T-Shirts?

[L8knight]

For anyone in the know, whats up with the scarce availability of Pathfinder t-shirts? Especially for PFS? Is the plan to replenish stock or reveal all new designs/stock as part of GenCon 2013?

Specifically I wanted to pick up some PFS faction shirts and one for the Year of the Demon but currently there's nothing available.

Sorry if this is the wrong forum, couldn't decide if I should put this in PFS or Products...

[Vic Wertz]

We've recently announced that we've selected Offworld Designs as our apparel licensee. So far, only the Core Rulebook tee has been announced, but I'd expect to see a Year of the Demon shirt once the season actually begins...

[Argen]

Outstanding!

[L8knight]

I do remember that announcement but wasn't aware that shirts would be sold exclusively through them. Okay, bookmarked :)

Thanks!

[Martin Kauffman 530]

I have not bought any of the Paizo Tees for two reasons: 1. I do not approve of shirt rerolls and believe that the rerolls are a merchandising ploy which appeals to munchkinist players; and 2. I never thought the designs of the previous shirts were very good. I do own a small collection of dragon themed T-shirts produced by a company called "The Mountain" which I consider to be well designed and of high quality (this is a free endorsement- I have no business or personal connection with that company). Despite the foregoing, I wish Paizo well in this venture; since it seems to listen to its clientele more than many other companies. It is for this reason that I offer the following hopefully constructive T-shirt suggestions: 1. Gamers seem to have a body size which is larger than average, so consider ordering a greater percentage of shirts in larger sizes. 2.Consider the possible usage of shirt designs/images from Paizo publications and comic books. 3.Consider shirts for the female and youth market.

[Fromper]

Vic Wertz wrote:

We've recently announced that we've selected Offworld Designs as our apparel licensee. So far, only the Core Rulebook tee has been announced, but I'd expect to see a Year of the Demon shirt once the season actually begins...

So this continues the trend of never reprinting any of the previous shirts then? I know several people who would love the goblin with d20 shirts, but they just aren't available.

[Vic Wertz]

I'll be frank—T-shirts just don't sell all that well. And when you make a new design, you need to make a lot of them to keep the price down, because pricing is all about materials volume.* And when you do a lot of them, it takes a long time to sell through them all. (It's also impossible to predict demand for each size relative to each other size; even using historical data, we always sell out of some sizes before others.)

And once we do sell through them, they're very hard to reprint, because you have to do a lot of them again, while the potential market for them has been decreased by the number of people who bought them the first time around, so it's an even tougher sell.

*This is why we've licensed them to a company that specializes in shirts—their materials volume is higher than we can ever get by ourselves, so their lower prices should let them do smaller runs without losing their shirt (ha!). Even so, the market for new designs will always be larger than the market for shirts that have already been sold, so even though they can do better with reprints than we could, I would still expect them to focus on introducing new designs preferentially to reprinting old ones.