> If Mozilla can raise some money independently of Google by selling merchandise, all the better!

Agreed, but did they need a new mascot to sell merchandise? It’s not like the old logo wasn’t already cool.

> And it's not like software engineers are spending time on this instead of working on Firefox.

But Mozilla is still spending money and resources on it. The issue isn’t this rebranding specifically, but that this is yet another distraction which won’t produce any real result.

> It's an effort that pays for itself

Is it? That’s not a given, and we definitely can’t say either way yet. Considering all of Mozilla’s past efforts, pretty much all of which they abandoned, I’d be very wary of calling this one a success so early on.

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lapcat 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Is it? That’s not a given, and we definitely can’t say either way yet. Considering all of Mozilla’s past efforts, pretty much all of which they abandoned, I’d be very wary of calling this one a success so early on.

The economics of selling branded clothing has been very well understood for 50 years. The markup for slapping a logo on a T-shirt is massive. Plus, it's a form of crowdsourced, word-of-chest advertising.

And Mozilla already has designers on staff. It's unlikely they had to do any extra hiring for this.

	▲	latexr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The economics of selling branded clothing has been very well understood for 50 years. The markup for slapping a logo on a T-shirt is massive. Plus, it's a form of crowdsourced, word-of-chest advertising. None of that addresses the point that the old logo was already very merchandisable. Furthermore, whatever markup they’re making is not something you can just generalise. It is very possible, likely even, that the bulk of the cost goes to whatever company is making the t-shirts (I haven’t looked but I doubt Mozilla is doing it in-house).