30 Bizarre And Very Specific T-Shirts, As Shared In This Group

When you see them, you’ll be baffled that someone had the bright idea to design and sell such a product. But apparently, there’s a lucrative market for these kind of targeted t-shirts. 

To understand how the market got started, I spoke to the aptly-named Facebook page Shirts Marketed To Extremely Specific Demographics (@ExtremelySpecificShirts). Their page has a following of 54K people who also love these cringe-worthy t-shirts. @ExtremelySpecificShirts gave Bored Panda their views on the topic and a quick run-down on how it happened.

“The weird specificity of these shirts is a product of how adverts on Facebook work,” @ExtremelySpecificShirts told Bored Panda. They go on to explain that: “In Facebook, you can target your ads to people based on things such as the pages they ‘Like’, their hobbies, jobs, birth months, etc. You can also target ads towards any combination of these variables.”

@ExtremelySpecificShirts believes that: “people found there was money to be made in creating bots to automatically generate designs based on these variables.” So, auto-generated marketing is what really drove this business to grow on Facebook, and even become profitable.

I contacted Andrea Vahl for more insights into Facebook Ads. She is a social media speaker and consultant, who is passionate about helping businesses understand and leverage the power of social media to grow their business. She is the co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies and her latest book is Facebook Ads Made Simple. 

“For many types of businesses, Facebook is the most lucrative place to advertise,” Andrea told Bored Panda. “Google is great when someone is specifically searching for a product, but Facebook works really well in the top of the marketing funnel to get in front of your perfect audience,” she explained. 

And these t-shirts are definitely trying to target the perfect person.

The numbers on the subreddit and Facebook page show that there’s an interest for the t-shirts. I asked @ExtremelySpecificShirts what they thought of the cult-following behind the targeted t-shirts. Do people really love these t-shirts so much? Or is it all just a running-joke on the internet?

”There's a combination of both,” the curator of the page said. ”I think older people are more likely to genuinely like these shirts and don't really see the humor in how specific they are.”

However, this is contrasted by the niche of users that find the t-shirts ridiculous, but in a good way. @ExtremelySpecificShirts said, “I've also seen some of my followers tag me in pictures of themselves wearing targeted shirts. In their case, it's definitely ironic.“