by Jitendra JoshiSun Mar 23, 4:07 AM ET
Tony Baltes has been making US election gear for three decades and has seen nothing like it before. Rocketing demand for campaign products has left his small company gasping for breath.
"For the 2008 election, it's off the charts. We're getting ready for a tsunami and we're just trying to hold on," the 59-year-old founder of Ohio-based Tigereye Design told AFP.
Tigereye is the exclusive provider of merchandise to the Democratic campaign of Barack Obama, but has received urgent requests from aides to Hillary Clinton to plug gaps in her own product line-up.
When the manufacturer won the Obama contract in February 2007, it employed 18 people churning products out of one warehouse. Now there are 120 workers on two sites working three shifts around the clock.
"The campaigns are buying a good deal of stuff to give away at rallies, but what's been unprecedented is the amount of stuff that people are buying for themselves, at full retail price," Baltes said.
For comparison, Tigereye had sold about three million buttons (badges) at this stage of the 2004 election cycle. This time round, button sales have topped 13 million, and other product lines are up by a factor of three or four.
T-shirts, hats, lapel pins and bumper stickers have long been staples of US election retailing. But in the scintillating 2008 race, the products are getting more exotic and, thanks to the Internet, more readily available.
Rearranging boxes of "Hillary Nutcracker" kits -- a doll-like tool sold with real walnuts -- at her shop in Washington's Union Station, Tudi Huff sighed when asked if there was much demand for John McCain merchandise.
Playing cards and coffee mugs featuring the Republican hopeful occupied an ill-lit corner of "America's Spirit Store," an emporium of campaign kitsch.
"She's selling OK but not nearly at the rate of Obama," Huff said, as two middle-aged women from Arkansas giggled beside full-length cardboard cut-outs of McCain and Clinton.
Around the corner at the Alamo Flags stall, Karen Gustafson was laden with Obama and McCain merchandise. The 46-year-old Texan, visiting the nation's capital for a spring break, plans to vote for the Republican.
"I do love Obama," Gustafson, a systems analyst for a pharmaceutical company, said as she cradled a "Yes we can!" mug. "I just can't stand his policies."
In the Democrats' epic nominating battle, Obama enjoys a slender lead in delegates over Clinton and pundits see their race going all the way to the party's convention in August.
But in the merchandise wars, the Illinois senator is trouncing his New York rival, reflecting the lock he has on the younger and more Internet-savvy electorate.
At CafePress.com, where customers can design their own clothing and novelty products, Obama stuff now accounts for 70 percent of all candidate-related sales.
In a media release, CafePress said Obama leads in sales of themed underwear and dog gear, but Clinton has the edge in teddy bears and beer glasses.
Karen Bard, "pop culture expert" at eBay, said the online auction house had seen healthy sales of Clinton T-shirts by New York fashion designer Marc Jacobs, who is the creative director at Louis Vuitton.
But those paled next to demand for T-shirts bearing a limited-edition print of Obama by urban art collective Obey, which Bard said had sold for an average of 380 dollars.
All of the presidential campaigns have harnessed the Internet to add retailing to their fundraising operations. Products bought through their websites count as campaign contributions under federal law.
Merchandise bought through third-party vendors escapes federal limits on donations -- and the profits are pocketed by the sellers.
But Baltes, who said all his products are union-made in the United States, argued there was more than enough to go round.
"The campaigns didn't anticipate the demand and neither did anyone else. It's a phenomenon we just haven't seen before," the Tigereye boss said. "This year, everyone wants to tell the world who they're supporting."
Pity, however, the spurned presidential hopeful.
At Alamo Flags, fridge magnets bearing the grinning visage of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani were gathering dust, even at the discount price of one dollar each.
Källa: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080323/bs_afp/usvoteretail 2008-03-24
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