If you’re like me, you really struggle with holiday gifts—mixing a blend of creative with thoughtful. Well, we here at Publicola have just the solution: Fun, political T-shirts! Luckily, I received a tip about a website that sells customized Obama T-shirts. These can be good for your liberal friends and your conservative relatives as well (lots of loopy anti-Obama shirts here.)
Zazzle.com, an online T-shirt vendor, is a Menlo Park upstart founded with early investor money from Google and is linked to Disney. In 2007, it was ranked the 13th fastest growing company in the Silicon Valley. They operate a little like Cafe Press—aspiring entrepreneurs upload their own graphics to Zazzle’s website, where they can then modify T-shirt style, color and graphic layout. Once you finish using the T-shirt creator wizard, poof, you just created a T-shirt product that people can buy using Zazzle.com’s easy shopping cart/checkout modules. Zazzle gets a share of all your sales, but you don’t have do anything but slap a funny T-shirt together. Create, click, sell, profit.
There appears to be no censoring of truly offensive logos on these self-made shirts, however. Among the many “Obama = Socialism” and “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for McCain” T-shirts, there are also your racist and violent anti-Obama shirts.
Exhibit A: “Barack Obama. Clown-in-Chief”
Exhibit B: “Send Obama Shooting with Cheney”
Exhibit C: “Abort Obama. Not the Unborn.”
Exhibit D: Need a bumper sticker? “Cannibals are starving in Africa. Please send Barack Obama to help.”
Exhibit E: “Waterboard Obama.”
Exhibit F: “Obama’s Socialism at Work.” Complete with sombrero!
You get the point.
Final interesting point: the Creative Director for Zazzle.com, Darren Luvaas, is a 2008 donor to Barack Obama. In his online resume, he notes he “wrote the styleguide” for Zazzle.
John Doerr, initial investor in Zazzle, is a max-out contributor to Obama and many Democratic candidates, including our very own Patty Murray and Adam Smith.
