- A shirt worn by Bluesky’s CEO at SXSW has become a hot seller. Sales of a shirt worn by Jay Graber, which tweaked one worn by Mark Zuckerberg recently, have topped the amount earned by domain sales. The company sold out of the first batch and will continue to sell the shirts through March 25.
When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber walked on stage at SXSW wearing a dark T-shirt that subtly took a stab at Mark Zuckerberg, she likely didn’t realize she had stumbled onto her company’s next big moneymaker.
The black shirt with black lettering was a dopelganger of one the Meta CEO wore onstage recently. Zuckerberg’s read “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” a self-promotional reworking on the Latin phrase “Aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “Either Caesar or nothing.”
Graber’s read “Mundus sine caesaribus” – “a world without Caesars.”
The shirt turned heads and, before long, Bluesky began selling them for $40. Within one day, it made more from the sale of those shirts than it did in the past two years selling custom domains, the company’s chief operating officer reported earlier this week. (Admittedly, Bluesky doesn’t promote its domain sales very heavily.)
“That’s it. Pivoting to a tshirt company…” joked Rose Wang in a post on the social network.
The first printing of the shirt sold out. A new batch is on sale now, but only for a limited time. The sale page says the ‘world without Caesars’ shirts sale will end on March 25 at 12:00 p.m. PT.
Proceeds raised from the sale of the shirts will be used to benefit the AT Protocol developer ecosystem, the open network that Bluesky is built upon.