Earlier this year, the Washington Post‘s Robin Givhan brought us the story of the Blo & Go, an ingenious hair-drying invention of Laurie Coleman, a former model and wife of the Minnesota Republican senator Norm Coleman. Here’s what the recently resurfaced Post piece has to say about the genesis of “Blo & Go”:
Against the backdrop of this kind of marketing savvy, it is hard to believe that the name Blo & Go was not chosen to, at the very least, amuse. This, after all, is a world in which the term “wide stance” churns up easy chuckles.
Coleman’s voice registers shock — and dismay– that anyone would make such a connection. “I didn’t think of that,” she says. And then she goes further to point out that the name wasn’t even her idea. It came out of a committee. It was all in the brainstorming, during which “Freedom Styler” was rejected. And so it went: You get your hair blown out. You need a blowout. You get blown . . . out. And then you go. Bingo: “Blo & Go!”
Givhan (a Pulitzer winner) also extracted the line, “The whole key to this is the suction” from Coleman, whose husband is in a tough reelection fight this year against Al Franken. All of this reminded me of another classic suction-based hair care device. Who else remembers the Suck Kut?
