Wikipedia is raising money ahead of its birthday with a streetwear collection
Plus: The misspelled $640 Trump watch shows the pitfalls of licensing your brand
Wikipedia is raising money ahead of its birthday with a streetwear collection
If you’ve always wanted to donate to Wikipedia but needed an extra nudge to do so, a new capsule collection by the German fashion brand Armedangels could be that reason.
To mark Wikipedia’s forthcoming 25th anniversary next year, Armedangels designed a 14-piece collection that turns design features from the Wikipedia user interface and experience into brand elements. Its signature bright cobalt blue, called “hyperlink blue,” is a key color, along with white and yellow core colors. One design, featured on a t-shirt and sweatshirt, uses an iconic 1972 image of Earth called “Blue Marble” that was taken during the Apollo 17 mission and is in the public domain.
A text excerpt from “The Blue Marble” Wikipedia page is below the image, which is one of the most widely reproduced images in the world and “celebrates the freedom of knowledge,” according to the product description. Wikipedia’s serif “W” logo is featured throughout.
The Armedangels x Wikipedia collection includes items that equate knowledge to progress, with shirts promoting freedom, peace, and equality. Ball caps with slogans like “Open Source of Information” and “Yes, I know,” are fan merch for people who love going down multi-tab Wikipedia rabbit holes. The items range in price from about $16 for socks, $48 for hats, $57 for T-shirts, and $114 for sweatshirts, and the collection is available now via the Armedangels website.
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation — which also operates tools like Wikimedia Commons and Wikibooks — saw annual revenue of more than $180 million in 2024, more than $170 million of which came from donations (though it says just 2% of Wikipedia readers donate). Some hypebeast apparel might be able to nominally improve that percentage, and it comes as the site itself has become a political lightning rod, facing increasing attacks from some on the right.
Armedangels says every piece is made from 100% recycled material, and 12% of sales proceeds go to the Wikimedia Foundation. It’s “sustainability meets free knowledge,” as the fashion brand says. “Because when we know better, we do better.”
Like the pro-reading, anti-book-ban capsule collection for Penguin Random House by Online Ceramics, Armedangels x Wikipedia lends street-fashion cred to book smarts, and it raises money for valuable education resources at a time when anti-intellectualism is on the rise and our information ecosystem has become especially polluted.
Supporting a free online encyclopedia is one way to fight back. For Wikipedia, its volunteers, readers, and fans, the site is an effective line of defense against misinformation and ignorance. Now they have a limited-edition streetwear line that feels the same way.
Previously in Yello:
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The misspelled $640 Trump watch shows the pitfalls of licensing your brand
Brand licensing deals can be an easy way to make a quick buck, but it’s not without risks. A man who splurged for one of President Donald Trump’s officially licensed watches learned that lesson the hard way after the timepiece arrived with an unfortunate typo. The $640 limited-edition “Inauguration First Lady” watch the Rhode Island man bought read “Rump” instead of “Trump” across its pink face.
“We expected that it would have the integrity of the president of the United States,” Tim Petit, who bought the watch for his wife, told the local news station WJAR. He said it made his wife cry.
Perhaps expecting integrity from a product that trades on the name and likeness of the first felon president in U.S. history, a man whose second term in office has become a historic tangle of conflicts of interest, is asking for too much. But it’s also a pitfall that all brands face when they outsource their products. Licensing your brand can increase brand recognition and profits without cost risks, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but without specific, enforced licensing requirements, you risk losing out on quality control. Not that the Trump brand is particularly airtight.
Trump has long made money from licensing deals, with resulting products such as Trump: The Game, Trump Water, and Trump Steaks. In between terms, Trump cashed in on new product releases like Trump Sneakers and “God Bless the USA” Bibles, all using LLCs that licensed his name and likeness to manufacture and market Trump-themed kitsch to his political supporters.
Trump Watches aren’t sold directly by Trump, his business, or an aligned political entity, but by TheBestWatchesonEarth LLC, a manufacturer with a business address at a nondescript Wyoming building, which is also home to a daycare center. With Trump back in office, Trump Watches and other licensed storefronts represent something unprecedented: a president personally profiting off of merch sales, a category that until now has been relegated to campaign fundraising. And in a shocking but not surprising twist for the president who’s made domestic manufacturing central to his political agenda, the watches make no claim to be made in the United States (GQ actually sourced them to China).
Luckily for the Rhode Island couple with the misspelled watch, the story has a happy ending. Though Trump Watches has a strict policy of no refunds or exchanges and states on its website that “images shown are for illustration purposes only and may not be an exact representation of the product,” the company made an exception for the “Rump” watch, though only after the media got involved. Petit said he didn’t hear back from the company until after WJAR reached out for comment, and then he got a call from Trump Watches offering to replace the watch and gift him an $800 coupon. Sometimes all it takes is a free press.
Have you seen this?
Getty Images spending millions to battle a “world of rhetoric” in A.I. suit, CEO says. Getty is suing Stability AI, which is behind popular text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, in both the U.K. and U.S. over allegations that it copied 12 million images without permission or compensation. [CNBC]
Harvard’s Graduate School of Design dean responds to Trump attacks. Harvard’s GSD is one of the university’s most international schools, and the dean is speaking out over Trump’s move to ban students from outside the U.S. [Fast Company]
The Japanese government released a free map in Minecraft. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism released a Minecraft map of its underground flood water diversion facility, the largest in the world. [Hypebeast]
FLOTUS got A.I. to narrate her memoir. Calling it a “new era in publishing,” first lady Melania Trump said last week a new audiobook version of her 2024 memoir and New York Times bestseller Melania is “narrated entirely using artificial intelligence in my own voice.” [Whig]
History of political design
Rolex “The Presidents’ Watch” advertisement (1966). The Rolex Day-Date has been spotted on the wrists of presidents including Kennedy, Johnson, and Trump, and the brand played up the association in a print ad modeling the timepiece with a red phone to allude to the Cold War-era presidency’s Moscow hotline.
Portions of this newsletter were first published in Fast Company.
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