Welcome to the Age of Me Merch
Beloved bars and restaurants close all the time in New York, but when our favorite bar unexpectedly shuttered at the end of last July, only five short months after it opened, my friends and I were extremely bummed. The floor was designed to look like a basketball court! It had a framed Metta World Peace jersey! There was a Velvet Rope\–era poster of Janet Jackson hanging by the door! Also, there was beer.
We talked about the fact that it had closed constantly, but when we realized we were still talking about it six months, ten months, then more than a year later, we decided enough was enough. We had to do something. No, not raise money to reopen the bar. Come on. The only thing for us to do was to make some unauthorized merch. It took three hours of scrupulous brainstorming between friends to design the clip-art-heavy, long-sleeve tee we made to honor The Low Post—and we only ordered ten of them.
We are—whether we like it or not—living in the golden age of merch. From Justin Bieber’s streetwear-leaning tour line to Kanye’s Sunday Service gear to McDonald’s-branded bomber jackets to Bernie fanny packs, you can’t throw a rock at a famous person (don’t do that, probably) without hitting some of their official overpriced merch. The more that celebs and brands want to cash in on the branded moment we live in, the more fans are turning to less official homemade methods to stan their idols. The original Deadhead bootleg tees of yesteryear inspired a decades-long revolution: Who wants to buy an overpriced official tee that looks like everything else when there is much better, much cheaper custom contraband everywhere you turn? T-shirt hawkers in parking lots have been selling off-brand, better-than-the-real-thing shirts for as long as there have been concerts and parking lots and shirts. The people we celebrate even get in on the bit now: Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, collects all the unauthorized Simpsons merch he sees. “Just the badness of it makes me laugh,” he told EW in 2015.
But today, with the proliferation of online custom apparel shops like Zazzle, Custom Ink, and CafePress, the undoubtable next wave is what I’m calling “Me Merch.” Designing custom shirts for your favorite artist before the festival? Cool, but only if you get a third-rate Ariana Grande fan account to reshare it. Want to know what’s even cooler? Meticulously designing and ordering only eight shirts for your friend’s July 4th pool party. Didn’t make it to the party, Dan? Then you don’t get to own a part of this limited-edition unofficial capsule collection of up-and-coming designers.
So, toward a cohesive definition of Me Merch (also known, by me, as Bar Mitz’fits): Instead of using online on-demand apparel services to make merch that pays low-fidelity tribute to a favorite artist, Me Merch contains references to a thing that people mostly in your intimate group of friends might know about, is made in extremely small quantities (let’s say as many as 30 or 40, and as few as one), and is extremely limited-edition, as in you’ll get bored of the joke and move on to the next one in a month. Here’s a perfect example, provided by a friend: “I made a friend a set of playing cards printed with a screencap of a mean e-mail she got from the leader of a prominent New York bridge club.” That deck of cards is now priceless. “I do a lot of bulk ordering for work and was pretty shocked that these sites have no minimum order numbers now,” a friend who works in the nonprofit world explained. She designed and ordered only one custom horse-racing shirt for her boyfriend. Try and find that on Grailed.
“We think of it more as ‘Us Merch,’ just because so much of it is about community and connection,” Marc Katz, CEO and founder of Custom Ink, told me by phone. “It’s really about taking a group of friends, family, or co-workers and helping everyone look and feel a part of something special, whether it’s a team or a cause or a special occasion.”
The personalized bar mitzvah shirt of yesterday is now the cool inside joke of today. “Mostly, these services are great for making dumb ideas come true,” a friend who works in tech in San Francisco told me. “I used to have to read through these brutally misguided marketing decks, and I guess I got my revenge on them by turning the worst slides into sweatshirts.” He is quick to clarify: “I did not sell these. They were just for me.”
He also designed tote bags with a vintage font that say, “Fuck America, I’m Californian” and sold the totes on Spreadshirt, one of the dozen or so sites where custom Me Merch is being designed and sold. “I made, I dunno, 80 bucks?” he said. If you’re in the market to buy someone else’s Me Merch, you can easily browse through Spreadshirt’s marketplace and find the most deranged tee of your dreams. You may even get to be in on someone else’s inside joke. But a good portion of the shirts on Spreadshirt are the kind autogenerated by an algorithm. Right now, for example, I could get a shirt that says, “Not Only You’re Dating My Mom You’re Also Dating an Awesome Firefighter,” or “I Never Dreamed I’d Grow Up to Be a Super Sexy Philadelphia Girl but Here I Am Killing It.” That’s not Me Merch—that’s AI Merch. And to be frank, I’m not interested.
The design process itself for a piece of Me Merch can be intimidating on your first try. As one friend put it, “I feel like every time I've designed a shirt, I just go down a rabbit hole and then wake up and realize it's been an hour and I have no idea what I'm doing,” she said. “But the energy I tend to go for is ‘fun commemorative shirt you'd want to pick up in a thrift store.’ ” If Virgil Abloh can print a bunch of glyphs on an Off-White tee and sell it for $300, who says you can’t take a stab at the same aesthetic while cruising through wacky icons on Custom Ink? In this friend’s “collection,” she now has a shirt commemorating her 30th birthday, one designed with hugging cartoon rabbits for a friend’s bachelorette, and now, a shirt dedicated to the best bar ever to have closed in under five months. She added that the return of tie-dye as a trend has added an extra layer of excitement to the Me Merch phenomenon. “It's an ideal hobby to have resurrected from sleepaway camp.” (Or, perhaps, from college: Me Merch’s closest relative might be the logo-flipped T-shirts peddled by fraternities and sororities with amateur graphic-design experience.)
“We’re astounded every day by the creativity of folks who take our comprehensive design tool and set out to create something that is 100 percent their own,” Nizzi Renaud, chief marketing officer at Zazzle, told me over e-mail. “We find that most of us need a little help or inspiration in that regard, but we definitely see folks embrace a blank slate.” Though, these blank slates also come with boundaries: Zazzle and Custom Ink’s guidelines forbid libelous content, content that violates or incites anyone to violate the law, or any content that infringes upon intellectual property. One friend tried to duck around those guidelines anyway.
“I ordered a T-shirt with the meme of Kirsten Dunst eating salad while Jake Gyllenhaal looks at her,” she told me by e-mail. “I originally ordered it from Custom Ink, but a very apologetic lady called me and told me they couldn't print it unless I got the celebrities' permission and Splash Photography's permission. I asked if there was any way I could make it a spoof shirt so we wouldn't violate copyright law, and the woman said maybe if I replaced Kirsten Dunst's face with my face, it could qualify.” She was not interested in doing that, so she canceled the order. (Luckily, a random man on Twitter offered to print the shirt for her himself, so she did not go without.) Another friend was able to subtly skirt the guidelines by printing up an order of Vaulter hats—decked out with the logo of the fictional media company from the HBO show Succession. “I’m not profiting off of the hats, and I did a quick search and found that the logo/name was not trademarked, so maybe it's fine,” she said. Maybe it’s fine: What better credo for the age of Me Merch?
Life happens and things change—people move, friends have kids, we all age. But, as Custom Ink’s Marc Katz told me, Me Merch is forever. “We don’t think of what we do as selling apparel—we think of it as helping people create special connections,” Katz said. “It’s not a 12-dollar T-shirt. It’s a product that enables a priceless feeling and memory, and we treat it accordingly.” Take my friend’s initial foray into custom shirt-making for his casual beach volleyball league as a shining example: “We all got way too competitive about it, and we had to disband the teams the year we made the shirts.” But with his Me Merch, the memories of those precious beach volleyball games will last a lifetime. Our favorite bar may never reopen, but the at-least-ten people who liked it as much as we did can eternally show their love for it through budget clip art designed by maniacs.
Is Me Merch where you’ll find the next generation of streetwear designers, primed for their big shot? Probably not. But also—maybe. “It almost becomes part of the person’s identity, that they are the person in the group that their friends go to for [designing a shirt]. And it’s very gratifying to be the person getting that feedback,” Katz added. “It’s a big responsibility.”
Originally Appeared on GQ
