Had this brainstorm a few weeks back (or maybe months?). Been meaning to blog it up, but hadn’t gotten the chance to flesh it out. The geologic map of the Commonwealth comes from Chuck Bailey of William & Mary, who gave me permission to use it for this project.
Anyhow – do you think there are enough Virginia geology nerds out there that I could sell these bumper stickers at a profit?
I *do* think there are enough of us VA geology nerds out there. And as my colleague on the Twitter said, tees too!
Selling them for a profit depends upon how much they cost you and the customer. If they are to last at all on a car, they need to be printed on vinyl. I doubt that you could charge more than $2 per bumper sticker.
Your market for the first 2 years might be about 1,000 if you passively sell them and perhaps 5,000 if you actively sell them. This is based upon the facyt that there are roughly 1,600 registered geologists in Virginia and maybe 30,000 people interested in geology. Don’t quit your day job.
I suggest that you put an arrow or a star on the map to indicate a general locality. Most of the readers of the bumper stickers will not have a geologist handy to indicate where the Mezoic Basins are, for example. In NoVA, they might ask a bureaucrat, with suspect results!
“Got caves” might be better than “got speleothems”.
You would make a killing at GSA meetings!
CafePress and others are print-on-demand services for items just such as these. For no cost to you, upload the designs and let everyone know how to get them! Geonerds win again.
@Steve says add an arrow or star, and I agree 🙂 But I like speleothems better than caves, although you could do both (and more besides).
On the educational side… you could add a blog post for each one as you put it up on CafePress. Add some pics of caves and speleothems from your favorite V&R spots, and where to go visit them.
Cheers from a long-time friend of Drumlin and Jack.
I’ll buy. Too, add some of the annotated drawings to t-shirts, please.
Pretty geeky! I would replace the generic geologic map with an image of the identified feature, and have a generic phrase with all of them like, “Virginia’s geology does!” or, “Check out Virginia’s great geology!” Most people won’t know that’s a geologic map, or that province in this case is not a political boundary–but everyone can relate to shark’s teeth, stalactites or fossil shells–and would like a bumper sticker with one on it.