Making D&D an aloha shirt-slinging brand is the only way it will survive the winter
The $120 D&D aloha shirt is a desperate bid for my attention and it’s working like a marketer’s wet dream.
“Oh, hell yeah,” my friend Ash said when I showed them the new D&D Hawaiian shirt from Reyn Spooner. “That rips.”
I lowered my phone, defeated. This was the third trans masc person to say this within the course of two days. It was true: D&D had finally made a piece of merchandise that was not only rad as fuck, but also catnip to trans and nonbinary weirdos who have always wanted to have dragons and babes on shirts but were going through a weird “pretty phase” when that sort of thing was acceptable. I’m mostly talking about myself, sure, but the point stands.
I wanted that dumbass Hawaiian dragon shirt.
Or I did, until I looked at the price tag and nearly suffered D8… I don’t know, premature vicarious bank account damage. The shirt, made by the famous brand, Reyn Spooner, was a whooping $120. I closed out of the tab slowly, wistfully, longing, the trans urge to put a badass dragon on my body abated in the face of a price tag that seemed inaccessible to me… and probably many others.
