A Stimulus In His Own Image: Obama Memorabilia, Keeping Sales Aloft

[Emit]

~snip~

...With so many segments of the economy in the fetal position, the Obama memorabilia business is one of the very few that is actually thriving.

In most election years, the candidate T-shirt and button market pretty much disappears after the ballots are counted. Not this time. Our next president has become a living, breathing stimulus package for a modest-size group of entrepreneurs who are slapping Obama's image on any surface it'll stick to. At CafePress.com there are 96,000 different Obama-related designs for sale, according to vice president of marketing Amy Maniatis. That includes a T-shirt that says "Now I don't have to move to Canada" and a poster that says "Once you go Barack, you'll never go back." All the designs come from "virtual shopkeepers," who upload images to the site and then sell them on any number of stock items, splitting the profits with CafePress.

"This is our third election, and for us, what we saw in 2000 and 2004 was really different," Maniatis says. "There was a lot of anti-Bush merchandise after those elections." Anti-Bush stuff sold so well for so many years that there was genuine concern at CafePress that the end of the president's second term would hurt the company's bottom line. ("Economists Warn Anti-Bush Merchandise Market Close to Collapse" read a recent headline in the Onion.) Instead, Obama love has more than offset the downturn.


~snip~

Obamamania has been a boon for tiny Greenville, Ohio, the home of Tigereye Design, which manufactured and handled the fulfillment for official Obama campaign materials, such as shirts, hats and buttons. It also has its own site, DemocraticStuff.com, which peddles an astounding variety of niche Obama buttons, including "Beekeepers for Obama," "Emo for Obama" and "Ventriloquists for Obama." Tigereye started the year with a staff of 50, then just kept on hiring.

"We had about 500 people at the peak," says Steve Swallow, the company's president. "It really had an impact on our local workforce, because almost all of the people we hired were unemployed before. And it wasn't just us. If you call the post office here, I bet they'll say they never handled so much mail."

~snip~

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/27/AR2008112702319.html?wpisrc=newsletter

[AspenRose]

1. Glad I could help some blue businesses out

:hi:

[rvablue]

2. Kick for your post Emit....every one else is too busy getting into

flame wars over questions that are either moot or irrelevant or silly.

Thanks for posting this....I had actually been wondering about this.......

[DrPresident]

3. I snapped up one of those Super Obama t-shirts

whose ads are showcased in this very thread right now.

[democrattotheend]

4. I thought my zazzle and CafePress stores would stop selling after Election Day

But just the opposite...the stuff has been flying off the shelves since Election Day. I've made more money this month than ever before. I was giving a portion of the proceeds to the campaign, so now I will either give a portion to charity or another Democratic cause. It will also enable me to buy the laptop I have been putting off buying for several years, so I am very excited about that.

[eshfemme]

5. Obama to the rescue!

:headbang:

[AtomicKitten]

6. Obama is good for business.

I would know - I bought a pile of memorabilia.