If you were in southeast Michigan in the 1980s and ‘90s, you'd be well aware of a particular ad featuring women in giant fur coats slaloming down a mountainside or riding on horseback.
The ad also featured a catchy jingle that made Dittrich Furs a household name well beyond the bounds of fur buyers and Detroit fashion. And there's a real art to writing this kind of staying power into a melody that's really only a few seconds long.
“When I first met the late Dittrich, he impressed on me how important it was to get three items in his jingle,” said Dan Yessian, the composer of the Dittrich Furs jingle. “[Dittrich said to me] ‘You have to mention 1893,’ because that was the emanation of the store, ‘you have to talk about dependability, and you have to mention my name, Dittrich Furs, at least six or seven times within 30 seconds.’”
Stateside’s April Baer sat down with Yessian to talk about his process and his career.
Getting into the jingle business
Yessian said he grew up playing saxophone, piano, and clarinet. But he didn’t immediately gravitate toward music as a career.
He started in education, then decided to go into the music business in 1971. He set up a small office in a renovated bait shop in Farmington, and started cold calling car dealers.
“It took another five years or so before I garnered any kind of attention with being able to create music for products,” he said.
Yessian said that work became the bread and butter of his business.
“It wasn't so much songwriting, although songwriting is my first love,” he said. “But with jingles, they're really songs. But the moment that you decide you're going to attach a product to it, they become a jingle.”
Yessian said he approaches writing a song and writing a jingle differently.
“With a jingle in 30 seconds, you got to get your message across,” he said. “With a song, you can take up to one minute before somebody hears the hook.”
The origins of an iconic jingle
In 1985, Hal Dittrich, then the owner of the almost 100-year-old business, reached out to Yessian with an interesting idea for a commercial.
Yessian said when he first heard Dittrich's ideas for the ad — to feature women riding horses in fur coats through the snow — he wasn’t totally sold.
“At the time, I thought it was kind of corny,” he said. “But then I thought, it's so bizarre at the same time that it seems like it's going to catch interest of some sort. And it did.”
Ohad Milner, a music producer who has worked with Yessian for over a decade, said the jingle caught on so well that it became its own piece of Detroit culture.
“There are far, many, far, far more people who know the spot and the jingle than have ever visited the store,” he said. “There's this novelty of the commercial with the jingle, and then there's this mystical lure of this magical place in Detroit that has all these fur coats.”
Parody is the sincerest form of flattery
With the spread of social media, the tune is even known outside Detroit.
“The jingle itself has been spoofed on many, many times,” Yessian said.
Sam Richardson’s show Detroiters parodied the song in 2017 with an ad for the fictitious Devereux wigs. And when Richardson appeared on late night host Conan O’Brian’s show, he sang it for the comedian.
Milner and Yessian attended an event celebrating the season 1 finale of Detroiters, where they met Richardson and his co-star, Tim Robinson.
“At some point in the night, the host of the event pointed Dan out as the writer of the jingle,” Milner said. “And moments later, the entire room serenaded him with his own jingle.”
Milner said the jingle continues to be an icon in Detroit’s culture.
“It's like a piece of comfort,” he said. “You remember something from years past, and it comforts you. The nostalgia is a really powerful thing.”
