Mistakes Were Made

We know why you’re here.

You’re here to buy overstocked nonsense. You know, from companies who reached out to us in desperation, like a late night Romeo-type who struck out at the bar beyond last call and is now spitting ineffectual game through a Wendy’s drive-through speaker in hopes of salvaging the night.

(Just kidding, we know that most of you are here to maintain your meh button streak and then move on to the comment section to argue about phone charger wattage or complain about microfiber sheets.)

But there’s so much more to the business model than that. For example, sometimes we aren’t selling someone else’s clearance priced such-and-such. Sometimes we’re selling OUR OWN clearance-priced such-and-such.

Are you familiar with Mediocritee? That’s one of ours. It’s where we offer screen-printed teeshirt designs twice a week from independent artists. It was an idea born from our realization that the internet didn’t have enough existing options for buying questionably-licensed pop culture tees made by semi-anonymous designers still suffering from the last time Uber cut driver wages.

But anyway.

Like so many great Meh offerings, this story begins with someone up the retail food chain fucking up. On a different day, this could be a company who overestimated the demand for novelty wireless speakers. Or they made way more dried corn snacks than the airline industry can responsibly distribute. Or perhaps they just dragged a forklift blade across a few dozen boxes of otherwise respectable cookware sets, forever sullying them in the eyes of God and Kohl’s alike.

Today, though? Today the up-chain fuckup is ours, so we might as well share the gory details that you don’t usually get.

Here goes.

Once upon a time, we thought that offering Mediocritee tees in women’s sizes would be desirable. Appreciated, even. A premium differentiator in the small batch shirt game.

This…was wrong. You didn’t care. Nobody cared. At least nobody cared enough for us to justify offering them.

Honestly, in the category of “things we should have known before doing this in the first place,” these are teeshirts. They’re not gala dresses or business suits or runway-wear.

Really it’s kind of presumptuous to try for highly-fitted women’s tees to begin with. Men come in all shapes and sizes, too, but we long ago agreed to make the shirts vaguely boxy and if you’re jacked or round or lumpy or tall, you should probably just go up a size and, if it fits badly, suck it up because it’s just a damn teeshirt. The point is to enjoy the cool pop culture reference, not to showcase your physique.

Same deal with women, going forward. If you happen to be shaped like a department store mannequin and looked awesome in a women’s cut AND were into our particular flavor of teeshirt design, well…we’re sorry. But you should have bought the approximately 50x more shirts that it would have taken to make the math work.

We hope you learned something. Also, congratulations on looking amazing in an off-the-rack fitted Star Wars tee, nerd magnet.

As a consolation prize, we’ve brought the remaining stock over to Meh. And because we’re kind of bitter about the whole thing, we’re not going to let you pick what designs you get.

Okay, it’s more like 20 percent bitterness and 80 percent the logistics of burning through this stock in a way where we don’t lose our asses, financially speaking. Mostly it’s just a fun grab-bag situation where you get some random shirts at a deep discount in exchange for playing along a little bit. It’s like an IRK, but with no risk of ending up with a bunch of semi-expired almonds or a puzzling number of oven mitts.

So yeah. Three shirts. You pick a (women’s) size. We pick the designs.

If you aren’t familiar with Mediocritee, you might get a Star Wars shirt or a completely nonsensical movie shirt or a shirt for nostalgic millennials. Or something else entirely.

Ladies, let’s roll the dice on this one. Fellas, you know your gift selection success rate is no better than random anyway. Everyone else, these will fit you great if you’re shaped like this.