O'Reilly Selling Swag??

At tradeshows, people are always coming up to us and asking how they can get one of our cool t-shirts. Well, we finally figured out a way to make our animal image items available to everyone. Edie Freedman, O'Reilly's Creative Director, was instrumental in making this happen. I thought you might be interested in what she has to say about our animal images and how they came about.

Waliszewski: Why did O'Reilly finally start selling T-shirts and other swag?

Freedman: For years, people have been asking us to make t-shirts and other items with the animal images. We've often done special items as giveaways for tradeshows and our conferences, and have had to fend off customers who just wanted the swag. Just as we started looking into selling shirts and other stuff, ThinkGeek was thinking about creating a store for O'Reilly swag. (Great minds and all that.) So, we got together and the O'Reilly store at ThinkGeek was launched in November 2002.

Waliszewski: So where did you get the idea for the animals, anyhow?

Freedman: In the 1980's, my neighbor, Linda Lamb, worked at O'Reilly. When Tim decided he wanted to sell books in retail bookstores, a designer was hired to do real bookcovers for the few books O'Reilly had at the time. The covers the designer created were not quite what Tim had in mind, so Linda asked me if I wanted to take a crack at it. I knew nothing about Unix (I'd worked at Digital for several years), and even less about Unix geeks. Based on what Linda told me about the people who bought O'Reilly books by mail, I figured that they were the kind of people who played games like Dungeons & Dragons. I started looking around for interesting images that might appeal to them. I have always loved old engravings, and when I came across some very peculiar-looking animal engravings, it seemed like a good fit with Unix topics like vi, sed & awk, lex & yacc, etc. The rest, as they say, is history.

Waliszewski: As you looked back through 25 years of O'Reilly history while putting together the O'Reilly calendar, what surprised you, and what stood out?

Freedman: It's amazing to see how much has changed in the industry in the past 25 years. Looking back, one might think that it was a fairly straight path from where the company was in the 80's to where it is today, but having lived through a lot of that time, it sure didn't seem that way from the other side. A lot of trial and error, and a willingness to take risks that other companies might have shied away from. Sometimes we just didn't know any better, so we went for it. What's really amazing is how often Tim has been right about what was important and where we should go next. That blows me away sometimes.

Waliszewski: What's your favorite O'Reilly item on Think Geek?

Freedman: Ah, that's an easy one. The calendar. It's not just a calendar, it's a history lesson--and not just company history, either. It covers all sorts of interesting events in the computer/programming universe over the past 25 years, lots of stuff I didn't know about until I started working on the content for the calendar. (Plus I love the goofy pictures of Tim and some of the other people who work here.)

And I like the Linux t-shirt, because I own a horse and I speak a little French.

Waliszewski: What's next--what other O'Reilly stuff can we expect?

Freedman: I'm not sure yet. We're sort of waiting to see what people like and want more of. I'd like to do lots more shirts, and maybe some baseball caps. Posters, perhaps. I'd love to hear from people about what they'd like to see.

You can post your comments here or email Edie directly edie@oreilly.com