Eagle eyed longtime YES PLZ customers (and many vendors we do business with) have noticed our formal company name is Car-Parts, Bottles, and Cutlery LLC, dba YES PLZ. Here’s the story…

When we first spun up our scheme back in 2018 to save your kitchen from mediocre coffee, I took the attitude that our underlying legal name didn’t matter too much so why not have fun with it? The name comes from a Björk Lyric (more on that in a moment), but the idea to use it as a company name was lifted from a tweet by Diesel Sweeties webcomic artist rstevens:

I guess on account of being a longtime Björk superfan, this just struck me as hilarious and I stuck it in my head that if I ever needed to name a corporate entity, this would be genius.

For the non-Björk-fanatics, the lifted lyric comes from the track Hyperballad off her 2nd solo LP Post. The lovely Michel Gondry directed video features her lying in some sort of hallucinatory k-hole of blinking lights and singing.

For fellow fans, I recommend listening to Björk’s recent podcast series Sonic Symbolism where she and her friends discuss her varied catalog. In short, Hyperballad is about throwing car parts off a cliff to get rid of frustrations or to hide your aggressive side from a lover. What does this have to do with coffee? Who can say. Let’s check in with comedian Chris Fleming who takes on the role of Björk’s landlord and has something to say about it all:

Now another person who doesn’t find all this flinging about of car-parts, bottles, and cutlery very fun is my co-founder Sumi. For one thing, not a Björk fan (tragic). For another, it turns out having a long, hard to explain company name with Oxford commas, an occasional ampersand, and a hyphen—and which often needs to be truncated in specific uses, is a real pain the ass. We have to maintain a spreadsheet of all the small variants that spontaneously arise when interfacing with different bureaucracies and billing systems. It has caused enough headaches that this cute joke has morphed into a cruel one from an accounting perspective.

But today some of that consternation gets soothed as I unveil our latest piece of limited edition YES PLZ swag—the car-parts hoodie! Late one night I designed a logo that felt destined for streetwear and, as it turns out, it looks amazing embroidered on a heavyweight Cotton Heritage hoodie.

The first day of wearing mine out in public this week I had multiple strangers stop and compliment it! Were they Björk fans or did they just have a sharp, sartorial eye? For all of you YES PLZ fans that are now in the know, this must-have fashion essential is now up in our merch shop. Please note these run on the slimmer side and we strongly suggest going a size up when scoring yours.

Be like me and solve all your fashion conundrums by wearing this thing every single day until it becomes like a second skin! Get yours today!