‘Yo Semite’ T-shirt sales skyrocket after Trump gaffe, US Jewish museum says
A verbal gaffe by President Donald Trump has raised $30,000 for a Philadelphia museum shuttered for months by the coronavirus pandemic.
Announcing the Great American Outdoors Act on Aug. 4, Trump twice mispronounced Yosemite National Park as “yo semites.” (The name is pronounced “yo-sem-it-ee”).
The president’s televised blooper has sent sales of an existing “Yo Semite” T-shirt by the National Museum of American Jewish History skyrocketing, the Philadelphia Business Journal reports.
“When we first started tracking sales last week, we had sold enough shirts in the first 30 hours to equal almost our entire July sales,” said Emily August, spokesperson for the museum, CNN reported.
“And now, less than a week later, our total shirt sales have exceeded the prior three months of sales combined,” August said, according to the network.
The T-shirt sales have raised $30,000 so far for the museum, which filed for bankruptcy protection in March, The Hill reported.
But it’s not a new product designed to capitalize on Trump’s blunder — the museum has been selling the “Yo Semite” T-shirt since 2011, according to its site.
“All of a sudden, this just fell in our laps,” said Kristen Kreider, the museum’s director of retail and visitor experience, the Philadelphia Business Journal reported.
The shirt was inspired by the designer’s job at a Jewish summer day camp near the California national park, the museum’s site says.
The museum’s online store warns people ordering the T-shirt of “unprecedented demand” that may cause some shipping delays.
Demand for the shirts has crashed the online store once and forced the museum to seek a backup printer to keep the T-shirts in stock, the Philadelphia Business Journal reported.
“It just keeps gathering momentum,” Kreider said, according to the publication. “I just keep thinking, ‘OK, this is going to be over in the next couple of hours. It’ll die down,’ and it doesn’t. It just keeps on going, and we’ll take it.”
