When Vision Becomes Reality: The Longhairs & Bring Back The Brown

In Celebrate by El Rubio2 Comments

Building Community & Bringing Back The Brown

We’ve refocused lately on The Longhairs core values, with stories and ideas that bring them to life. We find endless examples just looking around, but few so audacious as Bring Back The Brown.

In this deep dive on community, vision and values, we look at The Longhairs history, and how its path was influenced by a grassroots community building effort that fundamentally changed a $1B professional sports franchise.

This is a story of vision becoming reality.

Building Community & Bringing Back The Brown

Building and Influencing Community From San Diego Outward

One of six core values enumerated in The Longhairs Core Ideology, this one holds special significance, dating back to 2013 and well before the “long hair idea” was ever conceived.

It was in the early days of our digital marketing agency, Round Two Creative Group. Over the year of inception we wrestled to pin down exactly what we did, how we did it, who we were, and what we intended to become.

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An idea that surfaced persistently during these exasperating discussions was first expressed in simple terms:

We want to do a big community event that makes an impact.

As we advanced through the stages of business building we established a core ideology for Round Two, where you can see the evolution of that idea from a broad concept to a specific core value.

Moreover, it’s plainly evident this core ideology was the basis for what became The Longhairs vision and values more than six years later:

Round Two Creative Group

Round Two Creative Group Core Ideology

Our Purpose
To creatively advance the interests of each client, partner, and associate while growing our influence on the world.

Our Values
honesty and integrity
team spirit and contagious enthusiasm
discipline in our work and attention to detail
unwavering determination to achieve greatness
respect and encouragement of individual ability and creativity
building and influencing community from San Diego outward

Credit to Built To Last by Jim Collins & Jerry Porras, and Traction by Gino Wickman for providing the frameworks used in the building of our businesses.

Energized and confident, we emblazoned these words on the walls of our early headquarters locations. We continued the foundational business building by adding strategy and tactics to our vision, describing what we would achieve, how it would happen, what it would look like, and what kind of impact it would have.

This ultimately became the Round Two Creative Group Core Ideology + Strategy & Tactics, stamped for approval in October, 2014. By this time The Longhairs was an idea we’d been pursuing for several months; it would be two more months before its public launch.

The Power of Vision

Looking back at this document years later, the timelines were clearly naive and unrealistic. But that doesn’t matter, because with few exceptions, everything it contains has become reality.

Published here in its original form, this plan illustrates the power of vision and values, paired with desire and commitment. With a similar mix and your own secret sauce, this could be your plan…and where you could be six years from now.

RTCG Core Ideology + Strategy & Tactics

What About The Brown?

As for “a big community event that makes an impact,” that certainly was The Great Cut, where we broke the Guinness World Records title for the most hair donated to charity in 24 hours. But the concept evolved into much more. While The Great Cut had an indelible impact, the community continues to build…from San Diego outward.

Which brings us to another example of building community…

Bring Back The Brown

Bring Back The Brown
The full story is told in 10 Year Campaign Made Padres 'Bring Back The Brown' , published on the Westside Love Website. It’s a story about the San Diego Padres, whose original colors were brown and gold from 1969 until 1984. New ownership started a gradual shift away from the brown, eventually settling into a hovering pattern between various boring combinations of blue and white.
Bring Back The Brown
ImageImageBring Back The BrownTony Gwynn

Sitting in their San Diego garage in 2010, two bros named Jordan Stark and Tony Martinez wondered if there were other people who wished the San Diego Padres were brown again.

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Bring Back The Brown
Bring Back The Brown

"We then joked about what would happen if we made a petition for the Padres to bring back brown. Would people sign it? How many other people wished the Padres were brown? How long would something like that take? We figured at least 10 years…but could we actually make it happen?

It was exciting, profound, ridiculous, and insane all at the same time. We didn’t realize it in the moment…but that was when the seed of Bring Back The Brown was planted."

Bring Back The Brown

It was a campaign designed to persuade the San Diego Padres organization to reintroduce brown as an official team color, a seemingly impossible outcome—but there was vision.

As the story unfolds, after years of campaigning, petitioning, community activity, business recruiting, event organizing and appealing to the club’s front office, in January 2019 the Padres announced they would Bring Back The Brown for the 2020 Major League Baseball season.

And so the San Diego Padres, after an agonizing delay through a global coronavirus pandemic, will debut their new brown uniforms on Friday, July 24 at Petco Park vs. the Arizona Diamondbacks.

It only took nine years, in fact…but today THE BROWN IS BACK!

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Padres Brown Uniforms
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The Longhairs Are Down For The Brown

While we weren’t directly involved, we were close to the action, from repping the apparel to pop up shops and local events, to the Knockaround Sunglasses giveaway at Petco Park.*

*Here we witnessed a most peculiar human behavioral phenomenon, in which a thick and continuous stream of jubilant fans entered the stadium, individually presented with their limited edition Bring Back The Brown Knockarounds, then proceeded to unwrap and immediately fumble their brand new shades onto the concrete. The visual and audible experience of a thousand pairs of sunglasses hitting the deck and skidding across the pavilion remains an unwritten part of our vision to this very day.

Taking the story in the context of our core ideology, Bring Back The Brown and its creators were an early and instrumental influence on Round Two Creative Group and The Longhairs (you noticed if you looked closely at the Round Two Core Ideology).

Whether you’re a Padres fan, a baseball fan or a person who values community, you will love reading the story of Bring Back The Brown, told with a reverence that can only be captured by those who were there.

READ THE FULL STORY10 Year Campaign Made Padres 'Bring Back The Brown'

The Brown Is Back…And So Is Baseball!

In celebration of vision becoming reality in 2020, both The Longhairs and Westside Love are offering select deals inspired by Bring Back The Brown.
Westside Love Bring Back The Brown
The Longhairs Bring Back The Brown

A MAJOR LEAGUE EPISODE OF LET IT RIDE LIVE

Tune in Monday at 7:00 PM (PST) for a special episode of Let It Ride LIVE, featuring the co-creator of Bring Back The Brown and Westside Love, Jordan Stark.
Jordan Stark

AND BRINGING THE HEAT...

with guest appearances from San Diego Padres longhair pitchers taking the mound in brown, The Lefty With Lettuce Matt Strahm and The Sheriff of Locksingham Chris Paddack.

Less than a week before Opening Day, these major league longhairs will be letting it ride with your boys for a preseason hair update, the MLB Hair Watch 2020, and a reading on the clubhouse stoke levels for the new unis.

Step up to the plate on Monday night at 7:00…and look for the high heat.

STRIIIIIIIIIIIIIKE!

READ THE FULL STORYHow The Longhairs Blew It In The 9th
Matt Strahm
Chris Paddack
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Feeling The Westside Love

An independent brand committed to designing and producing high-quality, thoughtfully considered products, firmly rooted in design, art, music, fashion, outdoor and street cultures. Headquartered in San Diego, humbly represented in all corners of the globe.

Proud sponsors of The Great Cut and longtime bros with The Longhairs, encouraging and supporting each other since the days at 8th & G and Little Italy.

Comments

  1. It’s about time!!! Couldn’t believe that our boys were changed to those blue uniforms, heinous at best. All the news, email, social media… All negative & overwhelming. THIS?? This is what I needed tonight. A reminder of my community, my Padres, how quarantining would be so much easier. Thanks guys, from Cathy on the Wrong Coast in Jersey. (Formerly from PB)

    1. Hell yes, Cathy! SD pulled together, and got it done together! Thank you for the comment, this is what it’s all about!

      STAY UP!!

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