So I was at work tonight, and I was talking to someone about how I was trying to make money as a writer (obviously not easy). And one of my other co-workers walked up and said that I was going about it all wrong.

“Here’s what you do,” he said. “Just take your logo, or site’s name, or whatever. Put it on a t-shirt with a funny saying, and people will buy it.” It doesn’t matter what it is, he told us. People will buy anything. Look at “I’m with Stupid” or any of the other million t-shirts out there that people pay money for. As long as it’s clever and it’s on a T-shirt, people will buy it. “You’ll make plenty of money with that,” my co-worker promised me.

Thus began…

I was also trying to think of something to write today, and so I figured this would do. To prove my ability as a writer, I decided to come up with some kind of slogan, put it on a t-shirt, and see how well it sold online (at Cafepress.com, a quick and easy shop setup site– I’m sure many of you are familiar with it). I’d give it two weeks, and at the end of two weeks, I’d come back and see how many it had sold.

So the only thing was that I needed to come up with a slogan.

It had to be something quick and simple, but catchy. And it had to be something new– I couldn’t reuse a slogan from a copyrighted show, or anything that I’d heard anywhere else– I had to own it all myself. It didn’t actually need to make any sense. But I am in business here, so it can’t just be complete nonsense, or be a really funny inside joke that only I get.

So I sat and puzzled over what to use. The best T-shirt I’ve seen lately is the Vote For Pedro one from Napoleon Dynamite. I also liked the 1337 hoodie that I linked to a while ago (reminder: my birthday is just over a month away).

We were reshelving magazines, and started talking about this cover model on one of them. I didn’t recognize her, and wondered who she was. He replied that he didn’t think she was famous– “She’s nobody. She’s just some model.”

“Hey, models are people too,” I said. So the first idea I had was Models are People, Too.

Then, after talking about a t-shirt that said “Guns Liquor Drugs Killing” on it (don’t ask), we started talking about liquor and got to absynthe somehow. Which led to me saying Absynthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder.

My co-worker thought someone had already used that one, though. I liked the pun, but I wanted something original.

We asked the security guard at work, and he actually had a pretty good idea. He said whenever he walked around, bums always asked him for money, and so he wanted a shirt to show them. All it would say on the front is NO. “And then,” he said, “on the back it would say I SAID NO.” I thought this was a pretty good idea, too, but I didn’t want to steal the security guard’s idea. I’ll let him make millions off of that one.

On the way home, I thought more about it. I’m geeky, so I wanted it to have kind of a geek angle, but also be kind of hip and current. I wanted to kind of have it link to the site somehow, and I wanted it to reference something popular.

I hadn’t come up with anything yet, but I registered at Cafepress anyway, and got ready to build the store over there. Again, I wanted hip, cool, geeky, popular, referential. When I came up to the point where it wanted a store name, I stopped, and thought really really hard. I wanted to promote my site. But everybody wants to promote their own site. Everybody wants promotion somehow.

And, of course, right then it hit me.

Ladies and gentlemen, go buy your t-shirts. Tell your friends. Link to the store (www.cafepress.com/mikeschramm), and tell those friends to do the same. Buy lots of t-shirts, and wear them with pride. We’ll check back two weeks from today and see how it went.