Johnny Cupcakes is a t-shirt brand based on a symbolic cupcake. This Tweet shows founder Johnny Earle wearing the company logo of a cupcake and crossbones.
Here’s the company’s first bakery-inspired store, located in Boston.
The stores look and smell like a cupcakery, but no cupcakes are sold. Except when they are, for purposes of an April Fool’s joke.
As Earle told the CSUN student newspaper,
I was working in a record shop in Boston, Mass., and I received a tremendous amount of nicknames. Since my name’s Johnny–people would call me Johnny Appleseed. When I was late for work they’d call me Johnny-come-lately, and Johnny Cupcakes came out of nowhere. I put it on a shirt as a joke and I wore it to work and all of the slightly miserable customers that never make eye contact with me started laughing and saying, “What is that? Where can I get one of those T-shirts?”
So I started making more T-shirts and poking fun at pop culture and replacing popular icons with cupcakes. Whether it be the Statue of Liberty holding a cupcake instead or a torch, or a plane dropping cupcakes instead of bombs. It was just a fun little project that I was doing and it started to blow up.
Q&A with Johnny Cupcakes
Ranked No. 1 in Bloomberg’s Best Entrepreneurs 25 and Under for 2008, Earle grew the company from a joke to a multimillion-dollar enterprise.
This month is the 14th anniversary of the original Boston store and the company designed commemorative shirts for the occasion. The collection includes one with metallic 14-karat gold ink, pictured at top right.
The gold shirt is an apt representation of this Year of Optimal Vision and Cupcakes of Gold, as my cupcakology practice is so themed. Cheers to cupcakes, gold, and their rich symbolism.
Andrea Adleman | Cupcakologist 