Who wants to buy Federer Merchandise?
Merchandise is very popular. One of the reasons it is popular is that it isn’t regular stuff that you can buy in a store. It has an intrinsic meaning attached to it. Every piece you can buy will have something on it or represented on it that will differentiate it from normal stuff that anyone can buy.
It used to be that celebrity merchandise was the only sort of merchandise you could buy but with sports becoming more popular, we can see a shift in the huge sales that sports merchandise is generating these days. With sports stars becoming as famous as celebrities anything that a person can buy that has any sort of connection to that sports star will be made and sold.
A programme on TV recently ran a story about Roger Federer merchandise selling like hotcakes. A person could buy anything from key chains with Federer’s face on them to mugs, t-shirts and even handbags. Now I’m not sure it is the height of fashion but would any woman be seen walking around with a Roger Federer handbag? It would probably be very tacky and she wouldn’t be allowed to model it at her very fashionable friends’ houses anytime soon. But the other things make more sense like the mugs, the t-shirts and others, which have his smiling face on them and might be better suited to the cupboards of die-hard Federer fans. What is interesting is that the sales that these sorts of things generate must be in the millions and an interesting thing to question is where all this money goes? Federer must have made a deal to get a cut of the profits because it is his face after all that is selling the items in question.
It seems this need to have merchandise of a celebrity or sports star comes from the need people have to try and own a piece of their favourite star. Some do it to earn money by selling the items on. That is a reason why so many signed items are always on auctions and places like ebay. But I suspect most people who collect things that have something to do with famous people do it to be closer to them. It sounds creepy but that is the stars problem to deal with, because some people get a little loopy when it comes to merchandise, collecting things for years and filling their houses with junk for the only reason that it has something to do with someone famous. I remember the good old days when people used to collect books.
They still do but not as many and they do it for the simple reason that book are great to collect. Others collect Persian carpets, stamps, trinkets and so on. It seems humans have a need to collect and store things, maybe it is a way for us to satisfy some primal desire to collect and store objects but it could just be that people like collecting odd things.
The need to own something that has the face of a sports person on it is a little bit harder to understand. It has gotten to the point where anything that has the face of a famous sports star on it will be snapped up. It gets weird when people buy plates with famous faces on them and then eat on them. Every bite of food that would go into your mouth would reveal more of this smiling person’s face. This obsession with sports stars has elevated them from being people who play sports for a living to something else entirely. They have become celebrities and people want to know everything about them and every detail of their lives. This can take a turn for the worse when the obsession turns into stalking but for most it stays at the eccentric level of obsessively collecting junk with their favourite stars faces on it.
As long as Federer remains as famous as he does and continues to win tennis tournaments and the hearts of his fans, the sales of his merchandise will continue to rise steadily. The strategy is great; sell as much stuff as he can before he retires and then relax for the rest of his life. Now how do I get in on this deal?
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