- A viral photo of Trump after a shooting attempt quickly spawned merchandise across TikTok, Facebook, and Etsy.
- Online retailers quickly began creating and selling shirts and other merch bearing the image.
Just hours after the shooting on Saturday that left former President Donald Trump wounded, online sellers are already using a photo of the bloodied US presidential candidate to generate a slew of merchandise.
Sellers on TikTok shop, Facebook Marketplace, and Etsy have immediately jumped on the picture of Trump raising his fist shortly after being shot, with shirts bearing slogans like "Grazed but not Dazed," "You Missed," "Shooting Makes Me Stronger," and "Never Surrender."
One TikTok retailer has already sold over 2,700 shirts with the word "Bulletproof" on them, and a shirt sporting the photo and "Trump 2024" is currently Amazon's best seller for Men's Novelty T-Shirts.
Chinese retailers were among the first to pounce on the e-commerce opportunity.
Li Jinwei, A 25-year-old seller on Alibaba's Taobao platform, told the South China Morning Post that her factory was able to immediately produce an average of one t-shirt a minute.
"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," Jinwei said.
Zhong Jiachi, owner of Paxinico, a clothing merchant on Douyin, sold roughly 40 shirts within 24 hours, Reuters reported. Jiachi told the publication that the sales "exceeded" her expectations.
"I didn't expect that Trump would have so many fans," she said.
This isn't the first time Trump's more somber situations have been spun into convincing merch. When the former President was arrested last year, his mugshot spawned thousands of shirts, mugs, and posters that accumulated to over $9.4 million for his campaign.