Approachable Luxury for Father's Day

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:14)
Chris Rovzar is a dad with a little kid. He's also a guy who knows what to buy dads. We're not talking about a regular gift guide. We're talking about a gift guide that dads will use every day. Chris Rovzar is Bloomberg Pursuit's editor-in-large. He joins us from New York.
Chris, before we start with the gift guide, which is great, I gotta say I love the way that you start this story because you write about your own tradition that you had with your brother and your dad because you guys would get him something each year that he'd actually use each day. It's really sweet. Talk about what you remember from your childhood.

**Chris Rovzar** (0:48)
Well, I don't know if it's really sweet or just cheap.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:50)
It's really, no, it's totally sweet.

**Chris Rovzar** (0:53)
When we were little, my brother and I would try to figure out how to get our dad with our allowance money for Father's Day. We tried to think of what his most precious item was, what he reached for the most.
When we watched him, that was his handkerchief. I don't know about your dad's, but my dad always had and still has a handkerchief in his back pocket. We decided that's what we would get him for Father's Day. Every year, we got him different bandanas.
He'd think of us every time he sneezed, we'd be with him when we weren't around. Yeah, so it just became a tradition. Actually, recently, I started getting him handkerchiefs again.

**Carol Massar** (1:29)
Chris, oh man, same for my family.
Both my mom and dad had cloth handkerchiefs. I remember as a kid, something happened and you would get their handkerchief. It was just great.

**Chris Rovzar** (1:41)
It was good for wounds, it was good for colds, it was good for making a sock puppet in the case of an emergency. What else is like that?

**Carol Massar** (1:51)
So sweet. What kind of a dad are you in terms of this list that you guys have? Because you broke it up into categories.

**Chris Rovzar** (1:59)
That's it. We broke it up into culture dad and kitchen dad and adventure dad. I think that I'm a mix of geek dad and culture dad. I wish I was kitchen dad, but I am not.
Maybe a little bit of adventure dad, although I feel like Tim is maybe more of an adventure dad.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:17)
Definitely adventure dad, although the kids aren't quite old enough yet to go on the adventures that I'd need to get one of these vests that carries everything.
Yeah. Go ahead.

**Chris Rovzar** (2:30)
That's for my dad who's like a hunter, I mean.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:34)
Hey, come on. We have hunting in Brooklyn. Prospect Park. Talk a little bit about some of the other gifts that stand out on the list here and why you chose to arrange it this way.

**Chris Rovzar** (2:46)
Yeah. All the dads on the Pursuit see we're talking and we're thinking like, all right, a lot of these Father's Day gift guides end up being quite expensive things like fancy watches which as you know I love and whiskey rocks and what dad needs more whiskey rocks? The correct number of whiskey rocks to have is zero. We were like, all right, what are little things like my dad's hankies that actually dads would use and be like, oh, this is maybe not expensive but like a part of my daily life.
Immediately, James on my team said, tennis ball subscription and I said, what is that? He said, when you play tennis, you use a new can every time you play, which as a non-tennis player, I didn't even realize and maybe you play tennis a lot, but a lot of dads aren't good at keeping track of stuff like that. If your kids get you a subscription, just literally a subscription on Amazon, so it comes once a month, $36, 12 cans. That's an amazing gift that dad will love and constantly use. So there's a lot of stuff like that.

**Tim Stenovec** (3:46)
I love that. I just need the tennis court time to actually go and play right now. But anyway, Carol.

**Chris Rovzar** (3:52)
For sports dad, there was also these bike classes.
I used to be a biker. I once biked across the country and I biked with these crappy plastic sunglasses. I got them at the station and another dad on the team was like, no, no, you can get really good glasses that have a single frame. They go from day to night. They don't get dark. And it's $200, which is a lot for a kid. But it's something that will make your dad happy. And you get to choose the color. So because you're the one that's going to have to look at them as the kids. So that was also a good sports dad item that I didn't think of.