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Merchandising the Toronto Earthquake
Chris Tsang’s shirt, for sale on Zazzle.
Yesterday’s earthquake was a mere 5.0 on the Richter scale, making it just slightly more worrisome than an everyday subway rumble. But that hasn’t stopped a number of local entrepreneurs from selling earthquake-related merch, much of it available just hours after the final tremor. Is there money to be made commemorating an event that lasted thirty seconds?
“I was actually sitting at my desk, I was on one of those conference calls,” said Chris Tsang, whose commemorative T-shirt was likely the first available on the web. “I stood up and was like, ‘What the heck was that?'”
He cobbled his shirt’s image and copy together in about five minutes, using a picture of Toronto’s skyline he found somewhere on the web. Then he brought it to market on Zazzle.com, which sells user-designed T-shirts, and pays users a small amount of money each time a shirt of their design sells. He tweeted about it shortly afterward, and got a surprising amount of play in the local media. (Including, um, right here.)
“I think I’ve sold maybe three,” he said. He expects to pocket about six dollars. Tsang told us he made the T-shirts mainly for entertainment, and as a test of the promotional capabilities of Twitter, with which he is now more impressed than ever.
This T-shirt is for sale at Come Get Customized on Yonge Street, according to reader Mike Radoslav, who shot this picture.
A few other people have tried similar marketing tactics. A Torontoist commenter (who goes by accozzaglia, and whose real name we wouldn’t tell you if we knew it, unless he or she gave us permission) made a Zazzle T-shirt with a more G20-focused angle. Also, reader Mike Radoslav wrote to tell us that Come Get Customized, a T-shirt shop on Yonge Street just north of College Street, is selling shirts that say: “I Survived Toronto Earthquake 2010.”
JustEat.ca was offering 10% off orders on their website to customers who entered coupon code “QUAKE10.” Sadly, that offer is no longer valid.
Even Spacing Magazine have turned into earthquake moguls by ramping up their existing button industrial complex in the service of disaster capitalism. Their “I Survived the Quake” buttons, which are priced at $1.50 each online and $2 each in stores, were manufactured by 4 p.m. and in stores by 5 p.m. The quake took place at 1:40 p.m.
“We’ve already had about one hundred orders online,” said Matthew Blackett, Spacing‘s publisher, “and both the stores we put them in—Swipe Books and Outer Layer on Queen—sold out within hours.” Spacing is in the process of delivering more buttons to both stores. Their initial print run was six to seven hundred buttons.
“We have a manufacturer that’s two blocks away from our building, and they’re friends of ours,” said Blackett. “We put them on the map in terms of button-making.”
Blackett attributes the success of Spacing‘s buttons to the fact that they’re much less expensive than T-shirts, and more wearable. But he’s aware that the trend is likely to be short-lived.
“If we didn’t have the G20,” he said, “the sale could go for a couple of days.”
Speaking of which, where’s our “I Made It Through the G20” T-shirt? Oh, right.