Wanna go bombing with this stencil that came with my shoes? On the inside of this shoebox is the Ipath logo that says, "This is a stencil/cut along the dotted line." Clearly, the first conclusion that can be made is simply that Ipath wishes to market its brand to a specific cultural crowd that is familiar with street art and appreciates graffiti as a legitimate art form as well as a cool (subversively rebellious) thing to do. Well, I tried to cut it out. I used a real X-acto knife. My carefully traced lines inevitably strayed while rounding those tight curves, and the knife didn't cut all the way through, so i had to retrace everything again. I gave up after the main logo shape. If I couldn't do that without grumbling, I had no business getting into the lettering. This was an activity designed to frustrate. Had this been my own design, I might have had some patience, a little tender loving care... but all this to stencil a shoe company logo? Did they really expect anyone to do this? There was no way my stencil would ever look just they way it was supposed to. With all those little slip-ups, it was bound to corrupt the perfection of the design and appear hand-made. 
Was this really the point? Had they really hoped for anyone to use it, wouldn't they have included inside the box, an already cut out stencil, ready to be sprayed? Maybe it is a reminder to their customers that something is expected of them also. It's not enough to just be cool, you have to do cool stuff too. They want to have the kind of customers that know they are cool because they or their friends make stencils, and they wear Ipath shoes. And so while they are not seriously suggesting that you cut out the box yourself, Ipath can be that kind of shoe brand. I felt like a failure as a consumer. I'd tried too hard, the most uncool thing to do.
