American Bedwetter

Since 1904

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About Us

Since 1904, American Bedwetter™ has been providing quality clothing and accessories with styles that define the wearer.

American Bedwetter started as a complete hoax, developed in an attempt to expose advertising rhetoric and boilerplate for the nonsense it is: meaningless text that excites you into buying products with the belief they'll define who you are.

The current rage in the corporate world is "building a brand", which is making a name recognizable to you and associating it with a particular aspect of your life. They try to hit you up based by your age bracket, class in society, school you attend, gender expression/identification, sexual orientation or just about any other aspect of your identity. They want to make you believe that to truly experience who you are, to get the most out of life and express yourself, you need their product.

I'm here to tell you you don't need it. If you want to buy into it, by all means do. But I hope by exposing advertising, you have more choice in the matter, rather than being coerced into spending hard-earned money.

For the record, I don't think most marketers are bad or evil people. Merchants, at least the ones I've worked with, are just people like you and me, trying to do their job so they can feed their families. As I see it, the problem is in a company of 50 or 50,000 people, whose job is it to be moral? We're all busy and focused, so if it's not in anybody's job description, it's neglected. The solution is to make ourselves more resistant.

Back to the store: American Bedwetter

No, really, I want to buy some crap!

About the Author

The American Bedwetter™ concept was developed by Perette Barella based on a variety of experiences:

While figuring out my identity in the 1990s, I began to notice difficulty in finding clothes I liked. In 1999 I attended a fashion event at a local mall, where different stores told a group of us about the new spring (or was it fall?) fashions. Each store suggested different fashions (some were upscale, some casual; some metro, some country). This lead me to start questioning.

In 2000 I developed "The Fashion Project", a workshop designed to get others thinking about the same questions I had. I ran it twice; once was a brilliant success, the other was a flop. Out of the success I changed the way others shopped, and they supplied me with new ideas about motivations. All of this encouraged advertising resistance.

In 2003 a software engineering job caused a breakdown. While I was probably eligible for disability, limited function prevented me exploring this option; I didn't know how. My income dropped precipitously to well below poverty level from a comfortable living. I tightened budgets and made due for 8 years while I recovered, learning new life skills out of necessity. When I was able, I read The Overworked American and The Overspent American and several other books on the issues of money vs time.

I returned to mainstream work as a web developer. Working daily to make it easier to buy things, or create more incentive to buy things, I felt a contradiction in what I do. Worries of a relapse moderated spending, with purchased targeted at things I needed while saving like mad. A year into the job, I began to slide, and after a second year I resigned.

I then spent two months on a bike ride through central New York, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, Canada's Land-of-Lakes region and the Lake Erie section of the Waterfront Trail.

In the end, I will probably never be able to describe how I quite see the world. I do not see many problems; instead there is one giant one with lots of interdependencies. These can be understood somewhat with sufficient time and study, but I'm not hopeful about serializing an incredibly complex model in text. This website, for all its limitations, is my effort to do so, even knowing the inevitable deficiencies inherent in this effort.