RIP Dark Brandon, hello coconut tree: Merch makers rise to meet the moment

Accelerated by the incredible ease of uploading, printing, and distributing graphics nationwide, campaign merchandise has been revolutionized. Merch makers can reprint memes onto T-shirts, hats, and mugs on the turn of a dime and create earned media for campaigns seeking to underscore messaging and engage their base. As the US presidential election enters a volatile stretch, we’re watching how quickly the merch wars are heating up.

In just the past few weeks, Amazon T-shirt sales, via the site’s Merch on Demand program, have demonstrated this: on July 14, a day after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, a shirt featuring the iconic image of him fist-pumping was the top seller for the men’s novelty T-shirt category. Over a week later, after President Biden announced he was leaving the race, a tee with a Kamala Harris logo became the bestseller. 

“We live in a dark time because merch and memes win elections now,” said Nicole Najafi, a cofounder of Merch for America, an independent store that designed and sold Biden-Harris sweatshirts in the previous election (including one in the “Seinfeld” font that led to a supply shortage of white sweatshirts). With cofounder Kiana Toossi, she’s gearing up to reopen the store with Harris gear in a few weeks, part of a wave of third-party vendors and campaign staff seeking to generate new merch ideas fast, after the Harris campaign’s quick takeover of the Biden team, web store, and brand guidelines. Najafi said she can often get merch from an idea to delivery at her doorstep within a week.

Merchandise — clothing, mugs, hats, posters, and other campaign paraphernalia — has been front and center for the past two presidential runs, said Bruce Newman, a professor and political marketing expert at DePaul University, with the pins and yard signs of yore making way for items more tailored to talking points and trending topics. Campaign strategists and designers expect the trend to continue over the next few months, so brace yourself for a flood of coconut-pilled T-shirts and mugs that reference JD Vance’s take on childless Americans.

“It’s reflective of how internet culture has merch-ified itself,” Raquel Breternitz, a designer who worked on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 campaign, said. “If you think about it, for a lot of content creators across YouTube and TikTok, one of the major ways they make money outside of sponsorships is selling merch.” 

Breternitz said the Warren campaign’s biggest seller was its “Billionaire Tears” mug, part of a long tradition of tear-based mugs directly inspired by the infamous Senate hearing where former Goldman Sachs CEO Leon Cooperman broke down crying in response to a discussion about paying his fair share of taxes. 

But it will be a challenge for the Harris team to outdo the most potent piece of campaign merch ever produced: the MAGA hat. As Najafi said, nobody in our lifetime can wear a red hat again without conjuring up that connotation. It’s one of many items, including shirts and flags, that reflect the connection Trump supporters feel with their candidate. Andrea Neuser, who ran a merch stand at the Milwaukee RNC convention last week, told CNN she was overcome with emotion when she heard Trump was shot but also thought, “This has gotta be a shirt.” 

In addition to making the wearer a walking billboard, campaign merch works according to attribution theory, Newman said. Once you’ve sunk $30 on a T-shirt, you’re bought in as a supporter and voter. “It goes beyond just rhetoric,” Najafi said. “DeSantis had the same rhetoric as Trump. No one was buying DeSantis merch — no one was excited to be a part of this brand.”

The 2020 election found the Democratic challengers fielding all manner of rapid-response merch, such as the Biden-Harris flyswatter that sold out a day after the vice-presidential debate, during which a fly prominently landed on Mike Pence’s head. Breternitz said the Warren team brought designers in-house to be more responsive to social media and integrate campaign and design communication with the policy team and political strategists. What started out as a standard operation early in the campaign — logo tees, yard signs, posters — became more focused on boutique shirts with cool typography. 

Merch typically makes up a small portion of revenue for campaigns, under 10%, Newman said — though Jared Kushner recalled the Trump campaign making $80,000 a day selling red hats in 2016. The numbers around MAGA hat sales are hard to parse, but sales seem to have slowed last year. Regardless of income, merch plays a significant role in marketing and messaging. 

“The 2020 campaign opened people’s eyes to the idea of a merch store as something integrated into a larger digital strategy,” Breternitz said. “It’s not technically digital, but of course, people are sharing these things online. It's one of the best ways to take advantage of organic reach for your policies.” 

This campaign season might see a partisan divide on merch. The decentralized nature of MAGA and MAGA-merch makers and sellers means there’s a bit more freedom, a bit less responsibility assigned to the candidate, and a higher chance goods might be manufactured overseas.

“It’s based on this very chaotic, reactive character,” Breternitz said. “So you can be chaotic and reactive and decentralized, print up random, unofficial shirts and sell them on the side of the road because people are buying the brand.”

Democratic campaigns, meanwhile, are typically adamant about message discipline and labor support with regard to merch. On Warren’s campaign, which wanted to showcase its pro-labor stance, items designed by the in-house team were union-printed at facilities in the US. Breternitz said designers would sometimes limit the color palette of a design to avoid making things too complicated and delaying distribution. Ideas and items also tended to come from the campaign. The idea for the Billionaire Tears mug was an early suggestion by designer Eric Ziminsky, but the campaign didn’t want to use it until after the Cooperman hearing.

Campaign merch makers also have to worry about things reaching a saturation point; digital merch strategy needs to maintain some sense of organic grassroots energy, and avoid milking a meme or being “too online.” 

“You have to be careful because you can take it too far,” Breternitz said. “You can kill the joke, like walking onstage holding a coconut. You have to walk that line.”

Regardless, the most organic driver of sales is not the merch itself but the excitement behind it. 

“I was originally inspired to make merch because Trump had such a good command of his merch, and I looked at our side, and we’re dorks, we don’t have anything,” Nafjali said.

“But I think Kamala actually might win because she's going viral in a way. We definitely weren’t getting any messages about reopening the store for Biden.”

Patrick Sisson is a reporter covering cities, technology, and business.