LAS VEGAS (AP) - Restaurant co-owner Penny Chutima began designing cloth face masks bearing the name of her Las Vegas business, Lotus of Siam, in an effort to eliminate waste.
“I was just making the masks for myself, because we were using a lot of the surgical masks,” Chutima told the Las Vegas Review-Journal . “So I just thought, it saves us (money), and it doesn’t ruin the earth.”
She was surprised by the response from customers.
“People were like ‘Hey, those masks are super-cool, can we buy some?’ And I was like, ‘OK, maybe I’ll make a little bit more, just to be memorabilia from this time.’”
At The Black Sheep in Las Vegas, chef Jamie Tran began getting similar requests after her staff started wearing custom face masks designed by their bartender, Terry Clark.
“Customers were telling my servers they think the mask is cool and they want to wear it,” said Tran, who is now selling them in her restaurant for $12 apiece.
While face masks, and rules requiring customers to wear them, have become divisive political issues for certain businesses, several local restaurants have embraced them as marketing opportunities.
“I’m a big believer in branding and marketing,” Sparrow + Wolf chef and owner Brian Howard told the Review-Journal. “If I can have somebody support our brand and showcase it, then there’s an opportunity there.”
Howard said he quickly sold out of his first shipment of 200 branded face masks
Few companies understand the intersection of marketing and fashion better the Hard Rock Café chain, which began selling Hard Rock face masks online in June.
The response was so positive that they soon began offering them in the stores at their restaurants, with three different designs currently available at the Hard Rock on the Las Vegas Strip, alongside the assorted T-shirts, hats, pins and other merchandise.
“The guest response has been very, very positive,” said Benito Mendez, Hard Rock vice president of merchandise, e-commerce and licensing. “Some of these masks rank in our top sellers.”
More and more local businesses seem to be catching on to the opportunity. When Rollin Smoke Barbeque originally received some custom masks as a gift from the company that designs their hats and jackets, Mike Moore began offering them for sale as a novelty at the company’s northwest Las Vegas location.
When new mask regulations took effect, he began ordering more.
“Once we were (mandated to wear them) it was going to be either the cheap paper ones, which are hard to get and expensive, or the ones that she made for us with the logos,” Moore explained. “If you’re going to have to do it, we’re having a little fun with it.”
Chutima said that when she lived in Thailand, young people who wore masks to protect themselves from pollution came to view them as a fashion accessory.
“Ninety percent of the students - university students, high school students - we always opted to find cute masks. For us it was kind of a fashion statement, while also protecting us.”
At The Hard Rock, Mendez believes Americans are coming around to that view.
“They’re going to be here for a little while, unfortunately,” he said of face coverings. “So I think for right now, in the short-term and the mid-term, it’s a fashion accessory that is here to stay.”
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