The Peerless Tee
No, your eyes do not deceive you. That is a genuinely new DespairWear T-Shirt overhead. I tried to write something funny to go with it, but I found myself feeling a bit upstaged. The shirt just cracked me up so much- but for reasons that wouldn’t necessarily be very funny to most people, least of all you folks.
I mean, given how long I’ve been here, I’ve had to endure countless Marketing Department demographic and psychographic studies of the Despair housefile and The Wailing List. And it’s frightening at this point how much we know about you- and how suitable this shirt seems to be for many of you.
We paid this one firm (who I’m not allowed to mention by name due to a pending lawsuit that I’m also not suppose to discuss so please keep this between the 100,001 of us)… We paid them a mid-five-figure sum to perform an extremely in-depth set of psychological profiles of our audience- comparing your purchases at Despair.com with purchases from every other merchant who participates in this giant consumer data orgy that most people of you remain blissfully unaware of…
When the consultant from the Marketing-Firm-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named arrived at our offices with the finished report, he could hardly conceal his outright distaste. Contempt, really.
This was a profound shift in disposition from the month prior, when he glibly pitched their dazzling profiling services to the whole of the Despair Marketing Department, and then after took a half-dozen of us to an extremely upscale eatery called Red Lobster. After putting the whole thing on a company Gold Card that he flashed around like it was the last of Willie Wonka’s Golden Tickets, it was all but a foregone conclusion to him that he’d won the deal. I mean, the meal cost $120. Sparkling wine was served. Two bottles, in fact, and of André Brut (Ernest & Julio Gallo- $4.39 per bottle- two for $7.50).
Maybe I’m being petty- and I’m certainly digressing- by recounting that little anecdote. But it felt a bit like being the security guard at The Louvre, and being approached by an oily catburglar carrying a big roll of one-dollar bills and saying, “Hey. How about I give you this big roll of $20 and you let me in to rob you blind?“. Seriously- he spends $120 of company money on a surf-and-turf at a place where male patrons as often sport wifebeaters as wear Crocs and all of a sudden, he’s convinced he’s going to win a $40,000 account?
And yet, win the account he did. (What can I say? He had my boss’ undying affections at “Admiral’s Feast”.)
But somehow- after that criminal act transpired- somehow, he shows up in our offices to review their findings and gets to feel superior to us. Because, well, because of what he learned about you.
He pulled the report out of his briefcase as if it was the dirty diaper of an infant fed only chili and peppered corn. Copies were distributed for our review, as well. And as much as I’d like to recount to you the particulars of both that debriefing session AND the subsequent altercation that took place in our parking lot, I am currently forbidden from discussing a word of it.
But I can least say that $40,000 worth of in-depth computer analysis of transactional data cross-referenced against a massive database of over 5 billion transactions- yielded the following surprising finding: Despair customers are surprisingly dissatisfied, lonely and maladjusted people. And they appear to represent the highest concentration of “Undesirables” – a marketing industry term used to describe chronically unsatisfiable buyers- in the retail catalog industry. In short, you folks are the kind of people that most catalog companies pay consulting firms a lot of money to purge from their database. No offense intended.
But, we love you nonetheless (at least in a sort of heavily-diluted form of the filios love. Don’t you write me replies getting all agape or eros on me… You know we can’t cross that line…) I mean, somebody’s got to create products for the malcontents. Who better than this motley lot?
Which brings us circuitously back to our new Peerless Tee. When I first saw it- I just crumpled into a weeping ball of hysterics. I mean, it’s just so perfect for some of you… So I hope at least some of you will do your duty- and pick up this particular tee and go forth into the world making people uncomfortable at the sight of you (even more than you already do). In fact, I’m feeling so strongly about this that I’m going to add a coupon code for it. Just use the code peerless with your order for this tee and you’ll save $3 on it.
Oh. And by the way, there’s also a new SubText Tee this week, too. I’ll let you get check it out for yourselves, if you made it this far into my email.
Well, backwards and downwards.