Byline note: the hoodie, the price and the plan are mine. The drafting is Claude Fable 5.1's, written from the shop's own repository, its database and the live site rather than from memory. The screenshots were taken on 10 October and follow your theme: switch between light and dark and they switch with you.
There is a hoodie on davis9001.com/shop that costs $9,001. The others on the grid cost between $20 and $106. This one sits at the top, first on the page, and I put it there on purpose.
Last week I wrote about the card and the site and spent a few paragraphs on this hoodie's engineering. This post is about the number, because the number is the part people stop on, and I would rather explain it once than have it look like a mistake.
What you are buying
The short version, for anyone who skipped the last post.
The davis9001 hoodie is an all-over print: the green mark from my logo, large, turned every way, across the body, sleeves, hood and pocket. Every visit to its page rolls a new design. The design is an eight-character code, and the code is the whole design: the same code always draws the same hoodie, in the browser while you look at it and on the server when the print files are made. Press random and you get another one. Add a design to the bag and the code goes with it, through checkout, onto the order.
Once a design has been paid for, its code is written down, and the shop refuses to sell that code again. Anyone who tries to pay for a sold design is told, at the pay step, that it has just been made for someone else, and asked to roll a new one. That is what "one of one" means here. It is not a promise on a label. It is a rule the server enforces.
Since this week the ground can be black or cream. That is one bit of the code, so a design has a dark and a light version with the same layout, and a fresh design follows whichever theme your browser is in.
A code holds forty bits. One of them is the ground, so there are roughly half a trillion layouts, each on two grounds. The shop will run out of customers long before it runs out of hoodies.
Why $9,001
The price is the name. My handle has had that number in it for a long time, and the Braille on the business card has a whole cell devoted to it. A price of $9,001 needs no explanation to anyone who already knows the name, and to anyone who does not, it is the first thing they ask about. Either way, they say the number out loud. A price that gets repeated is doing the work a slogan is supposed to do, and it costs nothing to print.
A one-of-one should be priced like one. Anywhere else, a garment that will never be made again carries a number that says so. If I listed this at $62 beside the Dirac hoodie, the one-of-one line in its description would read as a gimmick. At $9,001 the description and the price agree. The scarcity is real, so the price should be at least a little serious about it.
It makes everything else look reasonable, and I am saying so. Put a $9,001 item at the top of a grid and the $62 hoodie under it stops looking expensive. Every shop that sells a premium tier knows this. I would rather tell you that it is part of the reason than let you work it out and feel handled.
The codes are the plan. This is the real reason, and the other three are the setup for it. The $9,001 is the door. A discount code is the key, and I decide who gets a key and what it opens.
The shop's coupons are more precise than the usual ten percent off. A code can apply to one product only. It can take a percentage off, or a fixed amount, or set a fixed price. It can have a limited number of uses, an expiry date, a start date, a minimum order, and a rule that each email address may use it once. So one code can make this hoodie cost ninety dollars for the first ten people who type it, and a different code can make it free for exactly one person, and both of those are the same product at the same list price.
That turns the price into something I can give away in pieces. A code on the back of a card handed to someone at a meetup. A code in a blog post, for the people who read this far. A code for a Discord server, for a client, for a friend who helped with the seams. Each one is a specific gift to a specific group, and each one carries the story of what it is a discount from. "I got the $9,001 hoodie for $90" is a sentence. "I got a hoodie" is not.
I am not putting a code in this post. They will turn up where I am actually talking to people: on the card, in person, in the places I already spend time, and sometimes here. If you want one, the honest route is to be around.
What happens if someone pays it
The same thing that happens with any order. Payment goes through on the shop's own page, with Stripe supplying the card field. The order goes to Printful, which fetches the print files from the shop, where each panel is drawn from the code at six thousand pixels square. The hoodie is sewn, it ships, and in one to two weeks it is at your door in the United States, which is the only place the shop ships to for now. The code is retired the moment the payment lands, so even the person who pays the full price gets exactly what the page promised: a design nobody else will ever wear.
And I will write about it here, because a hoodie that sold for $9,001 is a story whether or not I expected it.
What this is not
It is not a token. The design is a code in a database I run, not an entry on a blockchain, and nothing about it is for sale except the hoodie. It is not a limited edition with a number stamped on it, because there is no edition. It is also not a dare. If you want the hoodie and you do not want to pay $9,001, the answer is a code, and codes are not hard to come by for people who ask.
Go roll one
Open the page, press random until you like what you see, and send the link to someone. The design in the link is the design they get, and if two people try to buy the same one, the first payment wins. The rest of the shop is one click further, at prices that now look very sensible.