Word: gazal
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...With Mambo Graphics, a clue for co-founder Dare Jennings lay in the way some of its people were handling the firm's star artist. This was the early 2000s, after Jennings and Andrew Rich had sold the company for a rumored $20 million to the giant rag-trader Gazal Corporation. Having stayed on as creative director, Jennings was amused to see certain staffers treating Reg Mombassa like a tradesman. "They would come to me and say, 'Can Reg do something for us?' Later it would be, 'Now, Reg, this is what we want you to do.' It's just...
...Gazal and Mambo went together like pepper and jam. A public company based in the artistic dead zone of Banksmeadow in Sydney's south, Gazal generates annual revenue of $160 million and licenses a suite of brands including Oroton and Calvin Klein. Mambo was no Ma and Pa store in its heyday, either: it had outlets on three continents and annual revenue of about $40 million. But right from its 1984 launch in a Sydney motel, Mambo in spirit was always the quirky interloper contending with surfwear's super-heavyweights, the all - Down Under trio of Billabong, Quik?silver...
...Jammed into a corporate culture, however, the stirrer lost its sting. In May last year, resigned to Mambo's dwindling sales and street cred, Gazal announced it was offloading the brand, which a private consortium snapped up in January for about a third of what Gazal had paid for it eight years before. The new owners' plan is to revert to the original Mambo recipe of humor, social commentary and art, while stirring in a fistful of contemporary spices. Co-owner Angus Kingsmill told TIME: "We believe Mambo has massive global potential. It would take almost a perfect storm...
...acquisition, Kingsmill and Merriman powwowed in a café in beachside Manly. For managing director Kingsmill, high on the to-do list was meeting with Jennings and Mombassa. A founding member of the celebrated band Mental As Anything, Mombassa never formally cut ties with Mambo, but in the Gazal era they frayed to a thread. In the old days, Mombassa would fill his notepads with sketches and show them to Jennings. "Dare was willing to run with stuff that wasn't going to be commercial," says Mombassa, "because he wanted to make a point." In the Gazal period, when...
...Another link with the past is Wayne Golding, who bluffed his way into the art room in 1984 and rose to become the company's chief copywriter. Convinced Mambo was dying under Gazal, he left the fold for 14 months but is now back, a wise head in a smart young team. "To many at Gazal, Mambo could have been a breakfast cereal or a box of dog biscuits," says Golding. "There was a failure to appreciate that we were at the élite end of the hard-core surf market." The brand hadn't moved with the times, persisting...