About a year and a half ago, some friends and I ran a now-defunct t-shirt business. We made several wrestling-themed shirts. One of them was a Macho Man shirt that sold pretty well. Mick Foley actually told us over Twitter that he loved it and we exchanged email addresses and broached the idea of making one for him. He was down with the idea and told us to go for it.
So we designed the
Mick Foley's Cheap Pop shirt. He loved it. He wanted to sell them on his comedy tour, specifically a couple of big shows he was doing overseas at the time. We were definitely cool with that and agreed to manufacture the shirts for him and ship them to him almost at cost (we made nearly no profit on the ones we sold him). In fact, we made a minor mis-print (nothing noticeable) on the first batch and since it was our fault, we gave him those for free, so he got double what he paid for and was thrilled about it.
We also planned to sell them on our website and broached the idea that Mick would plug the shirt for us on Twitter and we would donate a portion of the profits to RAINN (a rape and incest charity that Mick is involved with and that I personally strongly support as well). He was cool with that initially and agreed.
Then he changed his mind and asked if we would be okay with letting him sell them exclusively for awhile before we started selling them on our site. shyt man, it's Mick Foley and he loves our design. Yeah dude, we'll do that. If I recall, I believe we agreed to hold off for 2 months while he sold them on his tour.
In the meantime, he sold the shirts.
He wore it in a photoshoot and even
Nolle was rocking one.
The 2 months passed and he wanted to extend the exclusivity. Eh, sure. Then he wanted to extend it a third time. By this point, fans or not, we were getting a little impatient. The shirt was a surefire hit, especially if he plugged it for us online. We wanted to sell it. So we told him we we really wanted to start selling. He seemed cool with that and promised to plug us on Twitter and mention us in an online radio show interview he was doing. He never did either.
We sold a limited run of the shirts online (by then, our business was failing for other reasons) and that was basically it. We knew we were shutting down and Mick still seemed interested in selling the shirts, so I emailed him and asked him if he was interested in buying the artwork from us. That way, he'd own it and could manufacture as many as he wanted without having to use us as the middleman.
He was interested so we started negotiating price. We offered him a VERY reasonable price and he said it was too high. Against better judgement (and the vehement protest of the guy who did most of the design work), we went even lower. Again, he balked and said it just wasn't affordable. We couldn't go any lower.
That was the last email I ever got from him, despite sending a follow-up email a few weeks later to see if he was still interested or if there was anything else could do. So at that point, we figured, ah well, lost cause. It was fun while it lasted.
ahem
Fast forward to tonight. I'm at the ROH show in Nashville and see a guy wearing a Mick Foley Cheap Pop shirt.
But not
our Mick Foley Cheap Pop shirt.
Clearly a cheap knockoff, but undoubtedly our design. I ask the guy where he bought it. Where, you ask?
Mick Foley's stand up tour. Turns out he took our design he didn't want to buy, made a shytty copy, and he's selling them. It's even autographed by Mick. News to us!
Our design
Mick's bootleg version
So yeah. On one hand, hey, at least he liked the design enough to want to keep selling it, but a lot of work went into making that. Graphic designers especially will understand. If he didn't want to buy the rights to it (at an absolute steal, might I add) then by all means, that's cool, but if he was going to just blatantly copy it and make his own version, it was a major dikk move to not even ask us if we were okay with it.
So yeah. That's my Mick Foley is a dikk story. Bums me out because I've always been a fan but that was just shytty.