The Origin Story
What’s the deal with the YELLOW SUIT?
Ya know, the funny thing about being “The Guy in the Yellow Suit” is I never wanted the yellow suit!
In fact, I absolutely HATED IT!
The story goes all the way back to the year 1990. I was 14 years old and was living in, Richmond, Virginia. I had already been doing magic shows around my community for about three years at that point.
I was a kid. I’d show up to perform in jeans and a Tshirt because that’s what kids wore. It was just my mom and I. She didn’t have a lot of money and I didn’t own a suit.
Then one day while visiting my Grandmother, she said to me, “you may be doing magic but you don’t LOOK like a magician. Let’s fix that.”
She took me to the now defunct Coliseum Mall in Hampton (she lived in Newport News right across from Langley Air Force Base). There was a clothing store there called GENTS! which was filled “wall to wall” with brightly colored suits and attire.
She said, “go walk around and find something you like.”
So I walk the store and I found the one I wanted. It was amazing. It was Grape Purple with black lapels and black slacks. I instantly fell in love with it.
I ran over to find my Grandma to show her my choice, but Grandma wasn’t having it.
She said, “I was here a couple of days ago and found the suit I’m going to buy you.”
Ummm, then why was I looking around the store???
She leads me over to a YELLOW SUIT and said, “THIS! This will be your new suit!”
Uhhhhh! Yellow?! Of all the colors in the store… WHY YELLOW?! I hated it. I said, “there is no way I’m ever going to wear that suit! I’ll look like Tweety Bird!”
She said, “you need a suit, it’s my money, this is the one you’re getting, or you can get nothing at all. You’ll learn to love it!”
I wasn’t convinced…
But Grandma had her reasoning.
She looked at me and said something that, at the time, probably didn’t seem particularly profound:
“Yellow is a happy color. Your job is to make people happy.”
Then she added;
“Besides, magicians all look the same. They all wear black. That’s boring. Do you want to look like everyone else?”
Turns out my Grandma understood branding about 30 years before I did.
The marketing genius of my Grandmother was lost on me in the moment, but she won, and right then and there, I became, “The Guy in the Yellow Suit!”
Neither one of us could possibly have known what we had just started.
I kept wearing yellow, and something happened. People remembered me. Maybe they didn’t always remember my name. But they remembered the suit.
Audiences began to recognize me. Clients associated me with it. Somewhere along the way, the yellow suit stopped being something I wore and became part of who I was.
Over the years, the suits have changed. The styles have changed. The shows have changed.
But the yellow remained!
More than 35 years later, it’s still part of my photographs, my branding, my show, my persona, and me.
And the funniest part?
None of it was some brilliant marketing strategy.
There wasn’t a branding consultant sitting in a conference room saying, “Christopher, we need to find a color that will differentiate you in the marketplace.”
It was my Grandma. Standing in GENTS! at the Coliseum Mall, telling her grandson he wasn’t getting the purple suit he wanted.
Because…
“Yellow is a Happy Color!”
Turns out Grandma knew what she was talking about.
And every time I put on the yellow suit today, there’s still a little piece of her standing onstage with me.
Pictured here is me at 14 wearing the ORIGINAL Yellow Suit my Grandma bought for me. Look at all that hair! Look at that waistline! And more than anything, look at that kid who had absolutely no idea where this crazy journey was going to take him.
A lifetime of dreams still ahead of me, and absolutely no clue that almost 40 years later…I’d still be The Guy in the Yellow Suit.
I thought Grandma was just buying me a suit.
Turns out, she was helping me step into my future.
Thanks, Grandma.