Trinidad Carnival 2011: Who to play mas with when you have less than $500 for costume?

Searching for Kaotic Carnival's 2011 Carnival page led me to Roam Mas's 2011 DJ for the road's post which sent me to Roam Mas's Facebook display of the 2011 theme, Womanish! Pics below are from their Facebook album. (His post showed up because his name is, also, Kaotic.)

But I already have one teensy tiny little gripe: I really need these Trinidad mas bands to master the social networking thing and stop making new obscurely-titled pages for everything...your ONE official page should have the NAME OF THE BAND as its header, with different albums ON THAT SAME PAGE for different years' presentations! It's like a scavenger hunt trying to track them down for 2011!


I mean think about it, if I don't know about your band, why would I already know your theme to look you up by theme instead of your name?  And when making a Facebook page it would seem to me it helps people doing random searches to put the words mas, carnival, or Trinidad carnival in your page name after your band's name, just to show up in more searches.  I'm just saying!


One bigger gripe...it is DECEMBER 12, 2010 and their official website looks like THIS?! 

No man fix up dat! I normally stay out of the whole mas band extreme critique because I generally only get into that up until the point I select a costume then I am pretty much done aside from noting which ones I come across that I like...but I love to the see the little guy get ahead, so I feel I should put this out there and maybe show how this looks from a customer's point of view, that's all! Especially as the Internet allows for word of mouth to spread oh so much faster...want to be available with your info for the masses, in all ways possible, as soon as possible!




That said, let's get on with what I liked enough about this group to quickly blog about them as soon as I found them.


1. The costumes are, to my eye, VERY creative and yet at such an affordable price! My top choices:
                  A. D'Bacchanalist (what can I say, I'm on my multicoloured vibe from now on this carnival season)
                  B. Midnight Oil (that blue is VIBRANT and would look GREAT next to my skin!)
                  C. Macafouchette (the colour combination just looks yummy, and while I am not into into skin toned costumes this carnival season, I would actually make an exception for this one! Pretty!)


2. The band's Facebook info states they DO take PayPal (and this is something else they may want to adjust for the future but it's no biggie: set up a PayPal account for ROAM MAS not that obscure name that's accepting PayPal's on behalf of the band. The more uniformity, the more professional it looks, especially when you are not a well-established band like TRIBE, Harts, D'Krewe...but definitely a small ting, much points for being able to take online payments without us having to share our credit card info with you, I LIKE THAT!)


3. The prices!  For less than $500 USD, and in some cases less than $400 USD, you can play mas in a great looking, creative costume!  I also love that the price of each costume is right there ON the picture, thank you for that I really dislike having to click around to several different parts of a site to get the full hundred!


4. They have a theme with explanations (I just love the little stories that accompany each section, I didn't see that at all with TRIBE for 2011, Harts neither! YUMA had it and I loved it!), and they emphasize that their costumes are made locally (I am not Trini so I don't feel I have to go out of my way to buy only locally made costumes, but I rate bands that go out of their way to improve local economy, cause I hear many costumes are made in China these days.)