Buying In - (Page 10) 10 rob walker brated for the tangible attributes of their products, work hard to associate themselves with abstract notions of nonconformity or achievement. A potent brand becomes a form of identity in shorthand. It solves the Pretty Good Problem. Here is one tool for understanding how this plays out in the market: the T-shirt. The T-shirt, really, is nothing. A former undergarment popularized as outerwear by World War II veterans who enjoyed their “skivvy” shirts on the often balmy Pacific front, it is today the plain brown cow of clothing, the sartorial equivalent of tap water. On a functional level, T-shirt innovation has not been radical compared with, say, the evolution in music-listening products. A time traveler from the 1930s might not know how to operate an iPod but could still figure out how to use the twenty-first-century T-shirt. But speaking of music: Band logos stood out as one popular strategy for adding value to a commodity in my safari through the Magic wilderness. A dozen or more companies offered Tshirts for the Clash, Slayer, Iron Maiden, Afrika Bambaataa, Melle Mel, and a seemingly endless variety of others, from the well-known to the obscure. At least three companies were selling rock T-shirts for toddlers—two had Ramones offerings. Maybe the bands who turned CBGB into the birthplace of American punk did not sell branded merch at the time, but thirty years later, Ramones T-shirts have outsold Ramones albums ten to one. And CB’s itself had a sizable Magic booth; in fact, its clothing line grossed $2 million in 2004, double the revenue of the actual music club, which later shut down. Of course, music-related T-shirts were only one category. A sizable percentage of the apparel on sale at Magic really exists solely as a carrier for symbolic meanings developed elsewhere in the marketplace. Playboy had a huge display of its branded
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