People wear software now

A vintage Apple tee resells for hundreds and a Figma jacket went for $550. The demand moved from swag to fashion. The supply did not.

There is a listing history on Grailed for Apple t-shirts from the nineties that reads like a sneaker market. The first-edition Apple T-Shirts book — a book, of company merch — goes for around $850 on AbeBooks. Figma's Config store had a two-hour line, and the jacket it listed on the day resold for $550 on eBay, which Figma wrote about themselves.

None of that is a merch story. It is a fashion story that happens to be about software. People rep the tools they use the way they rep a band or a team, and they have done for a while now.

The demand moved. The supply didn't.

Here is the gap. A company with genuine fans — a dev tool with a cult following, an AI product people are evangelical about, a platform whose users have opinions about its logo — has a Supreme-level audience and meets it with a print-shop tee. Not because they don't care. Because the alternative is an eight-month engagement with a brand studio in New York, and merch is nobody's priority on a Tuesday.

So the top twenty tech brands do it properly and everybody else ships a conference tote that ends up as a bin liner. There are, roughly, five hundred software companies with real fans and no brand studio. Nobody serves them.

What the economics actually look like on the other side

The reason the default is bad is that the default is built for volume, not for fans. Amazon's merch programme pays a creator $2.44 on a $19.99 t-shirt. That number is not a scandal, it is just what happens when the product is a blank commodity and the decoration is a print.

Meanwhile Fanatics did $8.1 billion in 2024 on licensed sports merch. There is no equivalent in software, and it is not because the affection isn't there. It is because there is no supply chain pointed at it.

Three things that make a piece good

Nothing here is clever. It is just the difference between a garment someone keeps and one they don't.

1. Embroidered, not printed. A plastisol chest print is the single strongest signal that a garment was given away rather than chosen. It also cracks after ten washes. Embroidery survives the garment.
2. A blank worth putting a mark on. Name the style number. If a vendor won't tell you what blank they're using, it's because you'd rather they didn't.
3. Scarcity that is real. A numbered run of 100 that actually stops at 100. If the number on the tag is decorative, everyone can tell.

Why we built it as software

The constraint that beat everyone else is not manufacturing. It is that merch is never a priority, so any process with a six-week lead time in front of it dies before it starts — even with a warm introduction, even when everyone agrees it is a good idea.

The only way through is to make the first step free and instant, and then make the thing at the end of it good enough that it becomes a priority on its own. Upload a mark, get a real store on your own address in about four minutes, hold no stock, spend nothing. If it turns out your users want it, that is the moment it deserves a meeting — not before.

Build one and see — it is free, and there is no card.