NEW DELHI: Just over 2 hours after Donald Trump was shot at during a rally in Pennsylvania, Chinese online retailers started selling souvenir T-shirts with photos printed on them capturing the moment just after the former president escaped the assassination attempt.
Taobao seller Li Jinwei said, “We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, though we hadn’t even printed them, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the US.”
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The speed of production and sales was enabled by the use of digital printing technology, which allowed the T-shirts to be printed and listed for sale very quickly.A Guangdong-based company called Xinflying Digital Printing Production said their digital printing machines could print 8 election-related T-shirts per hour.
Data from the Chinese cross-border e-commerce platform DHgate showed the transaction volume of election-related souvenirs had grown over 40% month-over-month since January, with over 110% growth in March.
This fast turnaround on the Trump shooting was possible because the T-shirt factories simply downloaded the relevant images and used their digital printing capabilities to produce the merchandise quickly. Li’s factory in Hebei province could finish a T-shirt in about 1 minute.