Friday, June 23, 2006

Home of the $100 T-Shirt!

So, anyway.... Last week I was reading an article in the Boston Globe about Boston's Newbury Street and the wide range of prices for t-shirts at the various stores there. On the low end you could find shirts for as little as $9.90. On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, however, were shirts selling for a whopping $955! Were these shirts made of golden thread and encrusted with precious gems? Nope. Just ordinary t-shirts with surrealistic art designs on them. Designs not all that different from the ones in my own Barry's World on-line store, as a matter of fact. No, what apparently makes these shirts so "valuable" is the fact that they just cost a lot of money, and once you get people like Mick Jagger and Elton John willing to fork out almost $1000 for a shirt everybody else thinks they must be worth it. Or something like that. I would dearly love to sell my t-shirts for $1000 a pop, but something tells me it just isn't going to happen anytime soon.

And then, just the other day, I read an ABC News Article about a restaurant down in Florida that has started selling $100 hamburgers. Yes, that's right -- a hamburger for $100. I'm sure it's a very tasty hamburger, and at 20 ounces nobody is going to be asking, "Where's the Beef," but still, $100? Once again, it comes down to the fact that people are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for the feeling that they are members of an exclusive club. Maybe you can't be a rock star or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but you can at least feel like one (or perhaps you can at least make other people think you are one).

Well, after giving it some thought, I thought I could combine both of these trends together and came up with my very own $100 T-shirt. I thought for a brief cynical moment that the shirt should just be plain white with simple black text stating, "This shirt cost $100," but my artistic integrity got the better of me and I decided to make it look nice. I mean, it still actually states, "This shirt cost $100," but instead of plain letters I created a faux gold and diamond-encrusted "bling bling" look to it.

So.... What do you think? If people will pay $955 for a t-shirt just because it is sold in a swanky shop frequented by rock stars and $100 for a hamburger because it's served in a swanky restaurant where rich businessmen go to dine, will anybody pay $100 for a t-shirt designed by yours truly and sold online?

Probably not. But you never know....