A: By wiping your ass on him. Literally. No, really!
Yes, this is a real product. And where will it be sold? Why, in Mexico…where else?
He went from anger to creativity. Antonio Battaglia, a lawyer from Guanajuato, will be selling “Trump” toilet paper at the end of the year, and will be donating a portion of the proceeds to help immigrants and his deported compatriots.
The offensive tone Donald Trump used to refer to Mexicans during his campaign for president of the United States motivated Battaglia, who is trying to send a message to make clear that Mexicans are not “bad hombres”, as Trump called them.
“I got angry, and started to look for a way to do something that would have a repercussion, not in a joking tone or a bad one, but a positive one,” he told Expansión in an interview.
“I tried to register a trademark for clothing or footwear, since my family is dedicated to the production of shoes, but the ‘Trump’ brand was already registered. Then I had the idea of producing a toilet paper, a product which would be ironic and which would stay on the market for a good length of time,” Battaglia explained.
The idea of the project is to generate a product at an accessible price, and that a percentage of the proceeds would be destined for the aid of migrants, a sector affected by the statements and policies of Trump.
Battaglia obtained the trademark from the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) in August of 2015.
“For me, the business is secondary. What I want is that it does something useful to help migrants and deportees. First off, I plan to donate 30% of the profits to organizations in Guanajuato,” Battaglia said.
Antonio Battaglia is the grandson of professional soccer player Antonio Félix Battaglia, an Argentine selected for the León team in the first national soccer division in the 1950s. He has a law office, and participates in his family’s shoe-making business. For the toilet-paper project, he will invest some 400,000 pesos to start, but he is open to finding other investors.
“We want to find a partner who has a business well positioned in this market (that of paper). We will use their channel of distribution and their knowledge of the market,” Battaglia explained to Expansión.
The worst problem he has encountered, he says, is the lack of space in paper-manufacturing plants, since the big brands that dominate the market hoard production time.
“The market is flooded and there is no one who wants to produce the paper. I looked for options in China, but nothing concrete came of it, until I found a firm in Mexico which is participating in this business and is interested in producing the product,” Battaglia commented, without giving further details.
The plan is for production to start later this year, and that the product be distributed via grocery stores and supply centres.
In Mexico, the hygienic-paper market is valued at 20.3 billion pesos ($1.097 billion US) a year, according to Euromonitor International.
Translation mine.
I’m really trying hard here not to make dirty puns, but even in a market that’s flooded, there’s still a good chance that this project will be flush with success. Especially since Donnie hasn’t even thought to register his oh-so-lucrative brand name on a product that will land up, quite literally, in the toilet.
I just hope that Mexican plumbing and sewers can handle this.
