Bluesky CEO Jay Graber made a splash at SXSW last week, showing up at her keynote event in a T-shirt that subtly poked fun at Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. Or, at least it seemed like it was subtle. But so many people appreciated the jab that users convinced Bluesky to reproduce and sell Graber’s shirt — even though it was an esoteric Latin language reference written in black ink on black fabric.
Rose Wang, Bluesky’s COO, said that the company made more money in one day of T-shirt sales than in two years of selling custom domains.
“That’s it. Pivoting to a tshirt company…” she wrote in a facetious post on Bluesky.
The shirts, which Bluesky is selling for $40, are a rebuttal to a shirt that Zuckerberg designed and wore at an event last year. His shirt declared, Aut Zuck aut nihil, which means “Zuck or nothing.” Zuckerberg is referencing the Latin phrase Aut Caesar aut nihil, drawing a direct parallel between the controversial Roman dictator and himself.
Graber’s shirt says Mundus sine Caesaribus, or, “a world without Caesars.”
Zuckerberg has long shown an interest in the Roman empire — the Roman empire is his own “Roman empire” — and perhaps he sees parallels between Julius Caesar and himself. Like Caesar, Zuckerberg is both powerful and divisive, but it takes a lot of hubris to compare yourself to one of the most controversial political figures in world history.
Graber’s fans — or, perhaps, Zuckerberg’s haters — liked the shirt so much that Bluesky almost immediately sold out of its first printing of the shirts. On Tuesday, the company reopened its Shopify page for orders, which will stay open for a week. As Wang said, the company made more money in one day selling shirts than it did in two years of custom domain sales.
Impressive as it seems, Bluesky didn’t push its domain sales very hard, Wang told TechCrunch. Domain sales make sense for Bluesky, since users can turn domains they own into their social handles, but the ability to buy domains was never even integrated into the Bluesky app.
If Bluesky’s other monetization ideas don’t work out, then maybe it’s time for these coders to pivot to irreverent fashion design.
