There is a new Tshirt company called 200 Nipples. They sell short run, original design, numbered tshirts. For each design 100 shirts are available. After those 100 are sold the design is retired. The kicker is that the shirt #1 is sold for $1 incrementing in price until shirt #100 is sold for $100.
Assuming every shirt is sold, they have essentially built a business on selling tshirts for $50.50. Not a bad business when you can get it.
I will be really interested to see how this plays out on ebay. Buying one of these shirts for less than $50 is a “good deal”. So the first 40 or so people should be able to profit from re-selling the shirt on ebay. However, if all 100 shirts sold then we know the market will bear $100 for one of these shirts. Since no more will be made we may see these shirts selling for more than $100 on ebay.
It could be that everyone who buys these shirts wants to keep them. I did a quick search on ebay for “200 nipples” and it came up with nothing.
As an experiment in economics, I went ahead and purchased the current design. I am going to list it for sale on ebay to see if there is an edge market for this kind of thing. Part of me thinks that because I bought the current design below the “average market value” of $50.50, I should list the minimum bid for $50.50. However, I don’t think that would be really fair to 200 Nipples; I don’t want to mess with them, I just want to do an experiment. I think it would be more fair to list the starting bid at $101 since that would be the theoretical next available price once they are sold out of this design. Because ebay will sell the shirt for what the market will bear it could actually sell for much higher.
Or it may not sell at all and I would have a really cool shirt condemning the RIAA that I paid a price I was willing to pay. Just in case I went ahead and ordered it in my size (male large).
UPDATE: Wade from 200Nipples.com has offered you (the readers of this post) 10% your first purchase from 200nipples.com. All you have to do is enter BEGINNERS-LUCK-10 as the coupon code during checkout. He also encouraged my little ebay experiment which is cool. Thanks Wade!
