Meet the masked men behind Brown Cardigan who specialise in viral humour

Brown Cardigan are two men from Sydney running a meme page. They’re godfathers of the Australian larrikin comedy scene, giving a key early boost to Tom Cardy and The Inspired Unemployed as they rose to stardom.

They’re holdovers from the pre-social media internet who made the leap to Instagram and are building a following on TikTok. They can be pugilistic with critics and unlike the vast majority of fame-hungry influencers, are so ambivalent about publicity they will only be photographed wearing balaclavas and without their last names used.

But mostly they post videos. It might be a streaker getting tackled, a painfully failed backflip or a highly inebriated old man at a pub losing a tray of beers. Some posts are obscene, many are crass or not politically correct but they are almost always — at least for Brown Cardigan’s 1.1 million followers on Instagram — funny and very Australian.

Now the largely anonymous duo behind Brown Cardigan, Jonny and Toby, are turning the amorphous enterprise they have created into a business. They’ve dabbled in political campaigning, are looking at raising money from investors and turning their fire hose of posts into something other media businesses can license from in the viral-hungry internet of 2022. In an emailed question and answer with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, Jonny reveals how the duo built a media business that has traversed the changing internet of the 21st century.

What’s the story of Brown Cardigan? When did it start?

In its purest form (a website) Brown Cardigan has existed since September 2003 … The name itself was a reference to my Cornish father who (as English blokes do) at 5:15pm would swap his office suit jacket for a 20-year-old knitted woollen cardigan from April to August. He ‘let’ me ‘borrow’ his credit card to pay for the first few years of domain registration, so the name was my way of ‘repaying’ him for that.

At some point it flipped from a personal weblog to a Tumblr-ish daily image dump of very inside Sydney jokes – real no rules, no f–ks given areas. At that time it was administered by myself and a rotating gang, including Berlin Mike, Joey Drinks, Gus from 12 Major Chords, King Kripy (there’s maybe more, sorry if I forgot you).

How did Toby get involved?

Toby was in Melbourne then (I think). We knew each other (online) from a rap music Google email group, and he pushed me for an admin password. Mr Internet himself, he really took it and ran with it. Soon enough we were smashing some big page views (a few million a month) and making some coin from [then-popular clothing retailer] American Apparel ads via Google Adsense (it was a certain time.) It wasn’t heaps of money, but I remember I once took Toby’s monthly cut out in five dollar denominations for his birthday and threw the full stack at him in a some probably-now-closed Sydney pub.

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Instagram kicked off and we migrated the audience over there – really just because it made more sense for the content, especially as mobile viewports and video-first quickly became the standard.

Why does it work? How do you pick an image (video?) to go on the page from all the submissions you get?

It’s just a feel. I’ve tried and failed to explain it to people before who aren’t familiar and it always falls flat in those instances. We like the idea of this though – a certain, unexplained genre of Australian humour that’s just called ‘Brown Cardigan’. Probably around 99 per cent submissions are binned, missing the mark or probably going far too far (some end up on the b-roll Twitter).

But ultimately I think it works because it’s real. Over time Brown Cardigan has come to document the ‘others’, not the glossy tourism bulls–t, but the real funny nuances that make this girted bastard of a country so special (for better or worse.)

It seems like Brown Cardigan has been pretty critical in The Inspired Unemployed and Tom Cardy getting big. Do you feel like some kind of influencer influencer for a particular kind of very Australian Instagrammer/TikToker?

Yeah, we love to see them all getting their successes and [are] happy we’re a part of those early stages legging them up. I think people generally recognise that too which is nice. That said, I think the Inspired Unemployed boys still might owe us a paid promo invoice or two from those early days when they were really hustling for the views. But they did also recently send us a sixer of their no-carb beer, so maybe we’re even now?

What’s the business plan for the future? Any plans to raise money from investors?

Yeah, we’ve been approached a few times over the past few years from various businesses and individuals with different deals – from partnerships to equity stakes and things in between. It’s something we’ve considered, and an investment of any size would definitely help us turbo-boost the business a bit – not to mention purchasing more of the submissions that come at us every day. But it’s all about it being the right fit and something that doesn’t f -k up the usual flow of what we do.

Our membership set-up [where fans can pay between $12 and $100 annually for early access to posts and merchandise] has been fantastic in helping us stay independent. Pretty much any money we’ve made from venture has gone straight back into the licensing side of the business, ensuring we can pay those who send us stuff.

What made you get into licensing images and videos from the people who create and submit them?

Our hand was kind of forced to be honest. We found over a time a bunch of licensing businesses overseas were using our account as a shopping centre. [These are companies that find posts going viral online and pay the original user a fee in return for a contract that gives them rights over the further distribution and use of the content, which they tend to aggressively enforce].

We’ve always credited people (when they want to be credited) and basically that meant Viral Hog, Jukin Media etc were simply going through the posts, finding the more PG ones and then hitting up the submitters directly, offering them a bit of coin for a signature and then slapping us with a take-down notice.

So we just had to set up the mechanisms for doing that process ourselves. It’s been a bit of a slog – contracts, lawyers etc – but we’ve got it really humming now, paying people real money for their contributions (when we can afford it.) It’s the classic business model – sell some socks, buy some videos. Repeat.

How did the Unions NSW partnership, in which Brown Cardigan designed and documented mobile billboards targeting former prime minister Scott Morrison in the 2022 federal election, go?

Pretty great. They were fantastic to work with and it really gave us free rein to come up with the slogans we wanted (some we submitted went too far, but most were accepted.) We’ve purposely avoided politics in the past but this just felt right for us. Fake footy fans, turncoats etc is something that transcends any political partisan bullshit.

What’s the status of your deal with publishing group Scout, which is behind outlets like Junkee and Australian Geographic? Who does what?

While Scout is a relatively new thing, I’ve known the team behind it for years. We needed some people to help us with the random ‘agency’ work that comes at us sometimes. Neither of us are sales people by nature, so they’re helping us on the commercial side of things so we can focus solely on the creative element of those campaigns. There was some confusion in the initial announcement around the deal which suggested we’d been bought out by Scout. I got a few odd messages from mates before I realised the announcement had been misinterpreted. Not sure how that all happened, but the relationship is purely working on a case-by-case basis at the moment, and purely on the sales side of things.

How many people are you hoping to hire?

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I think at some stage we’ll need help with the general admin and merch side of our business. It’s still just the two of us and sometimes it gets a bit much. We’re currently focused on adding some components to the licensing side – including a submission portal so we can hopefully remove some of the clog from the various inboxes submissions currently land in. I can definitely see that side then requiring a few more sets of hands over the next year or two to chat to contributors, send cash to their various off-shore accounts, pack some socks in some satchels – you know, normal business things.

Speaking of TikTok, what are your thoughts? Going to go hard there?

It’s definitely been a bit of a focus for us this year – fishing where the fish are etc. We’re probably close to maxing out on Instagram as well, considering our million-plus audience is around 80 per cent Australia and there’s only so many phone-owning humans in this land. TikTok can be a frustrating place with the heavy-handed moderation, but we’ve also managed to crack a fair few million-plus posts over the past few months, so the appetite is definitely there on the audience side.

Who are you?

Jonny and Toby. Sydney. But not in Bondi.