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?
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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…
