Friday, April 03, 2009

I will only let attractive people wear them. (Which rules me out.)

The other day, I was walking through the grocery store minding my own business, and trying to carry Mr Bunches, when a guy across the frozen meat counter said to me:

"Hey, how'd you become a Florida fan living up here in Wisconsin?"

It confused me because (a) I'm not a Florida fan, (b) Mr Bunches was at the time inserting his index finger into my ear as far as he could, and (c) I didn't know what the heck he was talking about and (d) who talks to strangers in the frozen meat department?

I figured out a couple of things, though, those things being that this guy talks to strangers near flash-frozen burritos, he was talking about the shirt I was wearing, and Mr Bunches' finger is amazingly long. I still can't hear right out of that ear.

I was wearing, as I realized, a "Florida Gators" t-shirt, and the guy thought I was a Florida fan. I explained to him that I didn't care about the Florida Gators at all -- I'd won it in an NCAA tournament bet from The Boy. Then I explained to Mr Bunches that he was making Daddy's ear bleed, and moved on.

But it got me thinking: how powerful is an advertisement on a t-shirt, if it could distract this guy from picking out chicken breasts and compel him to talk to me?

Then I got to thinking more: Could I harness the power of my incredible body in an attractive t-shirt to, say, drum up some publicity?

That's how I came to find that I could customize a t shirt quickly and easily through Vista Print.

Now, anyone these days can create a custom t-shirt. There's probably a zillion sites that do that. What Vista Print has over those sites is first, they're less expensive, second, they're higher quality, and third, the more you buy, the more you save.

1 customized t-shirt runs only $13.99 per shirt, so if you just want to declare that your grandfather is the world's greatest, that's under fourteen bucks.

But order, say, 201 (or more) and the cost drops to $10.99 per shirt, saving $600. At under eleven dollars a shirt, that's not much money to come up with 300 shirts with your company name, logo, and phone number on it -- which is what I plan to do.

Not with my law practice -- I'm not sure I'd want the kind of clients who want to hire a lawyer they saw on a shirt. With my blogs and writing. Get a bunch of snazzy tshirts for my websites, and next thing you know, "The Best of Everything" is bigger than Facebook. Bigger than Youtube. Bigger than Google.

Okay, not bigger than Google. I take that back. Please, Google overlords, don't punish me.

But you get the point: Cheap, quick, fun, and suddenly, for less money than a new laptop, all around the city people have my blog and the address on their chests, and that hit counter goes up and up and up, until someone somewhere sees this, hires me to write it full time, and I'm relaxing in Hawaii telling you what the best way to avoid getting too tan and too relaxed is.

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