FIELD OF DREAMS: Supima plants its cotton in SoHo

NEW YORK — It takes a lot to make a New Yorker look twice, but Supima pulled it off—with shock value to spare—when it “planted” a cotton field here overnight and turned a downtown parking lot into one of Manhattan’s most-photographed tourist attractions.

Bright and early on Friday, March 14, the opening day of the Supima pop-up store in SoHo, New Yorkers woke up to see an entire field of 1,000 picturesque cotton plants sprouting their fluffy white bolls in what had previously been a barren parking lot on East Houston Street, one of the city’s major arteries, between Lafayette and Crosby Streets, one of the prime entrances to the SoHo and NoHo shopping districts.

“People couldn’t believe their eyes,” Buxton Midyette, Supima’s vice president of marketing, says about the day-long event. “Tourists were posing in front of it. Commuters were leaning out of their cars. Cellphone cameras came out. Jaws dropped. It was one of those magical New York moments . . . people were doing doubletakes.”

Here’s how it happened:

Minutes after the 10 p.m. finish of Thursday night’s opening party held at the Supima pop-up store at 72 Greene Street (for more on that party, see supimacotton.blogspot.com/2008/03/good-opening-move-supima-stores.html) and mere hours before the official opening of Supima’s first-ever retail venture at 11 a.m. on Friday morning, three of Supima’s top brass—chairman Jeff Elder, president Jesse Curlee, and Midyette—left the event and headed straight to the nearby empty lot, where they worked until 4 a.m. shoveling dirt and transforming the erstwhile vacant lot.

“There was a lot of sweat equity involved,” Midyette admits, “but that’s authentic to our brand.”

Midyette, who’d had hatched the idea for the unadvertised promotion months before as a hook to the pop-up store, explains how the Supima crew managed to get mature cotton “growing” in Manhattan in mid-March: “A grower had reserved the plants for us . . . he’d dedicated an entire field to this promotion.”

Together with Eric Dorfman of EdMedia, the co-producer of the Supima store nearby, Midyette had arranged for a ton or two of dirt to be dumped in the parking lot as soon as the store’s opening party was over. Then the crew got down to work spreading dirt and creating rows that would simulate an authentic field in the West or Southwest, where all of Supima’s premium, long staple cotton originates.

By midnight, people coming out of the nearby Bleecker Street subway stop were already stopping to quiz the crew about cotton.

Just before dawn, when the planting was finally done, a huge banner with the Supima logo was posted on the wall over the field—and a security guard was posted so that nothing would happen to the precious cotton plants.

But Supima didn’t stop there.

Passersby were also treated to bonus bouquets of cotton, from a couple who—starting promptly at 8:30 a.m.—began assembling bouquets of cotton branches while working out of the same kind of vendor’s cart that New Yorkers usually associate with hot pretzels and hot dogs. Anyone who asked got a bouquet of beautiful, fluffy cotton wrapped in cellophane, complete with an oversized Supima hangtag directing them to the Supima store nearby.

Before the promotion ended, at nightfall on Friday, hundreds of bouquets had been given away.

And hundreds of professional and amateur photographers had documented the day-long promotion for the month-long pop-up store (which closes its doors on April 13).

The cost of the promotion? Less than $10,000.

The value of the publicity? Somewhere in the millions.

“No one did not react to it,” says Midyette, “and in New York that’s really something.”