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It's great to see how ThinkGeek uses April Fool's day as a way to gauge customer interest. They did this before with their Tauntaun sleeping bags which they produced/sold after a lot of positive feedback to their April 1st joke.

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I think that has been a great deal in the past, but these days it seems frustratingly obvious that the April Fools Day posts are sometimes little more than market research. It seems to take some of the humor out of it.

Also- While the orig. idea was by ThinkGeek, the production isn't by them for this product, it's a third-party.

I worked under the same corporate umbrella as the thinkgeek guys before :) If I'm not mistaken, all of their production is outsourced. In this case, though I think the design is partially outsourced, too, since it's a little more complex than a guitar shirt with the bluetooth and all.

I don't really think the April fools stuff is being explicitly used as test marketing, btw, though I think it's a neat side effect. Those guys just really like April fools stuff.

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