Q&A Friday #34: What Happened To The RWN T-Shirt?

24 Feb, 2006 by John Hawkins

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Question: “What ever happened to the RWN t-shirt? I went to get one (a while back) and it wasn’t available.” — bob_the_great

Answer: The short version is this: I set up a deal with a T-shirt company to do a RWN T-shirt. They helped me design it, we put it on sale, and…it just didn’t sell all that well.

Maybe that’s because the design wasn’t that great. Maybe it’s because RWN readers just aren’t all that interested in buying RWN t-shirts. Maybe it’s because although I did regularly promote the shirts, I didn’t push them hard enough.

But, whatever the case may be, the guy selling the shirts just didn’t think they were selling fast enough to justify continuing to do business with RWN unless some changes were made. The one thing he really wanted was a big T-shirt promo right at the top of the left or right column. In fact, that’s something he’d thought I was going to do from the beginning. Unfortunately, that ended up turning into a deal breaker because my Blogads premium spot paid out more money that I felt like I could earn selling t-shirts.

So, we mutually agreed to terminate our relationship and the vendor decided to refund the money to the people who had already bought shirts rather than have them made (they actually do fairly large printing runs, so it wouldn’t have been economical for them to only do a few shirts).

Since then, I’ve had other companies approach me about doing t-shirts and of course, I could go through CafePress, but there are currently no plans to produce another RWN t-shirt although I may take another look at it when I get about twice the size I’m at now.