spacetwinks:

a lot of business operations for internet clothing stores seems to be “just keep selling shit with pokemon or bugs bunny’s face on it until someone sends us a cease and desist”

like not that i disapprove, but it’s weird how much out there is just “how long can we get away with copyright infringement, and are we small enough that they don’t care”

This has been every t-shirt operation’s business model ever since there were t-shirt operations with business models

Hot Topic was the most important clothing outlet of the ‘90s, more than The Gap or Abercrombie or Banana Republic or Old Navy, because they made the t-shirt an everyday thing and they were *constantly* getting shit for selling unlicensed knockoffs

(also bcuz the model of selling first band-, and then other media-branded property allowed them to offload all the buyers’ R&D risk of “establish ourselves as the style of a/every teen subculture”, which was huge)