Entrepreneurial

A. G. Newmyer said slapping the slogan “Too Big To Fail” on the front of a pair of men’s underpants was not meant to mock the government bailout packages extended to the financial and automotive sectors.

“I did not do it in any way related to making a political statement of any kind,” said Newmyer, a longtime Washington, D.C. political consultant, who conceived of his risque idea last Thanksgiving and founded Silly Underwear LLC shortly thereafter. “As all of the discussion about too big to fail started to mushroom during the recent economic tsunami, I just kept thinking about the expression and it just occurred to me as a whimsical idea to put it on a pair of underpants and see what happens.”

The underwear retails for $20 and is primarily sold online at SillyUnderwear.com. Newmyer’s story first appeared in a Wall Street Journal blog, after which he said sales increased dramatically. However Newmyer refrained from releasing any sales figures.

“It’s been very very busy,” he said, noting he already sold out of one size. “We certainly can’t afford to advertise so it’s all viral and word of mouth.”

The company recently released a campy promotional video on YouTube that features a young couple in bed, in which the male is fretting about his job security and his girlfriend tries to boost his confidence by giving him some “Too Big To Fail” underwear.

It appears the magic number for American small businesses is 10, as in the sudden urgency to help smaller companies after the U.S. unemployment rate jumped over 10 percent last month for the first time in a quarter century. After a year with Wall Street at the top of everyone’s agenda, Main Street is now taking center stage.

Suddenly new lending programs are being announced, town halls are hastily being arranged and political heavyweights from across the financial and ideological spectrums are falling over themselves to propose their plans for how to get small businesses back on track and hiring.

Over the past month, everyone from President Obama, to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and to billionaire investor Warren Buffett have addressed the issue. Yesterday was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s kick at the can (watch the video of his speech here), when he chaired a forum on small business financing with FDIC head Sheila Bair and SBA chief Karen Mills.

Over the last week there have been some wins and losses for small businesses in terms of new job data.

On the win side of the ledger, a new Intuit survey shows 44 percent of small businesses say they plan to hire in the next 12 months. The data is included in a San Francisco Chronicle story profiling a local Web startup – Airbnb.com – that is doing its part, having hired seven people since April, at a time when national unemployment has reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent.

But that optimism is tempered by a USA Today story that said the main reason the unemployment rate jumped in October was due primarily to small businesses cutting staff. It seems that while some small companies are starting to hire again, they are still outnumbered by the ones laying off their workers. The story quotes Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, who explained there is a bias towards big companies in how the Labor Department compiles its payroll survey, which showed October job losses were down nearly 50 percent (190,000) from the average of 357,000 in May, June and July.