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In 2011, Michael Fowler, a 20-year veteran of the t-shirt business, began to experiment with ways to generate more designs. Chances are, you’ve seen similar products marketed to you on Facebook by people who seem to know exactly who you are, what you like, when you were born, where you live, who you love, and what you do. But as it turns out, the key to these operations (huge volume) can also be its curse — and oftentimes, these “algorithmically-generated” products can go terribly, terribly wrong. Keep Calm and… destroy your company
The atomization of culture and business is nothing new. But as algorithms are making it easier to saturate the market with low-quality products, entrepreneurs should be wary of scaling virtual inventory without oversight. At the time, his company, Solid Gold Bomb, had a catalog of around 1k t-shirts, each conceived by a human. But Fowler knew that the t-shirts were “a numbers game, a quantitative culture” — and to scale, he needed to dramatically increase his output. In a since-deleted apology letter , he harped on the downside of relying heavily on an algorithm with little human oversight — “The ‘Keep Calm’ shirts were computer generated, and we didn’t even know we had a shirt that says that,” he wrote — but it did little to assuage the internet’s fury.
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As Michael Fowler and others learned, big data comes with big responsibility — and big potential consequences. The internet is rife with hundreds of fly-by-night t-shirt companies that operate in a similar fashion. Another company boasts more than 10k variations of a single t-shirt phrase, with personalized names ranging from Aylin to Zara. Its catalog includes classics like “Never Underestimate A Woman Who Loves Stephen King And Was Born In April,” and “I’m a Tattooed Hippie Girl Born With a Mouth I Can’t Control.”
These mishaps beg an important question: in an age of retail governed by volume and scale, what happens to quality control? Big data = big responsibility Who makes these products? How on Earth do they manage to generate such specific phrases? And what happens when things go wrong? The algorithm merchantsIn his 2006 book, The Long Tail , Chris Anderson argued that retail was moving away from a model where only a small number of popular products were sold, and toward a system with billions of niche products. The future, he wrote, would be “selling less of more.” There’s a whole subreddit ( r/TargetedShirts ) with 29k users devoted to the weirdly specific t-shirts that show up in Facebook users’ feeds — shirts like “I love ANIME but JESUS always comes first,” or “I’m a VET who EATS BEEF and sings KARAOKE.” As it turns out, Fowler’s algorithm had served as a sort of demented Mad Libs, generating phrases like “Keep Calm and Rape Them,” and “Keep Calm and Grope On.”
In 2012, the WWII propaganda phrase “ Keep Calm and Carry On ” was having a moment — and Michael Fowler decided to capitalize with a simple bit of coding . It was a t-shirt. Not just any t-shirt, mind you — an incredibly niche work of art, adorned with a phrase that perfectly encapsulated who she was: “Never underestimate a MOTHER who listens to IRON MAIDEN and was born in AUGUST.” Most of these businesses use algorithms to generate massive, almost unlimited digital inventories (sometimes, 25m+ designs), then rely on hyper-targeted Facebook ads to reach niche audiences in small volumes.
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