Blue Jay Bautista goes Silver
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/04/2015 (4083 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Michael Silver figures he’s hit a grand slam with his latest celebrity collaboration.
The CEO of Winnipeg-based Silver Jeans Co. has teamed up with Toronto Blue Jays slugger José Bautista on a one-year deal to promote its new line of signature jeans called the Joey Series, which are due out this fall.
Silver met the Jays’ highest-profile player last year thanks to another Winnipeg connection. Bautista’s business manager is Barry Klarberg, whose former company, Klarberg, Raiola & Associates, a New York City financial-planning firm that serves mostly athletes and entertainers, was bought in 2000 by Assante Corp., which was run by Marty Weinberg from his Portage and Main office.
“(Klarberg) contacted me through some prior associations with Assante and Weinberg. I’d met him once before, 10 or 12 years ago. He told me José wanted to expand his brand into other businesses, and the fashion business keenly interested him. I was invited to a Jays game last season, met with José afterwards, and we immediately hit it off,” he said.
The two discussed the similarities between the ballplayer and the company, which included neither one being an overnight success — Bautista was with four different organizations alone in 2004 — and having to work hard to make it in their chosen fields. “He has an in-depth knowledge of the fashion industry. He enjoys clothes himself, and he also enjoys business (having earned a business degree from a Florida college). He didn’t want to talk about himself, he wanted to talk about jeans, our distribution systems and our marketing,” he said. “He not only designed some jeans for us, he’s the face of our men’s product.”
Silver believes Bautista will help Silver Jeans boost its business in both the U.S. and Canada.
“He’s a Dominican-born, college-educated fashionisto who plays America’s game on Canada’s only baseball team. He ticked off a lot of boxes for us,” he said.