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That’s the cost for a basketball that’s sold out.
ChatGPT basketballs, OpenAI tote bags, Codex hoodies.
Big Tech is launching physical products and wants you to believe it's fashion, but it isn't, it's merch, and that difference is the whole story.
Silicon Valley grinded for years, flipped their startups (or made their bags), and won the kind of money and exits that buy a table at the Met Gala. Jeff Bezos sponsored it for a small sum, for him, of $10 million.
Money still can’t buy taste, but it can absolutely buy access, through partnerships and distribution into a new market, the way Meta just did by putting Kylie Jenner’s name on its glasses.
Defining merch, merchandise and fashion
Who OpenAI’s merch was created for
Fashion Merchandising Report Card
3 moves that turn merch into fashion
Here’s the short answer: merch is something you wear to show you belong, fashion is something you wear because it says who you are.
Merchandise is the broad word, any product a business sells, from the socks at Target to a licensed band tee.
Merch is the cool cousin, the branded apparel and collectibles that musicians, teams, and brands sell to fans, and you buy it to support them and to show you’re in the club.
Swag (the closest relative), the free hat they hand you at a conference. Both are really about belonging.
Fashion is a different animal. It’s the style people covet for its own sake, the piece you’d buy because it says something about your taste and/or status.
Merch tells people which team you’re on. Fashion tells them who you are.
Merch isn’t the problem, pretending it’s fashion is. Merch buys you belonging and fashion earns you desire, and right now tech is stuck making merch while reaching for fashion.
OpenAI made merch, but it should and could be selling it as fashion, and that’s the exact gap the whole fashion internet fell into.
The answer is in what sold out.
Only 2 of the 12 pieces on the site are gone, the basketball and the $230 Codex keyboard. The basketball is a novelty that’ll live on some tech bro’s shelf and make a cameo on his calls, and the Codex keyboard is the piece the tech nerds actually lined up for. Both are for the same guy.
The tell is the attempt at girl tech, which missed. Period.
Adding pink to a water bottle and a cartoon to a tote doesn’t earn a place in womenswear, and I’m not even talking about ready-to-wear, I’m just simply talking about women’s athleisure.
It’s the same thing I can clock in 10 seconds in a hotel bathroom, where I can tell whether a man or a woman designed the room by how deep the sink is and where they put the trash can. This is what happens when tech designs for women without one in the room, the same miss I flagged when Meta built its AI necklace.
Before the fashion set gets smug, remember fashion and style aren’t the same thing either.
Fashion is the trend everyone’s buying, the same Hermès Birkin, the same Cartier Love bracelet, the same Van Cleef Alhambra, The Row bag, and Adidas Sambas, basically the entire Hailey Bieber starter pack on a different arm.
Style is what you do with it through your own point of view. Real taste was never the thing everyone bought, but it’s your own aesthetic and how you style an outfit.
Tech and even crypto bros could make fashion. Yes, I said what I said.
Back in the beginning of my Web3 era, most of what NFT projects printed was logo slop, except Azuki's satin Twin Tigers bomber, which still lives rent free in my head because that team came out of streetwear and actually embodied the aesthetic.
Even Google managed a good one from Google I/O with the Nano Banana T Shirt and Vibe _____ hat, but only for IO attendees and not available for sale.
Anthropic's "thinking" cap was a clever on brand cheeky little wink.
The rule is simple: someone with fashion taste in the room makes merch feel like fashion, while a room of tech bros makes merch that looks AI generated, and not in the good way, which is a particular irony for the company that sells the thing we prompt.
🔑 Unlock the full strategy: the report card graded like a real buy (yes, one category gets an F), the brand partnership that OpenAI can pull off, the launch that would've turned a $70 basketball into a drop people brag about, and the single hire that fixes it all.
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