It’s 6am and Ironing Board Sam is standing in his house clothes putting some finishing touches on his pants when I come in to check on him in his hotel room in Kansas City.

“Aaron, I always ironed my own clothes. Everywhere I go, the first thing I look for is the ironing board.” Sam is getting prepared for his last day shooting commercials for Faultless Starch in Kansas City. He’ll do a photo shoot, record the jingles he wrote and perform in two commercials touting Faultless’ newest line of starch called “Premium.” For Sam, this is the realization of a life’s work.

A few nights prior, during his interview with Chuck Haddix, host of the Fish Fry on KCUR , Kansas City’s favorite blues radio show, Sam recounted the story of how he got his name, and how it led to one of his proudest moments as the celebrity icon for Faultless Premium Spray Starch:

“The starch campaign is an extension of my career (as Ironing Board Sam), a name I hated when I was starting out has now connected me to a great company that started in 1887, a company that’s about clothes. My name is about clothes and my career has been about clothes because I’ve always been about looking good, from 25-75, it took that long. But, it took that time to make my career come to life.”

See Ironing Board Sam’s page on the Faultless website here

A few months ago, I got a call from Faultless’ marketing team asking if Ironing Board Sam was real. As Music Maker’s Artist Services Coordinator, these are the calls I dream of because I spend most of my days looking for gigs and paychecks for Sam and our many other partner artists. When they told me a Google image search for “ironing board” had turned up the photos of Sam, I realized that four years of shooting and posting were totally worthwhile.

Sam was blown away by the complete experience of doing the starch campaign. He loved Kansas City calling it a “city with a groove, like when you’re playing music and you feel the groove, that’s what Kansas City feels like to me. The food is groovy, too.“

Sam’s career has had many ups and downs and he is famous for following an outrageous idea to its glorious realization. Sam sees his relationship with Faultless Starch as something more than just a work opportunity – it’s fate. “The spirit told me about the starch, I had a vision. This can is going to take me to where I want to go. It’s all for a reason.“

– Aaron Greenhood