December 12, 2018
Readers Share Viral Success Stories
In the January issue of Wearables, we explore "moment merch," when big events in sports, pop culture or politics go viral, and how apparel decorators can take advantage of those moments. But many T-shirt makers have already experienced this phenomenon in one way or another. We asked them to share a time when a shirt they made went viral or they were tasked with stocking a hot market.
Don't Miss: How to Succeed with "Moment Merch"
The team at Printed Threads in Keller, TX, shared a story of a baseball brawl, between a Texas Rangers second baseman and Toronto Bluejay outfielder that inspired a customer to create a celebratory tee.
Last year when Rougned Odor punched Jose Bautista in the face, one of our customers had us design a shirt that said Rougned eats free at Heim BBQ. The shirt was on many news outlets Including ESPN
— Printed Threads (@printedthreads) November 6, 2018
@hotmarketdesign: We run into this every now and then. Most we can’t publish because of privacy, but [for the Chicago Blackhawks’ 2015 Stanley Cup win] we did 39,000 shirts in 48 hours, which was a ton of fun.
@thetshirtguys: It’s not really timely, but when our Dallas Mavericks won the NBA Championship back in 2011, we were asked to be a hot printer for Albertsons and Tom Thumb stores and had to print over 7,000 shirts overnight. We started printing right when the last game ended around 10 p.m. and finished the next morning around 7 a.m.
George Lampman, Believe Pittsburgh: On Sept. 7, 2008, Bernard Pollard of the Kansas City Chiefs slammed into the leg of Tom Brady. The next day, I was sitting in the office thinking of a way to commemorate this event. Understanding how despised Tom Brady was throughout the rest of the NFL fandom I came up with the Bernard Pollard Fan Club T-shirt. After showing people on a couple of message boards (this was pre-Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) I had a major hit on my hands. I sold a ton of shirts. Thousands of orders per day. People were ordering 20 at a time for parties. People were also decrying my depravity for creating something so vile. By Thursday of that same week, there was a story running every hour on the NFL network as well as all the major talking heads on the network taking sides as to whether this was just good fun or the most despicable thing anyone had ever done.
All in all, it was a lot of fun. The amount of hate mail I received was staggering. Every member of my family was wished some form of malicious harm or death. I have many of them archived and get a kick out of reading them.
@detourshirts: I don’t know about viral, but [this shirt inspired by the hit musical Hamilton] was one of our first designs and has been one of our best-sellers. Not as popular as it used to be, but it still gets some good sales.
Margarita Goroshkevich, ALLRIOT: Our P***y Riot designs were selling like hotcakes when we launched the brand years ago. None of us had any background in activism or politics. All we had were the seeds of a vision to make a positive change in the world; that was it. At the time, P***y Riot were awaiting trial [in Russia], and we designed some shirts to raise money for them. Pretty quickly, we were officially endorsed by the band. Our designs were selling faster than we could make them, and we were working 18-hour days to keep up with the demand. Our enthusiasm kept us going for months – we were just psyched that people actually bought the things we were making.
The first few batches of our T-shirts sucked. Thankfully, punk is renowned for its raw, homemade aesthetic, so we kinda got away with it. In fact, it probably made the experience more authentic for our customers.
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