No one knows how much we all love a rebel better than Julian Assange who is now getting ready to launch a WikiLeaks line of clothing and accessories in India. Branded as a ‘campaigner for truth,’ Assange is hoping to drum up financial support for his cause from the country where awareness about WikiLeaks is reported to be extremely high.
If everything goes according to plan, you’ll soon be able to shop for T-shirts, caps, sweatshirts and more with WikiLeaks branding on them. Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson who will fly to India this weekend in order to talk to potential marketing partners, says that Assange is excited about the proposition, notes a post on The Times of India.
Franchisee India will be enabling brand WikiLeaks’ debut in the nation and its chairman, Gaurav Marya, was quoted as saying that e-commerce portals may be the answer to making a winner of the upcoming merchandise, seeing as thousands of people are happy to shop via the web these days. The distribution to end user availability gap is shorter with online sales.
Marya points at Salman Khan’s Being Human offerings which have grown into a Rs 100-crore business without any major investment in marketing or advertising as an unexpected merchandising success to take inspiration from. But then Salman Khan is only one of the biggest Bollywood celebrities in a country which worships actors as much as its does cricketers and gods, right?
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Also, the run-up to India’s 2014 Lok Sabha general elections saw a lot of NaMo (short for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s name) products and services being publicized online. The point is that the Internet has made it much easier to get to potential buyers quickly and with relatively less investment. WikiLeaks is presently searching for an exclusive online partner to sell its clothing and accessories.
It has signed agreements with agents from countries such as Austria, France, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland and Spain over similar deals. If Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks brand enters India, T-shirts and sweatshirts with slogans like ‘Enemy of the state’ and ‘Leaks exposing injustice’ will find their way into closets.