The uprising to oust Ellen Pao from Reddit s top office has moved from the cyberworld to the material world, with one Nashville, Tenn., startup capitalizing on the Internet revolt with a new T-Shirt campaign.
Threadvocate, which makes limited-edition apparel that communicates messages around specific movements or social or political causes, has released T-Shirts that read: No hiring: Reddit CEO.
The message refers, of course, to the recent digital movement to force Pao to step down,, causing a brutal backlash. Volunteer Reddit moderators protested by taking parts of the Internet discussion site dark.
The Change.org petition created a month ago calling for Pao to step down has accumulated more than 213,000 supporters, most of them in the last week. A second petition also calling for Pao s removal has more than 13,000 supporters.
Scott Page, founder of Threadvocate, said his company is about taking Change.org movements and making them more visual offline. While not a Reddit employee or moderator — although he does use the site — he said there is so much enthusiasm around the effort to oust Pao that it seemed ripe for a T-Shirt campaign. It seemed like prime time to sell his own product.
It s definiately the moment right now and there is a large group of support around it, he said. So it makes sense.
Pao apologized for the poor communication in a Reddit post Monday:
We screwed up, Pao wrote. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes. … The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit.
The apology did little, however, to quell the backlash.
The for the next 13 days at $24 a pop. The idea, Page said, is for those who support the campaign to buy a T-Shirt and take a photo of themselves wearing it, and post it to social media.
This is Threadvocate s first campaign; the company launched in the spring and has just two employes and creates its own T-Shirt designs.
Image: Reddit campaign T-shirt from teespring.com
