark (like the "Vote for Pedro" t-shirt from Napoleon Dynamite). The band shirts were selling for about $15; I'd seen similar shirts at concerts and music stores for $20 to $30. They even had dry-tech visors like the one I got in Ann Arbor, though not nearly as nice.

Though the selections weren't totally cutting-edge, they were certainly more mainstream and crowd-pleasing that a lot of more trendy offerings at expensive boutiques. The more I looked around, the more I realized that very few of their clothing items would looked out of place on a rack at Macy's, or another designer store. Much of it was actually nicer-looking that a lot of the stuff I normally sort through at supposedly nicer stores. Since I am poor at the moment, I stuck to my mission of obtaining workout gear. But it was hard.

I had always figured that Target couldn't possibly have clothes that were quality enough or stylin' enough to me to bother with. Now it appears that I will have to re-evaluate that basic premise in a big way.

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