Hello from a road called 81 in Virginia.
Virginia is looking good today – doing it’s best impression of England. We had a great night last night in Asheville. Such a cool town and it’s always good to be back in North Carolina. i was born there (NC) and it always has a way of causing me to remember…
Two weeks ago, we posted a blog announcing that TWLOHA shirts would be available in 650 Hot Topic stores around the country. We saw a pretty incredible response as the news was met with a ton of excitement and it was also a chance for us to wrestle with and respond to criticism. An honest conversation, you might say… The story has taken some surprising turns so it’s definitely time for an update. First off, thank you. Thanks for your emails and messages. Thanks for caring. In large thanks to you, our Title shirt was Hot Topic’s best-selling shirt two weeks ago. But then, last Monday, because of the language in the story (printed inside), they decided to stop selling the shirts. We were told this was not an emotional decision. It was simply their policy. (No profanity. No religion.)
As you can probably guess, it was quite a roller coaster, to be told we were their best seller, and then a few hours later, to learn the shirts were being removed from their stores… It was a strange day, to say the least. We wrestled with it and i spent several hours on the phone, reaching out to friends and people we look uo to, for advice on how we should respond.
The next morning, i got a call from Hot Topic’s CEO. Her name is Betsy. Betsy apologized for the drama and said a lot of nice things and made it very clear that they believe in what we’re doing and they want our shirts back in the stores as soon as possible. She asked if they could buy the shirts without the story printed inside, and i asked her if she would let me write something entirely new. She said yes. And then Betsy said another surprising thing: basically that they should be paying more for the shirts, so that TWLOHA could se more support from the deal – i almost dropped the phone.
So there’s a couple cool things happening…
1 The shirts pulled from their stores, Hot Topic is giving those to their employees.
2 This brings us to today… i am in the middle of writing something new for the inside of the next batch of the Hot Topic shirts. i will explain and defend this soon, but i have to get back to the writing for now. i was supposed to have it done yesterday… (i am the slowest writer in the world).
The cool news, in my opinion, is that basically every single Hot Topic employee (10,000) is now aware of TWLOHA. Also, we now have a relationship with the people who run Hot Topic. We said we want to run TWLOHA in a way that is brave and creative. We said we want to continue to take this conversation to surprising places. With those things in mind, i’d say this fits pretty well. And again, heart of the matter, we found a way to make it work so that the people who shop in their stores will again be introduced to hope and help through TWLOHA. Rather than pick a fight over their decision, we were able to come to an agreement that works for everyone. In many ways, we’re in a better position now than we were. (And if that’s not enough for you, we get to say that our shirts were too controversial for Hot Topic. We were their best seller and we got kicked out, all in the same day! How rock and roll is that?)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, i have some writing to get back to. i owe Betsy an email.
Trying to say something that will matter and move. Trying to say hope. Then we’re gonna print a whole bunch of shirts and send them back out to all the towns. We’re told the towns are filled with people, and that’s really what this whole thing’s about…
: )
Peace from these green mountains. We are moving north.
Keep it spicy.
jamie
PS: We have a new shirt. It’s called “Alive”. Some new V-Necks and stickers too. Check ’em here.