Mother launches e-commerce site with bullet-resistant leisurewear

Mother today launched its "Mother Goods" venture, a website and Instagram account that will showcase a range of products designed to change how people think about and behave around specific issues in the world. 

The independent agency revealed that it was launching "Mother Goods" as part of its new Make Our Children Proud platform in June. It intends to seek and develop product ideas that create progress for the world based on social and cultural issues, from gun control to LGBTQ+, women's rights and social media addiction. While some will be available for retail, others are created simply to highlight causes and issues.

In addition to including previous Mother ventures, such as its "luxury diaper" made as a stunt in collaboration with Goop and Baby2Baby to highlight the U.S. tax on diapers, the "Mother Goods" site includes several new products.

Kickback Lounge Wear is a range of bullet-resistant leisurewear designed "to protect you from guns in the comfort of your home." Designed to highlight the inertia around gun violence in the U.S., the range includes a bathrobe "lined with the finest ballistic aramid fiber body plates, giving you the protection and peace of mind you need in a country where you can get shot by anyone, anywhere, anytime." Other designs in the range include slippers and a lawn chair. 

"Gun violence is obviously both a sensitive and complex issue, especially here in the US—though recently too with a major tragic incident in the UK,” said Charlie McKittrick, chief strategy officer at Mother U.S., referring to the killing of a 9-year-old girl in Liverpool last month. “There are people with strong opinions on both sides of the issue. Like any good political strategy, the people in-between (concerned but inactive) seemed to hold the potential for greatest incremental impact and movement. We asked ourselves, what was a new way we could battle that inertia? How could we get people to see the issue through a new lens provocative enough to get them off the fence and do something?”

While Kickback is initially just a prototype, Mother plans for it to go on sale in the future. It is the start of what the agency intends to be a full range of products highlighting gun violence.

Another new product, "Cûf," highlights our obsession with smartphones. It consists of a rose gold phone case, to which a handcuff is attached. Priced at $1,000, it's promoted on the site in satirical language as "a luxury handcuff phone case that lets the real people in your life know immediately what they might only otherwise learn gradually, painfully or if ever, notification by notification, over the course of a relationship that decomposes slowly and then all at once, just like all the others: that anything your phone says or does at any moment is more important than they are."

Mother will initially make a run of 10 phone cases, in collaboration with a New York diamond district producer; as well as rose gold, they will come in gold and platinum. 

McKittrick described it as "a statement about our smartphone obsession."

"The customer can use it perhaps as a self-aware acknowledgment, give it as a gift or simply as a practical solution if you have slippery hands," he added. "Rose Gold is kind of a homage to our favorite “finish” which once was the mass premium tech hardware choice of any manufacturer—why is rose gold not a thing anymore?"

Other products on the site from previous Mother campaigns include Blood is Blood, a line of blood-ink products made with gay employees' blood designed to challenge anti-LGBTQ+ policies; Public Boob, a series of giant boob installations created in support of the #FreetheFeed breastfeeding campaign, which can be rented out via the website; and Russian dolls, a set of gay-icon nesting dolls auctioned in partnership with Kaleidoscope Trust to combat Russia's  anti-LGBTQ+ laws.

The agency is also promising two new products to come: Lullabombs, a "children’s wartime noise machine," designed to highlight the grim plight of children in war zones, and the Gay Blood Collection, which will include more products made with the blood of LGBTQ+ people. 

The site will be run via a global briefing process that goes out twice a year so all of the agency's global offices can contribute. McKittrick and Mother U.S. Founding Partner Paul Malmstrom will oversee the structure, alongside senior leaders in London, while around a dozen of the agency's employees will be involved in running it.

"The momentum created by our products and successes to date has developed an almost unending stream of new ideas from every corner of Mother," Malmstrom said.

Explaining the idea behind the site further, Malmstrom said: "The thought behind Mother Goods was to see if we could solve some problems for the world with provocative ideas that take shape as products.

"What if an idea is so good and powerful that someone was willing to pay to have it (instead of us paying for them to see it), and that behavior change and mental commitment came from the transaction?  Our goal is to have most of the ideas show up in real product form that you can buy in volume from a shoppable e-commerce platform—thus, Mother Goods."

He added, "In terms of inspiration, all of our products are the result of issues individual people within Mother feel strongly about, whether it be gun violence, a love-hate relationship with your phone, or LBGTQ+ issues.  The common thread between products is that the issue is expressed in a way that creates a desire to buy the actual item and share the idea with others to create a positive change along the way."