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New: Shop for Tysto gear!
2006.05.22 — Business | Tysto | Technology | Internet | by Tysto
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Shop Tysto at Café Press. |
Close on the heels of our ground-breaking (for us) RSS feed, the staff of Tysto offers you Shop Tysto, the Café Press store for all your Tysto logo needs as well as other assorted junk, like a beer stein with the famous (for us) "Well, that was dumb, wasn't it?" cartoon.
Café Press allows anyone to set up an online store where people can select about 80 products with your art or photos on them, including T-shirts, mugs, magnets, frameable prints, and mousepads. It's free for the dilettante who just wants to offer his or her logo or catch phrase on every item, but for those who want to offer an extensive catalog of designs and a custom look, the cost is about $5 a month. That's a little steep for Tysto's operating budget ($47 annually, offset by approximately $1 in ad revenues), so until the moolah starts rolling in, our offerings will be limited.
Get a barbecue apron with this charmingly oblique social commentary on it. [Tysto original after Sam Brown] |
Café Press is a little steep for shirts and whatnot, if you ask me, so we've priced all items at $1 over cost (to us). We're confident that when the well starts gushing, this will be sufficient to force the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to crank up an extra monthly run of $2 bills (we demand all withdrawals from our bank to be in $2 bills; we think they're neat).
Simultaneously, we hope that friends, family, and admirer(s) will wear the Tysto branded gear around town and thereby provide Tysto the crucial free advertising it needs to achieve our business goal: domination of the semi-weekly sociopolitical analysis/opinion Web magazine market.
Another potential T-shirt design, if things go well. [Tysto original] |
We're excited by the prospect, not merely because it would make us rich and famous, but because—since writing the Hillary and Condi articles' bumperstickers—we now have lots of other ideas for pithy sayings that would look good on a T-shirt, both political and non-political.
We've already put together a few pieces, like the one at right that have potential. Judging by what else is available on Café Press and other T-shirt sites, people like the smutty double-entendres.
This image virtually cries out to be seen on an infant creeper. (med res | hi res) |
And some of the nicer photos on the Postcards pages would look good on a mousepad or in a frame, we're sure, and a booming business might be just around the corner just from those. I'll probably go to Zazzle.com for that, since they have a reputation as a better photo print maker.
Of course, the chicken-and-egg problem confronts us, as usual: how will people know to come to Tysto to buy logo merchandise in order to wear it to show others to come to Tysto to buy merchandise?
My answer is simple, and is the same as for all chicken-and-egg problems: the chicken evolves gradually from non-chickens, each offspring just a small step different from the last, so that, over several generations, a genetic line develops that exhibits different traits and which can no longer interbreed productively with non-mutational descendents of previous generations; the semi-mutually-reproductive interstitial lines die out as less fit than the remaining semi- or non-mutually-reproductive lines, and what remains are separate genetic lines exhibiting observable traits that allow biologists to classify them as distinct species.
So, all we need are some horny proto-chickens, and we are seriously in business.
f e e d b a c k
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