PURPLE, GREEN & GOLD
The Colors of Mardi Gras Madness

In New Orleans, the collective mania known as Mardi Gras Madness is inextricably associated with purple, green and gold, a color combination that's woven deeply into the city's renown culture of revelry. History doesn't record the exact reason why the Rex organization, in making its Mardi Gras debut in 1872, adopted the scheme, though Errol Laborde, in his book Marched the Day God: A History of the Rex Organization,plausibly asserts that the krewemen were guided by the laws of hearldry. In any case, purple, green and gold captured the public's imagination and, via Rex's 1892 procession, entitled "Symbolism of Colors," came to signify justice, faith and power, respectively.

Today, the colors are to Mardi Gras what red and green are to Christmas or black and orange are to Halloween: they emblazon the masks and countless other fanciful decorations that pop up everywhere during the pre-Lenten season of merriment that culminates on Fat Tuesday.

New Orleanians just can't seem to get enough of it. Mardi Gras dolls and masks have been known to wind up as grill ornaments on the front-ends of delivery vehicles; tri-colored wreaths hang from doors and gates all over town; poles and pillars are wrapped in tinsel and ribbons; Mardi Gras-themed store windows lure bead-and-bauble junkies; elaborately festooned balconies add to the festive ambience of the French Quarter; and at night, the dome of the Hibernia National Bank building, in the Central Business District, is bathed in stripes of purple, green and gold light, as are a smattering of residences and other buildings. And in fact, some New Orleanians even go so far as to decorate Mardi Gras Christmas trees.

Feeding this decorative frenzy is a company that provides a case study in how supply can create its own demand. Accent Annex Enterprises, Inc., which bills itself as "Mardi Gras Headquarters," is by far the leading vendor of Mardi Gras merchandise. In addition to row upon row of Mardi Gras beads, the stores carry Mardi Gras-themed shower curtains, oven mitts, sunglasses, umbrellas, suspenders, shoe strings, boxer shorts and sports bottles, as well as a dizzying array of decorative accessories. "Anything you want"—even rubber dog doo—"just think of it in purple, green and gold—we got it," says Karl Carlone, whose father Dom founded the business.

A native of Pennsgrove, N.J., about 30 miles south of Camden, Dom Carlone, 68, is not the mostly likely person to have wound up with Mardi Gras-colored blood coursing through his veins. His father, many of his relatives and "pretty much everybody I knew" worked for DuPont, around which life in Pennsgrove more or less revolved. After a stint in the Air Force, as a control tower operator in Biloxi, Miss., "I just said, 'I don't want to go work for DuPont,' " recalls Carlone, who instead moved to New Orleans—his wife at the time was an Orleanian—and opened a sandwich shop on the west bank of the Mississippi, in 1956.

But the location proved lacking, so after about four years Carlone sold the shop and took a job as a salesman for Park Lane Co., a wholesale distributor of toys and costume jewelry. Carlone became the top salesman, eventually buying control of the company and moving operations from the Central Business District to a new location at North Carrollton Ave. The front of the building, when you walked in the door, had a space, or "annex," that was suitable for a retail store. Carlone had initially tried to find a tenant, but decided to keep the space for himself after a friend suggested they go into business together, selling Mardi Gras beads.

A popular attraction for over a century, Mardi Gras, Carlone figured, was "a safe business to be in." Unlike the restaurant business (in which employees help themselves to food and spoilage can be a problem) or even the wholesale jewelry business (in which the value of inventory can be adversely affected by sudden shifts in the fickle winds of fashion).

"I said, 'The whole Mardi Gras business has been around for a long, long time, and it won't spoil [or] go out of style...,' " recalls Carlone. " 'A Mardi Gras bead is a Mardi Gras bead..., [and] if I don't sell it this year, I don't have to throw it away or reduce my price—I would sell it again next year.' "

Opening Accent Annex in 1980, the would-be king of Mardi Gras beads took a different approach from other purveyors of "throws"—necklaces and other items tossed by masked riders on Mardi Gras parade floats. The competition would typically throw cardboard boxes full of beads on the floor, and let the patrons have at it. Not Dom Carlone. He had shelves and carpeting installed, offered shopping carts and generally tried to make the experience akin to being in a supermarket. "There was a big emphasis on presentation," he explains.

Probably the biggest factor in the company's success: opening stores in areas where people who rode in the Mardi Gras parades lived—municipalities like Gretna, Metairie and Houma, as well as Mobile, Ala. (Accent Annex has 10 locations, with two more scheduled to open, in Shreveport and Lake Charles, La., in early January.) Riding in parades is exhilarating, if not intoxicating, notes Karl Carlone, and the business prospered as the number parades outside of New Orleans's city limits proliferated.

"The people who do it—I mean, they love it...," he says. "They get off the float saying, 'I'm doing this again next year; this was a kick-and-a-half.' "

For his part, Dom Carlone has never been a fan of big crowds and Mardi Gras parades. He recalls taking in the festivities on St. Charles Avenue one year. Karl, then about 5 years old, ran out to retrieve a trinket from the street. "I—just in time—grabbed him and pulled him back. His head was about one foot away from one these big tires [on a parade float].... I said, 'Let's get the hell out of here—this is too dangerous.' And from that time on, I always went out of town [during Mardi Gras]."

At Mardi Gras, beads exert an almost talismanic power capable of inducing even "respectable" citizens of the realm to grovel in gutters and expose body parts that normally remain covered up. Of course, one reason New Orleanians and tourists alike allow themselves to indulge in such madness is that they know the festivities have a fixed duration, ending with the onset of Lent. As Karl says, "It goes away for everybody."

Everybody, that is, except the Carlone family.

Though some Mardi Gras merchants operate on a seasonal basis, Accent Annex keeps its stores open year-round. And in the off season, the Carlones work on product development. Every spring, Dom, along with sons Karl and Dominic Jr., plus other family members, spend two to four weeks in China, putting in 12-hour days designing new necklaces, working on ideas for other merchandise and planning production. "All the things you find over here [at Accent Annex] we either designed ourselves or found over there [in China] in one form and changed to meet the Mardi Gras form," says Dom.

The Carlones' partner in this end of the business is Hong Kong-based Wong Ting Kwong, also known as Roger Wong. Believed to be the world's largest manufacturer of Mardi Gras beads, Tai Kuen Ornament Co.,Ltd., owned by Wong and his brother Gary, manufacturers beads in China for Accent Annex and other importers. The brothers also own a thriving trading company, through which Accent Annex sources hundreds of custom-designed items—stuffed animals, masks, plastic cigars and other trinkets, as well as a vast array of decorative accessories and ready-to-wear apparel—from third-party manufacturers.

When Mardi Gras season rolls around and shoppers begin flocking to Accent Annex, says Dom, "the first thing they ask [is], 'What's new?' " Indeed, "the hardest part of our whole operation," he adds, is "coming up with something different, something unique [that] people would love to have  without it costing a lot of money." And so, every year, Accent Annex phases out dozens of slow-moving items and introduces upwards of 100 new products, including as many as 30 so-called "speciality" necklaces: custom designs with hand-strung beads and other ornaments, such as king cake babies and ceramic jesters.

Dom Carlone made his first trip to Hong Kong in 1980; he hooked up with Wong through the local chamber of commerce. At the time, Wong was producing hair barrettes for young girls and curtains made from strands of beads, yet didn't know the first thing about Mardi Gras beads. This became somewhat painfully apparent the first year that Wong manufactured beads for Carlone: the smallest-size necklaces—the ends of which had been melted together, instead of joined with a clasp—were too short by a few inches and, as a result, would only fit over the heads of children.

That was Mardi Gras 1981. "Now," says Carlone, "he [Wong] has a huge [Mardi Gras bead] factory—he's doing better than I am."

In the early years, before Wong set up his trading operation, Carlone often ventured to Taiwan and Hong Kong in search of manufacturers that could make everything from ceramic masks and apparel to plastic whistles and yo-yos. He recalls heading south one morning from Taipei, driving 14 hours to scout for factories that could make umbrella hats, bamboo spears and nylon bikini panties stamped "Happy Mardi Gras!"

More often than not, finding the right supplier for a particular item meant journeying to places that no right-minded tourist would ever dare set foot. Once, Carlone, accompanied by his wife at the time and Wong, went to meet a Hong Kong trinket maker. Venturing into a decidedly low-rent neighborhood, they couldn't find his office. So Wong made a phone call from the street, and a man came to meet them and lead the way—down an unlit, tunnel-like alley. On either side were single-room dwellings occupied by entire families; a stream of drainage water flowed down the center, and ducks scampered about. "I'm telling you, it was scary," says Carlone.

They came to a steep, wooden spiral staircase, and were barely able to climb up to get to the second floor. The trinket maker's office, covered with a tin roof, was no more than six feet long by four feet wide—so tight that Wong had to wait outside the door while Carlone and his then wife sat at a table with the would-be supplier. "And behind us, and behind him, were shoeboxes that had all these little trinkets," says Carlone, who found some items he liked and wound up establishing a business relationship with the "Alley Man," as he came to be known.

Toiling away in a larger, adjacent room were a half dozen or so young women. Hunched over pans of silver paint, they were putting the finishing touches on large, midieval-style executioner's axes—plastic accessories for Halloween get-ups. They methodically dipped the edges of the black, double-sided ax blades into the paint to give them the appearance of having been sharpened. One after another, over and over again. "That's what really blew our minds," says Carlone.

In building his business, Carlone surmised that people who bought throws and reveled at Mardi Gras might be interested in decorative items, such as garlands, wreaths and bunting, in purple, green and gold—items that couldn't be found at competing Mardi Gras merchandisers. So, Carlone sought out Taiwanese manufacturers to make "Christmas-type decorations for us in Mardi Gras colors."

It took him four years to sell all of the inventory from his first purchase of decorative merchandise, a garland made out of metallic foil. But eventually, a wider assortment of items expanded the range of decorative possibilities, prompting customers to load-up by the cartload. "People are addicted to this stuff," says Karl. "They come in here and they just go on and on."

In 1990, Accent Annex began placing Mardi Gras items with big retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Kmart, on a consignment basis. In 1991, the company launched a mail-order catalog; it now sends out about 75,000 copies annually. "Now what we're finding out," says Karl, "is that people all over the United States are wanting to buy this stuff."

Just who are these "people"? Karl: "I think that it's people who like to party."

Accent Annex wholesales cups and medallion beads to Carnival krewes, though it derives the majority of its revenue from retail customers, most of whom are locals. Not that the company hasn't taken aim at New Orleans's booming tourist trade: It has a store on Toulouse Street in the French Quarter, and in 1996, in the city's busiest shopping center, Riverwalk Marketplace, opened Mardi Gras Madness. Karl says the name was a gesture to tourists, who undoubtedly would have been befuddled by the name Accent Annex.

The store, which is completely themed out a la a Disney emporium, is an attraction unto itself. A pair of 13-foot jesters, standing astride the entrance, appear to be holding up a Mardi Gras Madness sign, on top of which is a large mask.

Giant necklaces, with purple, green and gold beads the size of beach balls, hang from the ceiling. Costumed mannequins dangle beads from a faux balcony, and a replica of a parade float juts out from one wall. Props—busts and figures used on floats—are also displayed, adding to the festive ambience.

Beads are still a mainstay of the business. New for Mardi Gras 1999 were beads that glow in the dark. But what's really hot these days are "long" beads—meaning 33 inches and up. "People are getting away from the shorter, cheaper beads and they're buying the longer, better beads," reports Karl. "And that's because the people in the streets are dictating what they want." If float riders don't throw "the right stuff," he adds, paradegoers "just let it go and hit the ground."

Accent Annex's Mardi Gras beads are manufactured in Fuzhou, on the eastern coast of China. It's a labor-intensive process—especially for the fancier, hand-strung necklaces. Dom Carlone estimates that labor accounts for around 70% of total costs, whereas materials and shipping account for roughly 20% and 10%, respectively.

In China, Dom has seen up close the "primitive" labor conditions of the bead factories. Before relocating his manufacturing operation to Fuzhou, Wong had a factory outside of Shenzhen, a city in China just across the border from Hong Kong. Carlone recalls one dormitory-style room in which 26 workers lived without television, heat or hot water. And yet, he says, these laborers, who typically travel hundreds of miles from home to work 11 months of the year in the bead factories, are "very thankful."

Wong's bead factory now employs about 600 people; they typically work six days a week and get paid not by the hour, but based on the number of pieces they produce. Average wage: $2 - $3 a day, or less than $1,000 for 11 months' work. (The workers take a month-long vacation, returning home in January for the Chinese New Year celebration.)

Back in the city of Mardi Gras merriment, the fruit of their labor is bought up and then typically given away—often to people whom the purchasers don't even know.

So-called "superkrewes" like Bacchus, Endymion and Orpheus are particularly generous with throws.

Indeed, according to Dom, certain "eccentric" members of Bacchus have been known to spend $6,000 - $8,000 on goodies for a single ride—the better part of a decade's wages for a Chinese bead worker.

No doubt, the notion of giving away thousands of dollars of trinkets would be about as incomprehensible to Chinese bead workers as the grinding reality of the bead factories would be to pleasure-seeking participants in "The Greatest Free Show on Earth."

"I always wanted one of the TV stations here in New Orleans to do a documentary on this," says Dom, referring to the Mardi Gras bead industry in China. "Nobody would believe where this stuff comes from."