August 23, 2020 3 min read

The Colors of Matagorda

We had a lot of fun naming Matagorda. It amuses us to flip through the catalog or scroll the site and see all these names that don’t make a lick of sense to anybody but us. The Joe Bar Price Top, named after Daddy’s one-eyed horse. The Velenda Top, named after one of Hedy’s good friends. Oh, and of course, the Nilla Jacket, named after the dirty little parking lot treasure we found at the horse races a hundred years ago that is arguably either a dog or a cat but is definitely a discarded vanilla air freshener.

We did the same with the colors for the collection. We asked Cheryl to spill the secrets behind the curious names; here are a few of our favorites…

MAN IN BLACK:

“Oh, well this one is named for Johnny Cash, obviously. This is actually more of a Nashville name, but Man In Black shows up in all the ‘I Go Back’ collections; I can’t imagine designing a collection without any black! Johnny and June are really what I had in mind when I started working on Nashville, but it ended up a little more Hank Williams, Jr. You’ll see.”

SHASTA:

“Shasta was the brand of the camper we took all those wild road trips in every summer! I made the little curtains for it. We drove it to Colorado and ripped the hubcaps off hugging the mountain, and we took it down to Acapulco; we took that thing everywhere. A lot of childhood memories involve that Shasta camper.”

TIDE HAVEN:

“Tidehaven was our big high school rivalry. They were a town over in El Maton, and it was always the big game every year. Their colors are blue and red, so this blue just made me think of those old Friday nights.”

SHAG CARPET:

“Mother had this awful avocado green shag carpet and we HATED it. Not even because it was hideous, but because we had to vacuum it, and then RAKE it every Saturday morning. We had these little plastic rakes and us girls would have to rake the carpet into one direction before we could go out and play or do anything. I’m sure a lot of people remember having that chore. But yeah, that’s where we got the name for that green color.”

PICKLE JUICE:

“Oh man, I’m not sure if I should tell this story… He grew up to be the most wonderful, genuine, kind, hardworking, just all-around GOOD man, but our cousin Scotty was kind of a little hellion growing up. One day, us girls were playing with Scotty at our grandmother’s house, and she had this screen door, and we each had one of those big dill pickles, like the kind you get at the movie theater or the swimming pool. Well, he taught us that we could write and draw on the screen with our pickles, so we were basically making a big ol’ mess drawing on her screen door with pickle juice. It didn’t go over well.”

And the list goes on… Acapulco Yellow for that one spur-of-the-moment road trip Daddy promised us if we could get the camper cleaned up; Blue Eyes after Cheryl’s high school boyfriend with the most beautiful blue eyes; Winner’s Circle in honor of all our horse racing memories; and Taos Turquoise, after the town where we first hatched the plan for Double D Ranch.