This just in, from the “seeking to understand” department…
Hugh Macleod, of gapingvoid fame, is bringing t-shirts to market, featuring his cartoon designs. Hugh, a question for you. You state:
“As I said before, each design will be limited to an edition of 200. That’s it. No more. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
I shall start with four designs, the “Hughtrain/Infinite” design above, the “Good for you” design and two others. As soon as one sells out, I’ll introduce another. But there won’t ever be more than 4 designs, 200 of each, available at one time…I think they might become quite collectable, in their own little way. I certainly have no wish to flood the market with them.”
You have hundreds (thousands?) of cartoons you’ve drawn over the years. Of the four you pick at any one time, there will be some folks who like them, and pick them up. But isn’t it considerably more likely that a far greater number of folks would want some other design that you are not producing?
By way of comparison, there’s (frankly) no reason why an individual can’t, say, grab one of the .jpgs of one of your cartoons, upload it to CafePress (or their local t-shirt shop), and make themselves a t-shirt of it. Once those images are out (and a lot of them are), there’s really nothing preventing that. And if that individual is just producing that one shirt for his or her self and not selling them, it’s likely you’d never know.
Doesn’t the faux-scarcity path fly in the face of the direction things are going? Why not give abundant choice, and get the Word of Hugh out farther and faster?
Spend more time thinking about why I am doing it the way I am, not why I am not doing it differently, and I’ll answer that question 😉
ok, yoda. 😉
so, back a couple of weeks ago, you were sharing your thoughts on “the tao of undersupply.” quotes from you:
“So maybe the thing is to is get into ‘The Tao of Undersupply.’ If only 100 people want to buy your widgets, then just make 90 widgets. If only 1000, make 900. If only 10 million, make 9 million. It isn’t rocket science, but it takes discipline.”
from a financial perspective, that’s button-down, uptight, MBA 101 microeconomics. but that’s *not* what this is about.
hugh: “I could also go on about how many good people I know are caught in oversupplied markets, and how every day they wake up, feeling chilled to the bone with dread and unease.”
so, why you are doing it the way you are is about not wanting to oversupply a market for the reasons you stated. too much choice. too many options. too much dread and unease. it’s the “perfectly rational donkey” paradox…there are so many choices that one can’t make *any* choice at all, and one starves.
it’s about carving out a niche, in order to “be creative” and stand out from the crowd. (or, more precisely, avoid the crowd altogether.) ok.
however…i hear what you’re saying, but i would posit that you would *not* be oversupplying a market by going all long tail with this, and offering much more choice. can you tell *me* why that is? 😉
(edited to add: a followup question…if “undersupply” is the way to go, would you counsel thomas mahon to post in english cut *less* often, to “undersupply” his readership?)
1. Making something freely available forever just commodifies you.
“Hey, Commodity Boy! Fetch!”
2. “edited to add: a followup question…if “undersupply” is the way to go, would you counsel thomas mahon to post in english cut *less* often, to “undersupply” his readership?)”
Certainly. Less is more.
hey, commodity boy!
A familiar theme in various e-mail exchanges I’ve been having recently:The Long Tail notwithstanding, if you’re in a ever-increasingly crowded market where the (A) the barriers to entry decrease with every passing day and (B) your competition get youn…
Interesting debate on over/under supply but here’s a customer perspective. I’m only interested in getting the shirts from hugh that hugh picks out and makes and only the ‘limited’ edition. I could do the jpg thing and make my own but then there is nothing to the story when somebody asks me about the shirt. I’ll talk about hugh, the gapingvoid, suits, blogs, etc. In my articles, talks to MBA wannabees, it will get mentioned.
There is more to it then just the shirt.
by way of another example. i have a collection of Hard Rock polo shirts from the Hard Rocks around the world. I only get them from the places where I have been and ordered food. I don’t have people get them for me nor do i buy them just in passing nor do i even like them as gifts.
If the hard rock offered all the shirts on a website for any store they had, I’d drop collecting them in a second because there is no story, no personal story around the those shirts.
these days, it’s not about price or maybe even supply, rather it’s about buzz and the story behind whatever i’m buying.
The key thing to watch? Assume Hugh gets two hundred people signed up for the automatic t-shirt fix. That’s the entire run. Now what?
Do you have a waiting list for people to cancel so you can get onto the list? Do you piss off 200 people by secretly making some extra? Do you ‘cop out’ in the name of greed/making money and make more while telling the original 200 people, sorry, demand thing.
If Hugh ends up with, call it, 100,000 active readers of whom 10,000 are die hard fans and you have only 200 getting t-shirts with a 400 person waiting list to get into the queue for a t-shirt fix, I wonder how people will define that. Some pundits will say, goofball coulda made more money while others will do a case study on creating buzz.
and everybody will be right.
Think about running into someone who’s got the same limited edition T-Shirt… it’s also a way to create communities outside of the blog.
Of course, chances of running into such a person may be slim, but still 🙂
(crossposted to gapingvoid)
hugh: i hear what you’re saying; just want to make sure we’re both thinking about the word “freely” in the same way. if “freely available” means “widely” available, then, well, it may-or-may-not commoditize you. if a product is *truly* unique, wouldn’t it only be attractive to a small, unique group of individuals? but, to agree violently with you, if the product is generic, and widely available, and able to be “generically” purchased, without the need for the customer to think about what he or she is doing…yup. commodity-ville. “meaning” comes from what you put into it, doesn’t it? if both sides (customer and creator) don’t have some skin in the game, the “meaning” is…well, meaningless.
otoh, if “freely available” means “available at no or very very cost,” that’s not what i was talking about at all.
(btw…the point that started this whole discussion was kathy sierra’s comment that she would have loved to have the “short tail” cartoon on a shirt when she was at eTech.)
mark: absoLUTEly…finding someone else with the same shirt is a perfect example of the “relationship hub” discussion of a few weeks back [1]. it’s about the uniqueness of the “thing,” sure, but it’s more about creating actual relationships, and building real community, with like-minded souls.
[1] – https://christophercarfi.com/2005/02/passion_amplifi.html
microtulipmania
The gapingvoid t-shirt conversation starts to get interesting: 1. I decide to limit each design to 200 shirts, and no more. And no more than 4 designs available at one time, ever. I do this for reasons stated in…
“Relationship Hub”… Heh. I like that phrase… that’s kinda what happend with the “Blogcards”… http://gapingvoid.streetcards.com … people would meet other people at Blog confabs, exchange biz cards, see that the other also had blogcards, and would go “Cool! You too, Huh?”
More on this t-shirt subject:
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001492.html
bezacly.
Value-Added Transactions
I’m not sure that I’m in the market for GapingVoid t-shirts, but I’ll be interested to see how this experiment plays out over the coming weeks.