Fashion Wire Daily
Dooker: One to Watch
by Maya Singer


The tale of the tee-shirt line Dooker begins, refreshingly enough, with a love story: Former TBWA\Chiat\Day wunderkind Doug Jaeger broke up with his girlfriend, kicked her out of the apartment, and started seeing a lot of Matthew Spangler. They just…connected.

“Well, it’s funny, because my girlfriend had actually introduced the two of us,” Jaeger recalls, “but I guess she suspected something right away, because she’d never leave us alone together. Which meant, you know, we couldn’t really ‘bro-down.’” continues the Dooker founder and designer. “So we’d end up talking about work,” he concludes, a little wistfully, passing a smile off to Spangler.

“Here’s where you have to visualize the two of us running through a field of wildflowers,” Spangler inserts. “With open arms.”

Indeed, in almost no time, Spangler had moved into Jaeger’s apartment. And together, they’re living happycorp ever after. It even says “happycorp” right on the buzzer. Which makes sense, in fact, since Jaeger has converted that old apartment of his into happycorp central: Dooker, a “division” of happycorp, has its studio and showroom there; meanwhile, a creative services client types merrily at the conference table in what used to be a kitchen. Jaeger’s photographs hang all around the space. There’s talk of film production and a temp agency for musician-types who moonlight as illustrators. An indie fashion showroom. The connective tissue between all the happycorp projects is that everything Jaeger and Spangler work on must, on some level, “help improve the amount of happiness in the world.”

Take the Dooker shirts, for example. Though at first glance the political and cultural content of Jaeger’s designs – a bomber dropping TV sets, montages of corporate logos, revolvers, pills and smokestacks trussed up in stars and stripes – might not seem, well, cheerful, Jaeger is quick to note that cheerful isn’t really the point.

“When we talk about happiness, what we mean is – what’s going to make the world a better place? How can people be healthier, more fulfilled, more at peace?” He holds up a beige-toned tee shirt from the original men’s collection, showing the names of Texan cities superimposed on a map of Iraq. “The tee shirts are meant to provoke conversation,” he explains, “and maybe that conversation starts something happening. And little by little…”

If this sounds like the usual grass-roots boilerplate about knocking on doors and one vote making all the difference, well, Jaeger has reason to be optimistic. At Chiat\Day he was something of a prodigy when it came to design, illustration and interactive initiatives; his job was cushy and his accounts included marquee names such as Absolut. Nevertheless, he cut and ran last November and launched with a friend (Spangler came on board later.) Not even a year later, Dooker’s tees for men are flying off the shelves at trend-setting men’s stores in eight U.S. markets. And back at happycorp, new plots are being hatched. A women’s collection – entirely hand-stencilled and hand-spray-painted by Jaeger himself, at the moment – is ready to go. There’s the experimental-stage “Mullet” – a traditional broadcloth button-down in the front, screened with a Dooker design on the back; Spangler, adhering to company policy, puts one on before leaving for an appointment.

“Basically, nothing’s final until we’ve gotten at least eight unsolicited compliments while walking around New York in a new design,” he explains. “We’re getting up there on this one.”

Naturally, Jaeger and Spangler also put the creative service talents they’ve sold to clients such as Flavorpill to use on Dooker. The latest innovation in the men’s collection is to partner with unsigned and emerging New York City bands, and make a shirt somehow based on the lyrics to one of the band’s songs. A shirt called “Gossip,” for example, was inspired by a song of the same name by a Brooklyn hip-hop group called Trilateral, and a CD single and lyric sheet are enclosed in the hang tag.

“We see it as a different approach to ‘merch,’” Jaeger explains. “We scout the bands ourselves, pretty much, and ideally they already have some kind of loyal following in the city. So we get promoted to those fans, while people who are out shopping at, say, Motley in Boston, and who just happen to like the shirt, get exposed to this great new band. Again: The point is, everyone’s happy.

There’s something flummoxing about hanging out in the happycorp think tank. Jaeger and Spangler seem to possess the Midas touch of cool: The Dooker tees are cool, the new handouts for flavorpill are cool, even the ‘hey, kids, let’s start a corporation!’ ethos of the place is, in its way, cool. But no one involved exudes any of the hauteur we’ve come to expect from the hip. Jaeger and Spangler have an unembarrassed passion when it comes to their ideas and their ideals. There’s even something sweetly dorkish about the bustling enthusiasm of the place, which extends to the premise of the happycorp itself. Make the world happier? That’s fruitcake talk. And for crying out loud, the logo is a pink and white happy face! And for some reason, when a pile of logo stickers is handed to you, you want to stick them all over your body! And start laughing really, really hard. If this is the new cool, the world is ready.