Member-only story
The End of the Booming Mask Economy Is Near
From Gap to Vistaprint, companies are betting on masks to save them. But what happens when the bubble pops?
If you arrived at the Vistaprint website looking to bulk-order some promotional pens or business cards or other swag you could send en masse to your remote staff as a morale boost and accidentally landed on its masks page, you most certainly would think you’re in the wrong place. A slick, minimalist grid floating over airy white space flaunts mask collaborations with the most street-cred artists around — L.A. psychedelic multimedia artist Jen Stark, Dutch illustrator Parra, New York graffiti legend Futura Laboratories, and famed graphic designer Geoff McFetridge. If art’s not your thing, then politics might be — there’s also an Election Collection; a Halloween series for the kids; and a rotating cast of seasonally astute patterns, like J.Crew-style buffalo plaid or a gray camo print.
With the site’s clean lines, crisp colors, and stripped-down navigation, the entire shopping experience bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Apple or any other purveyor of a design-forward, highly engineered, premium-priced product. The main difference: Vistaprint’s site is selling an arguably hotter item right now, the unexpected wardrobe must-have of 2020: the face mask.
Amid hundreds of new mask brands that have sprung from thin air since March, Vistaprint has become an improbable front-runner. With its eye-catching graphics and next-level engineering — moisture-wicking fabric, flexible nose bridge, adjustable ear straps, and articulated chin — the masks have been featured on best-of lists everywhere from Wired and USA Today to PopSugar. At $18 per adult-size mask, they’re on the high end—yet since Vistaprint started selling them on April 20, it’s sold more than a million masks.
Pre-pandemic, the company’s vibe was less Apple and more Staples. Unless you were an office manager, conference organizer, or a marketer, you’d probably never heard of the…
