Raygun founder and owner Mike Draper. CREDIT JUSTIN BRADY
A viral breakdancing performance at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris has proven to be an unexpected marketing and social media windfall for Iowa-based Raygun. Australian Rachael Gunn, a 36-year-old college professor who competed under the pseudonym “Raygun” in breakdancing, or “breaking,” in the Paris Olympics Aug. 9, became a viral sensation for her dance […]
A viral breakdancing performance at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris has proven to be an unexpected marketing and social media windfall for Iowa-based Raygun.Australian Rachael Gunn, a 36-year-old college professor who competed under the pseudonym “Raygun” in breakdancing, or “breaking,” in the Paris Olympics Aug. 9, became a viral sensation for her dance moves, receiving scores of “0” in each of her three rounds of competition.And while her efforts may not have netted her an Olympic medal, Ms. Gunn became one of the Games’ most popular competitors, with scores of videos and memes emerging on social media spoofing her unusual “breaking” routines, including awkward moves such as the worm, the sprinkler and a kangaroo-style hopping sequence.Mike Draper, owner and founder of Raygun, a Des Moines-based apparel vendor specializing in humorous memes about Iowa and other topics of popular culture, said his company has received unprecedented attention, on social media and otherwise, since the Raygun spectacle in the Olympics.Raygun also has a Quad Cities location at 210 E. Second St., Davenport. As of Wednesday morning, it was featuring Raygun the break dancer on its website. One post on the website had a coffee cup with images of a cat in several break-like positions. "Good news: My moves made it to the Olympics. Bad news: They got a zero,” the headline next to the cup said.Of that viral moment, Mr. Draper said, “The main impact has been tons and tons of people telling us about it, and that we should do something with it – more than anything that has ever happened. And when you’re in the business of making shirts about events, you obviously get a lot of emails about things that happen.”
A whole other level
In fact, since Mr. Draper founded Raygun in 2005, he said this is the first time another Raygun-related event has bumped his company from the top “Raygun” Google search result.“Up until, like, a week ago, we were the biggest Raygun on the planet,” Mr. Draper said. “This was on a whole other level. It just seemed like anybody who had my cell phone number and is an acquaintance of mine texted me about this.”Raygun – the Iowa apparel company – has translated the social media craze to their homepage.“We did find that Raygun’s dance move looked eerily similar to Gary, our mascot cat, and his moves on one of our mugs,” Mr. Draper said.Raygun has attempted to reach out to the Australian dancer and her representatives, without success so far. Mr. Draper said Raygun would be interested in pursuing a marketing partnership that would benefit both Rayguns.“She’s a little bit outside of our wheelhouse,” he admitted. “We’re normally just (reaching) Midwesterners, and then Americans, then Canadians and Mexicans – basically North America. We have yet to work with anybody from Australia. I think it would be cool at this point to do something with her, but it’s hard to know how to get in touch, since she’s probably inundated with messages. It must be just surreal for her. The whole thing has been kind of a wild ride.”In a report from ABC News, Ms. Gunn defended her breakdancing skills, telling reporters that what she brought to her performance was “creativity.”
‘I do my thing’ – Gunn
“I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best — their power moves,” Ms. Gunn said. “All of my moves are original. Creativity is really important to me. I go out there, and I show my artistry. Sometimes it speaks to the judges, and sometimes it doesn’t. I do my thing, and it represents art. That is what it is about.”Since the Olympics, reports have emerged that Ms. Gunn has been a longtime presence on the Australian breakdancing scene, and holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies from Macquarie University. She even produced a thesis in 2017 titled “Deterritorializing gender in Sydney’s breakdancing scene: a B-girl’s experience of B-boying,” in which she “questions why so few female participants engage in this creative space.”Mr. Draper said he thinks the viral sensation that Australia’s Raygun has become may be partly due to breakdancing’s dissimilarity to other Olympic events.“Everybody thinks that during the Olympics, where people do things that are so unbelievable – what would it look like if an average person did this?” Mr. Draper said. “I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great if before the 100-meter swim, they just threw in some average people and showed you how slow an average person is compared to an Olympic swimmer, just to give you a good idea?’“You don’t want to feel like you’re bullying anybody when you say it, but it was wild watching her,” he added. “Friends of mine in college, even in Des Moines, were in breaking clubs. And when I watched her, I was like, ‘are there different rules to Olympic breaking?’ Because pretty much everybody I know would do it better than this. Did she just get picked out of the audience? Did they just say ‘who wants to go next?’”
Next up at Raygun?
It’s not yet clear if the Iowa Raygun will pursue a new apparel and marketing line featuring their Australian counterpart, Mr. Draper said, since this situation is somewhat different than with other memes they’ve produced.“Whenever it’s a person, you kind of want to have their permission to do it,” he said. “That kind of stuff can go sideways, where you do something and you’re not sure what their intent is. She has had some really good quotes about it, ‘it’s just being me’ or whatever. So there are a lot of really positive affirmations that have come out of it, the whole ‘dance like nobody’s watching’ idea.”But in a way, even though this explosion of attention is unlike any Raygun has previously received, Mr. Draper said it’s almost par for the course in his line of work.“A lot of people are linking us together now,” he said. “That’s what’s fun about the line of work we’re in. So much of what we do day to day, we didn’t realize we were going to be doing the day before. You just wake up one morning and see what’s happened locally, nationally, or regionally, or, in this case, someone who has the nickname Raygun … and if you have to lose (your top Google search result) to somebody, you may as well lose it to a Australian professor who breakdances in the Olympics, I guess.”
