2 girls 1 cup shirtA few weeks ago I was driving around listening to a local morning radio show (the always excellent Dudley & Bob Show here on Austin’s KLBJ FM) and I heard them talking about a video they had seen on the internet called “2 Girls 1 Cup.” They were pretty disgusted by it. You are probably aware of this video by now, but if not, I’m sure as hell not going to enlighten you…it’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen on the internet and I don’t want to be held responsible for you gouging your eyes out after watching it.

At any rate, since it was such a riveting and hilarious topic for them, I got the idea that I ought to make a “2 Girls 1 Cup” t-shirt with my CafePress account and send them one…so I did. I also put my CafePress store’s URL on the back of the shirt. My hope was that they would get the gift, it would remind them of the disgusting “2 Girls 1 Cup” video and they would mention WarehouseLarry on the air.

Did they get the shirt? Yes. Did they mention my shop on air? I don’t know…I don’t listen every day. But what did happen was a little bigger than I had hoped. I had stumbled upon Trend Marketing, which is - as it sounds - marketing to trends. This is common knowledge to marketing people, but to a little guy like me this was big news.

When I created the “2 Girls 1 Cup” shirt for the Dudley & Bob guys, the design was automatically submitted into the CafePress marketplace. And it sold like hotcakes. Disgusting, disturbing hotcakes, but hotcakes none the less. “2 Girls 1 Cup” was a hot trend. The video had gone viral and every drunk ass college kid and radio DJ in the world knew of it’s horrid greatness and, naturally, wanted to wear t-shirts about it! Good for me! The “2 Girls 1 Cup” design accounted for about 80% of my December sales, and I’ve already sold 2 this month!

Lesson learned: Keep an ear to the ground for what trends are hot and market to those. It’s Trend Marketing!