How Jeezy’s Snowman Became Hip-Hop’s Most Controversial Marketing Campaign

Jeezy flipped a diamond-encrusted chain and a sketch drawing into one of hip-hop’s most controversial fashion statements.

Back in 2005, when Jeezy was still sporting “Young” in his name, the upstart Atlanta rapper set himself apart by slapping a huge, scowling snowman—eyebrows slanted, straight line for a mouth, glitter-frosted—onto a T-shirt. It was all part of an elaborate campaign to promote the street-anointed breakout star of Puff Daddy’s group Boyz N Da Hood, then seeking solo mainstream success with his debut Def Jam LP Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101.

According to Jeezy, that campaign started with a trip to his jeweler. “I took him about $150,000, maybe $200,000, like, ‘Yo, I want this snowman medallion.’” Jeezy remembers. He sported the piece on the cover of his Trap Or Die mixtape, which dropped in January 2005, and “Snowman” quickly became his calling card, due to his past dealing cocaine, or “snow.” “When I started wearing it I automatically saw how people was looking at that shit in the club like, ‘What the fuck?’ As the music was getting bigger, people were calling me Snowman more than they were calling me Jeezy.”

He realized most of his followers couldn’t afford a chain, but T-shirts with the same silhouette were more accessible. Former Def Jam marketing director Ashaunna Ayars says she got involved around the same time, in early 2005. “When thinking of new creative ideas to take him outside of Atlanta and grow his visibility, I just drew that snowman with a pen on a piece of paper,” she tells Genius. “[Mike Jones] had the phone number on his shirts—that was his campaign. We were like, ‘We need something that’s as big and as notable as the phone number.’ That was my personal marketing goal: How do we beat Mike Jones?”

Ayars sent her simple sketch to Eif Rivera—now a video director for Drake, Kanye West, and yes, Jeezy too—to have it blown up and printed on shirts, which would be sold and distributed guerrilla style. “We could have put a tiny Snowman on the shirts or [put it] on the back,” says Rivera, who compares the design’s brilliant simplicity to the Apple logo. “But everything we did as a whole—meaning myself, Ashaunna, Jeezy, Def Jam—we created this T-shirt and the proportions and everything was right.”

The shirts’ first production run was small. Rivera recalls starting with about 100; Jeezy says it was more like 1,000. Either way, it wasn’t enough, especially after Jeezy began wearing them in music videos and during appearances. He sported a black T-shirt with the triple screen-printed Snowman logo in Gucci Mane’s “Icy” video, which dropped in April. And he wasn’t subtle about his trademark, rapping, “Get it? Jeezy the Snowman / I’m iced out, plus I got that snow, man.”

The shirts were featured more prominently via Jeezy’s own “And Then What” video in June and later in Juelz Santana’s “Make It Work For You” visual, except these tees gained glitter and an expressionless mouth, like a bespeckled angry emoji. “We decided to print it with some glitter—it took off from there,” says Rivera, who estimates printing up to 30,000 shirts for Def Jam. “It went crazy. You had to be someone special to have the one with the glitter on it. I remember [former Executive Vice President at Def Jam] Shawn ‘Pecas’ [Costner] telling me, ‘Can you make a black-on-black for Kanye?’”

As Jizzle’s notoriety grew, so did bootlegging. Knockoff versions of the cotton shirts began popping up at streetwear stores around the country. Some added bandanas and guns to the original design, others came in different colorways. Jeezy realized how rampant the bootlegging had become during an August trip to the MAGIC trade show in Las Vegas with Jay Z, where he saw “30 different booths” selling various Snowman shirts. “They were selling like crack,” he adds. “[Jay] asked me, ‘Did you trademark that?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but how do you stop [this]?’”

School administrators wondered the same question, especially when word got out about the drug-related messaging of the Snowman logo. In November, Associated Press reported that school officials were beginning to ban the shirt. Reports of principals making students turn their Snowman shirts inside out surfaced from Brooklyn to Bankhead; some students were reportedly sent home for their Jeezy gear. “I remember waking up one day and my man was like, ‘Turn on CNN!’” Jeezy says. “There was a worldwide ban at all the schools.”

“When we started to see that I was like, ‘Oh shit, we made it!’” Ayars adds.

Sam Lilly, a high school football coach in Augusta, Georgia, felt the shirts could invite danger. “You can get seen by somebody who thinks you’re a drug dealer on his block and get shot,” he told WRDW. “A lot of things can happen with having a shirt like that on.”

Even early supporters turned against the Snowman. Jeezy had commissioned Miskeen Originals—at the time popular for custom-painted clothes—to design its own take on the Snowman shirts (see below). In late July and early August ’05, the brand sent 500 individually designed shirts to retailers in major cities with a $68 price tag. But according to company owner Yaniv Zaken, those shirts were printed while he was on vacation, without his authority. He pulled the plug on the design once he realized its illegal undertone. “I like the buzz,” he told Philadelphia Weekly. “Of course it gives us an edge. But if I was here, none of this would have occurred.”

“I think they was nervous that somebody from the streets had that much influence,” Jeezy says, reflecting on the nationwide backlash. “That image is iconic. You can make your own assumptions from it, but a two year-old kid can look at that and tell you it’s a snowman.”

This wasn’t the first or last time a rapper would be criticized for merch. In 2000, an Ohio teen sued the local police department for confiscating an Insane Clown Posse shirt that read “MERRY FUCKIN' CHRISTMAS BITCH!” in red and green writing. He settled out of court. More recently, Rev. Al Sharpton called for a boycott of Kanye’s confederate flag-adorned Yeezus merch in 2013. Last year, “out of respect” for veterans, PacSun pulled A$AP Rocky shirts that featured an upside down U.S. flag.

As for Jeezy, he used the criticism to fuel his career. In February 2006, he dropped Can’t Ban The Snowman, on which he defiantly raps: “I bow down to no man / I say all that to say that you can’t ban the Snowman.” He’s even got a song on there called “Jeezy The Snowman” where he directly addresses the controversy:

Seventy-two karats on my Snowman piece
I’m dope boy fresh, 4X black tee
And there’s a million motherfuckers feelin’ just like me.

Since then, Jeezy’s continued to use the Snowman as part of his brand, most recently on the cover of his new No. 1 album, Trap or Die 3. “I think it connects your new fans and the ones that have been riding with you from day one,” says Jeezy, who’s selling those classic tees once again via his website. “That’s why I didn’t want my picture on the album cover. I just wanted to make it iconic. Even these new kids, they’re excited about the Snowman because they heard about it. Now they get a chance to see it and feel it all over again."