Mambosok Craze Starts Here

Have you ever wanted to put a laundry bag over your teen-ager's head?

Now, for a simple ten-spot, you can do just that.

A pair of Kirkland entrepreneurs have come up with a way of putting a sack on the kid's head and, simultaneously, bringing a smile to his or her face.

For the past six months, Tom Bunnell and Dan Hoard have been selling things they call Mambosoks out of Bunnell's Kirkland basement.

These mini-bags have started a Pet Rock-like rage in the ski-and-skateboard set. Mambosoks are a cross between a chef's hat and inverted surfer trunks, secured to the head with a drawstringand elastic, like a tiny laundry bag.

After selling quickly at retailers like Snowboard Connection in Seattle, Mainstreet Mountain Bikes in Bellevue and Bothell Ski and Bike, they may soon show up on the shelves of upmarket stores like Nordstrom.

"Its a craze. A fad. A real hot item right now," says Jim Brown, salesman at Main Street Mountain Bikes. "We have an average of two or three (customers) a day coming in just for Mambosoks. They're not interested in anything else we have to sell."

Bunnell estimates some 25,000 Mambosoks have been sold since last March, when he and Hoard finished six months of developing prototypes and started marketing their invention.

Speaking by telephone from his basement office, Bunnell says, "It's getting real cramped down here. The Ping-Pong table is the shipping department. It bums me out."

Nordstrom is a long way from Roanoke Park Place Tavern, the Seattle pub where the first Mambosoks were sold over-the-bar by Bunnell, while he ran the tap.

But, then again, Seattle is a long way from Australia, where the duo invented Mambosoks.

Three years ago, Bunnell and Hoard, then 23 years old, were traveling through Australia in midsummer. Being good Pacific Northwesterners, they found themselves short on shorts.

So they did what, to some, might seem the logical thing to do. They cut the legs off a pair of long pants.

Then they did something which, at the time, seemed funny. They pulled the pants legs down on their heads.

"The pants were pale-white, with baby-blue inner lining," remembers Bunnell. The partners have saved the original pair of trouser legs, for posterity, or whatever. Start-up money for the partnership originally consisted of $3,000 in savings from Hoard, who was a manager at the Four Seasons Olympic hotel, in Seattle. Another $12,000 in savings has been put into the fledgling operation, as it grew. And all profits have been pumped back into the business.

The operation, which has not yet incorporated, may soon grow even more quickly. "We are looking at a big chunk of working capital - a $50,000 loan," says Bunnell.

Although neither partner has a degree in business, Bunnell said the two have learned the basics quickly. "It's been like a crash course in business school," says Bunnell. Already, the partners have gone through two manufacturers whose rates they considered too high. Now Vina Sewing Co., of Tukwila, is producing about 5,000 Mambosoks a month for them.

They are working on some variations on the standard Mambosok. Prototypes are in the works for Mambosoks with earflaps or bills. And a Mambosok for children called Mambino may be coming soon.

What's more, Bunnell says, the product may go international. The burgeoning business has been talking with four Japanese companies interested in buying their idea. So far, their answer to foreign investors has been, "No." But they don't rule out the future possibility.

But, Bunnell has begun calling his basement offices "World Headquarters." The pair knows there may be competition. "The idea is so simple, that we know there are knockoffs out there," says Bunnell. "We are working on a design patent. But all they have to do is change the design a little."

Their response to the threat? "We figured all we needed to do is hit the market hard," says Bunnell.