Permanent collection · est. 2013

The Shirt Museum

Years ago I ran a tiny store called Minimum Viable Style and sold t-shirts about marketing jokes. The store is long gone. The shirts were funny, so here they are.

Exhibit A ⁄ Exhibit B

The split test

One shirt, two halves. The front asks the question. The back answers it. You only ever get to see one at a time, which is the entire joke about split testing and also, if you think about it for a second, a fairly accurate description of running one.

Two models back to back, one shirt front reading What do you think about A/B testing, the other back reading Talk to me about split testing — The advertisement we never ran, in the house style of every mall catalog of the era.

The original A/B testing shirt artwork, white type on red, divided by a diagonal slash — Original artwork. The slash marks where the shirt ends and your curiosity begins.

Exhibit C

Hold still

This one said out loud what the advertising industry preferred to phrase as “engagement.” It read better on a shirt than it did in a pitch deck, and it has aged, I am sorry to report, extremely well.

Photograph of the actual green Monetizing Your Eyeballs t-shirt with yellow lettering — A real one, photographed on a real chair, some time around 2013.

The gift shop is closed

There is no store. There are no shirts. Whatever link brought you here has been pointing at a dead shop for years, and I only found out because I went looking through the server logs for things returning 404.

These days I advise CEOs and founders on AI and technology — the same instinct that produced these shirts, aimed at more expensive problems. If you found them funny, there is a reasonable chance we would work well together.

See what I do now