Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Americans, responding more to political issues this election year than in 2000 or 2004, demand that their voices be heard but are instead letting their dollars do the talking.
Melissa Padgett, manager of Third Planet, 846 Massachusetts St., said she noticed the rising demand for political T-shirts when more people began asking for and buying the shirts after the 2004 election. Consequently, Third Planet ordered its first T-shirts supporting Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) after the primaries at the beginning of 2008. The store now sells five different lines of Obama shirts and has another on the way.
Padgett said Third Planet had a hard time keeping its 36 lines of different political shirts on the shelf. She said that because the customers bought the shirts, which sell at an average price of $19.95, it made sense to stock them.
“We wouldn’t do it if they didn’t sell,” Padgett said. “We put our money where our mouth is.”
Aside from Third Planet, other T-shirt distributors are also profiting from this election season. In 2004, Ryan Redcorn, a graphic designer and 2004 graduate, founded Demockratees, a T-shirt design company. He said he made $15 per week by selling his shirts to Third Planet and worked from a 500-square-foot apartment in Clearview City.
Today, he said he made $6,000 per week from Demockratees. He said he sold his T-shirts to national community leaders from organizations such as The Native Vote and he worked from a 3,000-square-foot warehouse.
Blue Collar Press, one of the first companies to produce Redcorn’s designs, is also catering to the demand for political clothing. The company just released 12 original political T-shirts. Hoping to sell at least 100 shirts before the election, Blue Collar Press had the shirts available to customers the first week of October.
For Sean Ingram, owner of Blue Collar Press, the recent success of the political T-shirt business is easily explained.
“Two things drive T-shirt sales: when somebody’s excited about something and when somebody’s pissed off about something,” Ingram said.
Ingram said despite how trendy political T-shirts were, Blue Collar Press couldn’t expect its new T-shirt lines to bring in any substantial profit past Nov. 4, the day of the presidential election.
A graph tracking weekly product sales of political items on Cafépress.com, another apparel company, shows the sales figures for items supporting former presidential candidates such as Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) fell dramatically after her campaign ended. Ingram said he would donate any election shirts left over after Nov. 4 to Goodwill.
Looking past the election deadline, Third Planet is busy planning for Jan. 20, the official end of the Bush presidency. To say goodbye to all of its anti-Bush apparel, the store will hold a “Bush-Burning Sale” from October to the inauguration date.
Unlike Third Planet or Blue Collar Press, Demockratees is not expecting the demand for its political T-shirts to go down. In fact, Redcorn said the company, which breaks even, is on pace to double its selling rate in the next year, potentially making a $6,000 profit. He said he separated Demockratees shirts from simple political T-shirts by making sure his products highlighted diverse issues reflective of his own ideologies.
“A lot of the reason I’ve stayed in business is that my ethics are congruent with the messages on the shirt, my business plan is congruent with it, and the people who are buying it are congruent with the message,” Redcorn said.
Redcorn said screenprinting gave normal people exposure to complex issues that might be under the radar. He said that his shirts could act as a billboard that raised awareness for a cause and could express a personal opinion or belief.
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