HOW MANY BLONDES DOES IT TAKE TO start a company that sells novelty products making fun of being blond? Two—not counting a guy who adopts school buses.

It happened like this: Betsy Irvine met Dienna Sanders in an undisclosed Dallas bar in 2002. They started an ad agency together called Big D Media. Clovis Steib III, who is an EPA Adopt-A-School Bus coordinator, became one of their clients. Then, one day, Steib and Sanders, who is blond, were getting into Sander’s father’s car, which had a handicap tag hanging from the rearview mirror.

“She had just done something really dumb,” says Irvine, who is also blond. “Clovis said, ’Oh my God. You are so blondicapped!’” They called Irvine and immediately filed five trademarks. The trio began designing Blondicapped apparel, key chains, bumper stickers, and the like.

The women now run www.blondicapped.rocks themselves, but the e-commerce site was having some difficulties at press time. A security issue from their hosting company had disallowed the HN-link coding on their NT server, which runs the cold-fusion software.

The blondes promised they’d have it figured out soon. —Adam McGill

PUBLISHED IN D MAGAZINE MAY 2003