So, I decided to go check AEWs merch, and see if there's anything that caught my eye. First, I decided to check their clearance section. Despite running a sitewide no coupon needed black friday sale, and despite me STARTING in the clearance section, I found a BCC design that I thought was hilarious looking, and so I added it to my cart.
35% off something that was already in the clearance section. It's just a T-Shirt. Take a guess at how much it cost.
jeapordy theme
Did you guess $48? I'm unclear if that was with or without shipping. I'm sure it told me, but I wasn't going to pay $48 for a god damned T-Shirt.
But then I started looking around the rest of the T-Shirts. Awful. Truely awful designs. So I thought "Well, ,maybe that's why all this shit is being discontinued. Let's take a look in their normal section"
This time I started with Hoodies. Nope. The designs all look exactly like one guy who's bad at visual design, created ALL of these.
I mean, take a look at this one
I want you to look at this hoodie from the perspective of "I'm going to buy this hoodie, and wear it, in public, as a thing that other people will see me wearing."
95% of people out there in the world don't watch pro-wrestling! And of the 5% that do, only a small fraction watch AEW. They're averaging about 4,000 people per arena per show. I live in a city with 350,000 people in the city itself, but if you include the greater area it's closer to 1 million with surrounding areas. So within a 1 hour drive of downtown Cleveland, 1 million people COULD show up to a show. They had a show here Oct 30th for dynamite. From what I read, less than 3,000 people showed up.
So that means, in this area, if I wore THAT hoodie, only an average of 3-5k people, in a city of 350,000 would get it. Good design relies on the idea of being good even if you've never seen the reference product. Even if you have no idea what AEW is, you can look at it, and say "Oh, THAT'S cool!"
What they have instead is a bunch of products that looks like one single dork designed ALL of it, in the exact same style, and it's all just awful. Taz is employed there. He used to do ECWs merch design in the 90s. He's mediocre at commentary, but I NEVER heard anybody say that old ECW shirts looked like shit. People even replicate the style in parodies/tributes with their own merch. I have an "E C F'N 3" shirt, with the same style/font as the "E C F'N W" shirt. Looks awesome, even if EC3 is irrelevant these days.
My god, if Tony Khan is supposedly such a fan of pro wrestling at it's core, he certainly doesn't seem to have a grasp on how any of it works. Like if we never saw TKs face, and just was told someone named TK is running AEW, you could convince me it's some 12 year old, and it would fully make sense. I'd have no problem being convinced of that. Other than the lack of sexuality, because a 12 year old would be in puberty, and AEW doesn't seem like it's being run by someone obsessed with boobies. Outside of that, the creative decisions DO seem like some random 12 year old saying "YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE COOL??? IF WE PUT A NEEDLE IN A GUYS MOUTH, AND COMMITTED MURDER ON TV OVER AND OVER AND OVER!!! AND ALL THE MERCH CAN LOOK LIKE EARLY 90S WWF MERCH, EXCEPT WITHOUT ANY PERSONALITY, AND THEN....AND THEN....AND THEN....."
Meanwhile you're just rolling your eyes wondering why you can't find a wrestling brand to suit your tastes.
WWE is just morally corrupt on every level.
AEW is seemingly run by a 45 year old 12 year old.
TNA......eh, maybe I should give them another go. 10 years ago it was just laughably bad.
ROH is just AEW version of WWF Metal or WWF Jakked.
MLW just doesn't have an easy way for me to access them.
It's like I enjoy watching wrestling for the first 30 minutes......and then it just sloggs on, because there's a bunch of OTHER stuff that pads the run time. I just want to grab TKs shoulders and shake him while yelling STOP BOOKING FOR AN AUDIENCE OF ONE!!! YOU'VE LOST YOUR AUDIENCE!!!! STOP IT!!!!
cute!