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!!!!
At least that one is funny. It's completely absurd, and it looks like a parody of a 90s rap album.
Just looking through the T-shirt designs, it's clear a few wrestlers design their own stuff, and everything else is handled by one guy.
My favorite absurd shirt from the perspective of wearing it in general public, is this one
It just makes me laugh imagining the confusion non-wrestling fans would have. Toni Storm and Danhousen seem to have the only shirts I'd buy. Mostly because they look unique. Toni Storm has one where it's a newspaper asking where Toni Storm is. That's great. It's very much only relevant in the moment, and 3 years from now won't make any sense, but it's still hilarious.
This one is pretty great too
But I'm on page 8 before I've seen these. 50 shirts per page, and I've seen 5 shirts total that made me go "Oooooh, that one's kinda cool...."
Sting has a cool one, that I'm unclear how they have the rights to. It's a picture of his face from the late 80s/early 90s in WCW. Split with modern day WCW. That's kinda cool.
The point is that when all is said and done, it comes down to individual preferences and tastes. I get your frustration, I have yet to see a Young Bucks or Kenny Omega shirt that I like, despite wanting Young Bucks and Kenny Omega shirts. But I'm not condemning every other shirt design because of it. Given how PWTees (AEW's actual shirt provider) operates, primarily by print-to-order, they don't exactly lose money on bad designs. Their business model benefits from throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. If they have nothing you like, don't open your wallet, or seek other merch that you do like. I have 22 AEW action figures and 6 AEW shirts. Hell, an AEW action figure at Walmart costs less than a shirt from PWTees most of the time.
Wait, then why bother having a clearance section if they don't print until you order?
Clearance is often stuff printed to be sold at shows and merch tables at conventions that just didn't sell. Or stuff that they think will sell big, like the CM Punk shirt after he debuted on episode 2 of Rampage. Some stuff is premade for these purposes. Which is why I said "primarily".
Additionally, some customers don't want to pay for an item and then wait anywhere between one and three weeks to get it, they would prefer to see it at a show or in a store and walk away with it immediately after paying. But, printing for that type of customer is always a gamble.
"Clearance" is just trying to recoup some of that cost.