People, before I go any further, this post is not a joke. This is a very real, lucrative career for one man. He’s a grown-up, and for a living…he wears your shirt. That’s right. A company pays him to wear their branded shirt (the day of the year amounts to what he charges, so Jan 1st = $1 & Dec 31st = $365), which he does all day. Throughout that day, he post photos to his blog & Flickr (while wearing your shirt), uploads videos to YouTube & UStream.tv (while wearing your shirt), tweets about it & places your logo & website on his calendar (wearing of shirt unknown).

Jason….wearing your shirt. Image from his Flickr account.

I repeat myself: This is his career. And he makes it a damn good one.

So…what makes wearing a branded shirt a successful career for a grown-up?

• It’s obvious that Jason is passionate about marketing, particularly social media. He’s really good at what he does, whether it’s writing blog posts, making videos, or tweeting. Just look at this man’s twitter stream. He’s a twexpert.
• Jason is a great relationship-builder. He makes you give a damn about the shirt he’s wearing, because he presents himself as a down-to-earth, funny guy that you’d wanna have a beer with.
• He takes this seriously. Such a silly idea, such great execution. He keeps the silliness in his photos & videos, but not in terms of his advertisers.
• Now, I’m not sure if he takes everyone that gives him money for that particular date, but his calendar is full of great small businesses & not-for-profits, like Childs Play, Senor Sangria (how’d they know what I was drinking right now?!) & Mama Says.
• It’s cool. Buying someone’s chest is cool. Paying the amount of money that corresponds to that day is cool. It’s all…really cool!
• He supplements his income from, uh, wearing shirts with making videos of his trip to your company, & having monthly sponsors for his calendar.

If you’re thinking of going way out of the box (as in, like, wearing shirts for a living. Is anyone else as amazed by this as I am?!), don’t forget to add the ingredients listed above (but tweak ‘em around your passion, skill set & talents)!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under Happy Hooplah. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.