Reggie’s Ad Campaign

I guess you could say its all my fault.

My wife had opened up a little store to sell lingerie, and before we knew it things were so busy she was seriously considering expanding to have locations across the country.

Her business model was simple. While stores like Victoria’s secret tended to cater to the already beautiful, she focused on helping the less than perfect be as good as they could be.

Small breasted women who wanted to be a bit bigger, Women who had lost a breast to cancer, the larger woman who needs a little slimming, these were some of her best clients, and they all swore by her stuff.

And because my wife has an amazingly open attitude, she also got a small amount of men coming into the store as well. Every kind of guy from the one-timer looking for a costume to full time crossdressers, drag queens, and even people who were transitioning came to try her wares.

And thanks to her commitment to making shopping at the store stress-free, all of these left promising to come back soon.

Many of her customers came from great distances, and some wondered why my wife didnt use the internet as so many other “speciality” shops did.

She’d say, “You cant really tell how something will fit on you by looking at how it fits a model in a catalog. And even having your measurements isnt enough. You have to try stuff on, and that means coming into the store in person.”

Still, the number of requests from out-of-town customers nagged at her, and finally she decided the best idea was to franchise - to get people in other cities to run stores in her name.

She found customers who would love the chance to be store managers, and soon she was ready to open up the new stores.

And that’s where I made the big mistake.

I figured she would need an advertising blitz to celebrate the occasion, and found a firm willing to come up with a couple of TV commercials to help briing awareness to the new stores.

They came up with one ad that showed a pretty woman in her underwear getting ready for her day. With pretty undergarments on, she had the confidence to ace a presentation at her work, go out with her girlfriends and dance, and generally take life by the horns.

What made it different was the company claimed to be able to put a subliminal message in the ad, or in fact two separate messages. One would be directed at women, and would go something like this “You feel envy of this woman, and want to be her. If you dressed in her clothes you would feel as good as she does.”

The other was directed at men, and went “You find this woman attractive, and will encourage your significant other to dress like her, and be turned on if they do.”

I wasnt too sure about the subliminals, but signed off on it, and the ads ran the week before the stores opened.

The stores opened, and did pretty good, but pretty soon there were some interesting calls from the managers.

They had expected the odd man, but it seemed that the majority of the people coming in the door were men.

What women came were often girlfriends or wives of the men, which was even stranger. What little we knew about cross-dressing told us most guys dont share it with the women in their lives.

But we both shrugged, and didnt think much about it, assuming things would get back to normal soon.

But it didnt. In fact, it got worse. The number of cross-dressing men seemed to be growing daily, until they represented a significant part of the population.

Laws protecting gender expression were rushed through legislatures around the country, and pretty soon it was obvious why. A significant percentage of politicians seemed to have been “infected” and were soon dressing like women even on the job.

The same thing happened in many churches, as pastors and preachers seemed to fall over each other preaching tolerance while dressed in women’s clothes.

So our world has changed, and who knows how long it will last, and its all my fault.

But is it really all that bad?