gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

microtulipmania

The gapingvoid t-shirt conversation starts to get interesting:

1. I decide to limit each design to 200 shirts, and no more. And no more than 4 designs available at one time, ever.

I do this for reasons stated in a recent post, "The Tao of Undersupply".

2. Chris over at The Social Customer Manifesto pipes in:

You have hundreds (thousands?) of cartoons you've drawn over the years. Of the four you pick at any one time, there will be some folks who like them, and pick them up. But isn't it considerably more likely that a far greater number of folks would want some other design that you are not producing?

By way of comparison, there's (frankly) no reason why an individual can't, say, grab one of the .jpgs of one of your cartoons, upload it to CafePress (or their local t-shirt shop), and make themselves a t-shirt of it. Once those images are out (and a lot of them are), there's really nothing preventing that. And if that individual is just producing that one shirt for his or her self and not selling them, it's likely you'd never know.

Then Rick Segal pipes in:

There is more to it then just the shirt.

By way of another example. I have a collection of Hard Rock polo shirts from the Hard Rocks around the world. I only get them from the places where I have been and ordered food. I don't have people get them for me nor do I buy them just in passing nor do I even like them as gifts.

If the hard rock offered all the shirts on a website for any store they had, I'd drop collecting them in a second because there is no story, no personal story around the shirts.

These days, it's not about price or maybe even supply, rather it's about buzz and the story behind whatever I'm buying.

The key thing to watch? Assume Hugh gets two hundred people signed up for the automatic t-shirt fix. That's the entire run. Now what?

Do you have a waiting list for people to cancel so you can get onto the list? Do you piss off 200 people by secretly making some extra? Do you 'cop out' in the name of greed/making money and make more while telling the original 200 people, sorry, demand thing.

If Hugh ends up with, call it, 100,000 active readers of whom 10,000 are die hard fans and you have only 200 getting t-shirts with a 400 person waiting list to get into the queue for a t-shirt fix, I wonder how people will define that. Some pundits will say, goofball coulda made more money while others will do a case study on creating buzz.

And everybody will be right.

So I leave the following comment in Rick's blog:

My own two cents: if demand exceeds 200 shirts per design, like I said, when they're gone, they're gone. I'll just make more designs available.

If you give people an incentive to act quickly ("There are only 200 in the world, and they'll be sold out in 3 days"), they act quickly. If you give people an incentive to delay ("Come back next year when they'll be 75% less") they delay.

I'm not bothered about counterfeits. All the fake Beanie Babies did was drive the price of real Beanie Babies sky high. The fakes became first-class adverts for the real thing, fully funded by third parties. Indirect marketing at its best.

And what about secondary markets possibly developing? What if demand for shirts were such that anybody who owned a shirt could pretty much be guaranteed to sell it at a high profit on E-Bay?

Then we're talking microtulipmania.

So I suppose what I would need then are just 200 out of 100-odd-thousand gapingvoid readers to help me create this secondary market... it's one business model, anyway.

So... anyone want to buy a tulip?

Posted by hugh macleod at April 2, 2005 10:02 AM | TrackBack