Jinx is a thriving niche fashion brand. It’s well known among my WoW friends. They’ve got 22 people making geek cred clothes (t-shirts, mainly, or since we’re talking American; tees) in San Diego. The fact that they’re well known among some gamer circles is impressive as their marketing department, based in Ohio, has less than three people in it (but more than one).
The economic good times were good times for Jinx. Between 2008 and 2009 sales reached over £4.4m. I don’t have stats for 2009/2010 (if their financial year is up yet) but it can’t be all that bad despite the down turn because they’re expanding to the UK and mainland Europe.
This means I can hit www.jinx.com/ and be able to shop in Pounds. Jinx has some exclusive deals with some publishers and games – including World of Warcraft.
It does look as if Jinx is using a single domain strategy despite it’s multi-country and multi-language play. This will mean they’ll struggle to pick up search engine traffic. Although that’s tough for Jinx the good news is that they may deploy more fan outreach here in Europe in order to keep the interest/traffic levels up.
As noted in my Superman post I’m smugly pleased at the growth of geek fashion. Hopefully Jinx’s push into Europe will accelerate the trend.
