Marker

Marker was a publication from Medium about the intersection of business, economics, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

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The End of the Booming Mask Economy Is Near

16 min readSep 24, 2020

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Illustration: Bráulio Amado

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.

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Marker
Marker

Published in Marker

Marker was a publication from Medium about the intersection of business, economics, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Adam Bluestein
Adam Bluestein

Written by Adam Bluestein

I write about business, science, and things that people do for fun. Work published in Fast Company, Inc., Men’s Journal, Proto, Marker. Vermonter by choice.

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