The highs & lows of chasing fast trends for big money
Just because you can, doesn’t mean it’s worth it
By Cole Lundstrom
This past spring, a baby macaque started cuddling with an IKEA plush toy. In that moment, a viral sensation emerged, and businesses rushed to capitalize on it. A simple $20 toy began reselling on eBay for $355, and sites like Etsy were flooded with baby monkey merch within 24 hours. For a print shop, the problem isn’t whether you can make the item — of course you can. The issue is that the sales window can close as fast as it opened. Entire businesses run on viral trend merch, but how do you make sure the item arrives at a client’s door before the meme is dead? It is this issue that makes fast trend apparel not only lucrative, but the easiest way to be sitting on unsellable inventory.
bmphotography – stock.adobe.com
Make it fast or don’t even try
Punch the Monkey is a clean case study in compressed demand. Sellers had product listed roughly two days after the image appeared; no traditional supply chain can handle that sort of turn. With a standard print shop offering 7-10 day turns on bulk orders with no fulfillment options, sellers have no choice but to turn to print on demand. Yes, it greatly reduces their margin, but you can’t reference a meme two weeks after people saw it. It’s now or never.
Social media platforms have collapsed the distance between attention and purchase intent, and the shops that captured that demand were not the ones with the deepest inventory.
That is a structural change in who gets the big opportunities. DTF transfers, DTG, and stocked blanks let a shop put a design on a shirt the same day it lands, without committing to screens, film, and a minimum run before demand is proven. You need to build a system for success regardless of the meme. It’s not about the joke or moment; it is about the infrastructure to actually fulfill the order rapidly.
As Ricky Bobby said, ‘I wanna go fast!’
The “Stevie Knicks” shirt is another great example of a stupidly easy idea being a hit with millions. Musician and actress Alana Haim reportedly made it on a Cricut using $3 Gildan blanks from Michaels. Taylor Swift wore it courtside at the NBA Finals on June 10, and knockoff versions were online within hours. So, while you sit looking at your equipment worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, a musician with a Cricut got more eyeballs and earned media impressions than your business will ever see. It kind of stings, but it shows the power of being ready for the right moment.
Can your shop take a design from file to credible sample, photograph the actual product rather than a mockup, and fulfill a small batch without pulling a press off a contract job or missing a paying customer’s deadline?
Scrambling to chase a trend needs to be an active business plan, not just a whim because you happen to be scrolling on your phone. Build your system for rapid production and shipping and it allows you to automate trend printing (trend research is something AI excels at) and not end up underwater with too much due and missed deadlines.
Don’t chase the trend — plan for it
Not every opportunity is the same. The LABUBU x FIFA World Cup collaboration moved roughly $150 collectibles that sold out within hours across 40 countries: explosive, brief, and effectively over before most shops could react. “2026 is the new 2016” is a different animal, a nostalgia frame loose enough to carry dozens of original designs across shirts, totes, and accessories, with a runway measured in months. Kool-Aid pineapples showed how a strange but instantly readable image can travel on legibility alone. America250 is the opposite of a meme entirely: a fixed anniversary you could have been sourcing blanks and building artwork for a year in advance.
Sort trends by how they behave, and schedule accordingly. Surprises can come out of nowhere, but if you somehow made no money during the World Cup, that is entirely your fault. Calendar-focused planning can have you front and center for the hottest events and allow you to grow rapidly. Treating events that have been scheduled the same way you treat a surprise viral moment is a massive missed opportunity I see too often in small shops scrambling to make whatever they can, but running without a clear path
Roman Tiraspolsky – stock.adobe.com
You are trying to make money, stupid
The only point of running a print shop is to make money. Too often I have seen shops be so proud of the stack of pallets on their Instagram reel that they forget to account for all the costs trend work quietly adds: art time, rush labor, spoilage of blanks, expedited shipping, marketplace fees, and the very high cost of not selling through your inventory in time. This summer I was walking through Manhattan, and I bought a Mexico World Cup jersey for $8 just a day after they lost. Be extremely careful with excess inventory because interests can change in hours.
I love screen printing as much as almost anyone I know, but DTF and DTG are truly the king here. If you are dealing with multiple garments, sizes, colors, and potential variations of designs, you will likely not scale any one item quickly enough to justify the screen run. But this is not always the case, that one-color Stevie Knicks tee being the perfect example of an easy win with screen printing.
Don’t forget: copyright is a very real thing
Knick-Knacks, a site selling unofficial Knicks championship merchandise, got more than 250,000 visitors before the NBA shut them down. Traffic like that is evidence people wanted their designs. But the dudes were not allowed to sell it, making them basically the best bootleggers on the internet. Even if people love it, you may not have the right to print it, and you do not want to be on the wrong side of a billion-dollar corporation’s lawyers because you chased a quick buck.
Team names and logos, league marks, championship phrasing, celebrity names and likenesses, song lyrics, brand identities, character art, and photography are all owned by someone, and so is a good deal of the artwork circulating in trend-design groups. The fact that Etsy or Shopify hasn’t taken down your listing is not proof you are safe. Enforcement is usually complaint-driven, which means it arrives after you have already printed. The exposure is not limited to a takedown, either. It can mean chargebacks, a suspended seller account, or a letter from counsel.
You need to straddle the line of reacting quickly to a cultural moment and not infringing on someone else’s rights. The first is a design problem. The second is a legal one. When rights are unclear, licensed programs and genuinely original art are the lane that lets you keep selling next month. If you have an amazing opportunity but it’s on the line, then it’s time to run it past an attorney. And if you can’t afford an attorney, then it’s not actually that big of an opportunity.
A good example is when my friend ran afoul of the whiskey brand Jack Daniel’s with one of his designs. The company not only got his designs pulled instantly, but they came after him for all sales connected to the T-shirt and attorney fees. He lost about $220,000 by the time it was finally settled. These corporations are not messing around.
AI + data = real opportunities
Set up an automation with Claude or Codex to find the best trending memes and moments in your niche daily.
- Look at real numbers, not personal enthusiasm: search volume, inbound asks, and competitor listings.
- Check rights before you produce or promote. Assume someone owns it.
- Always tell customers the real arrival date for their merchandise. No one wants to buy a trending item today and get it in a month.
- Create a real sample and photograph the actual product. Buyers don’t trust mockups or worse, AI slop.
- Set a kill date. Remember you must not be stuck with dead inventory; it will destroy any margin you have.
- Track true margin after fees, labor, spoilage, and shipping.
- Make sure to capture the customers for future marketing. You can reach out to those NBA fans every season.
The competitive advantage is not predicting every viral moment. Nobody does that reliably. It is running a shop that can recognize a real opportunity, respond to it quickly, and still make a disciplined decision about whether it is worth the press time.
Cole Lundstrom is the founder of MerchTroop.com, specializing in live event apparel activations for brands and experiential marketing. With 16 years in the print industry, he’s now launching PrintShopCRM.com, a workflow and automation platform built specifically for print shops to scale smarter and operate more profitably.
