They’ve been selling the same t-shirt and mug for at least 8 years. Both of which have a Slug Signorino illustration on them, which may be fun and distinctive for a newspaper column, but isn’t necessarily something that most folks (even fans of Cecil) want to have plastered across their chest.
I don’t know what their sales are like, but a few years back you had 4,000 people willing to pony up money to post, I’m sure you could get quite a few interested in buying a t-shirt if you marketed to them. Have a SDMB t-shirt design contest, enable voting, and offer the winning design for sale.
I don’t know, I’d wear some of the artwork of some of the columns although a specific one doesn’t come to mind. But the current t-shirts are below average for Slug’s artwork although I don’t dislike his art in general.
But then again I’m the guy who wants band T-shirts to be copies of their album covers and thinks the t-shirts with original art on them are uglier usually.
I am certainly not in charge but if I were I would disagree with you. The purpose of the shirt should be to:
Have a design that members will like to wear and
b) Have a design that acts as a commercial to get new customers.
Having an inside joke on the shirt won’t work because:
a) look at the “What SDMB meme do you hate” threads that pop up frequently. Any inside joke you pick will annoy as many people or more than will like it.
2) An inside joke will not work as advertising
c) Any SDMB reference will only apply to the SDMB and not to Cecil or the SD as a whole.
I would buy the shirt as described…with or without Opal…but only if they were available in sizes for normal human beings (5xlt)…nut just for the smaller members.
One for the SD itself. That one would probably be of more interest to Ed et al. I am not sure what those would look like, but then again I am not a funny or even a t-shirty kinda guy. Those could be sold from the front page as an additional money making scheme for the SD. I don’t see it making millions, but I believe the cost of implementing it would be next to zero if it is all outsourced. Any earnings would be profit.
The other market is for the SDMB. Oddly, this might turn out to be more profitable since the SDMB is a bit more of a cult than the SD, but also of less interest to Ed et al. Or at least harder for Ed to explain to the et al. These would be shirts with the usual one-liners that people love/hate here. Cite, Opal, treadmills, Marianas, etc. Mod coffee mugs are also an option.
That the jokes are all in jokes that nobody else would get and would serve little or no publicity purpose is irrelevant. Hardcore SDMB fans would buy them in support, not as publicity.
The tricky thing is that although the cost of implementing it is also next to zero, if Ed doesn’t give it the green light, it will be hard to do without his consent. I mean, besides the copyright issues and all that, what is the point of a third party doing it if the monies are not going to support the SDMB anyways?
Maybe if someone with serious interest in seeing this happen did all the leg work and came to Ed with something more than a “why don’t you do it” and came with a solid plan instead, he might show some interest. Asking Ed why he doesn’t do something is pointless as the answer is obvious. He has other things to worry about rather than pursue any random daydream.
So go ahead and ask around how to go about making and distributing these shirts without leaving his desk and spending a penny and then come to Ed with a credible plan in hand.
The point of having an inside joke on a shirt is that people will ask you about it. **And then you can tell them. **If you’re wearing a shirt that says “Pepsi-Cola” on it, how many people will approach you and ask about that esoteric red, white, and blue design? Nobody. But if you’re wearing a shirt with “Cite?” on it, your friends might ask you what it means. People you meet might ask you. Strangers might ask you. **And then you can tell them. **
You tell them about this community you belong to, this crazy international group of people who can answer almost any question, support you when you’re sick, smack you down when you act like a jerk, discuss literature and movies and sports and politics with you, send you recipes and pictures of their cats, and yet never give you grief if you don’t clean your bathroom.
And maybe they’ll join too!
Oh, it might.
Have a design contest, we pick the winner(s); Creative Loafing or whoever holds the copyright signs off (although nobody needs a license to make a T-shirt with the work “Cite” on it") and tell Cafe Press. They don’t make the shirts until somebody orders them anyway.
Maybe they could use setup they already have in place for the Slug Signorino T-shirt. You can go there right now and order a T-shirt, it doesn’t stretch the imagination too much to think that one could put a similar link right below that shirt with any other kind of shirt they want to market. It also doesn’t tax the mind too much to think that they could send a new graphic to their current supplier and get a different kind of t-shirt made, for a much lower cost than a place like Cafe Press.
We are listening to each other; we don’t have to agree. And even without agreeing, we can both be right or both be wrong. I think you are thinking on a larger scale than I am. On your scale, you are right.
I have an old SD t-shirt, with Slug’s “Stupidity, I Smack Thy Face” artwork, that dates back to when the only online presence of TSD was on AOL (has the AOL logo on it and everything). And it’s still one of my most treasured possessions, which I wear proudly around The Bluff City during the summer months. And I’ll be happy to buy the coffee mug, just as soon as I break one of the ones I currently own (or otherwise make room for new coffee mugs in my very limited kitchen cabinetspace).
Considering that Slug’s been Cecil’s illustrator since the very first SD column I read (when I picked up that very first Reader issue on NU’s Chicago Campus back in August of '79), I can’t fathom the Slug hatred I see here. A Cecil Adams column without a Slug Signorino illustration would just not feel right.
Jeez, next someone will be trying to tell me that “Cecil Adams” is just someone’s pen name, or some other such absurdity.
