Just over two hours after Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania, Chinese online stores began selling souvenir T-shirts printed with images that captured the moment after the former president fled an assassination attempt.
Taobao seller Li Jinwei said: “We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news of the shooting, although we didn’t even print them, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both sides of China and the United States.”.
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.
Digital Printing Production said their digital printing machines could print 8 election-related T-shirts per hour.
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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.
