It’s easy to get carried away with what you wear, but maybe a wardrobe of nothing but Zelda T-shirts isn’t really all that cool. Insert Coin is a clothing company that wants to help you with what’s in your closet.
Insert Coin is an online vendor that specializes in gaming T-shirts, hoodies, and more. Only these items don’t have Mega Man’s face or the Street Fighter logo plastered all over them. Instead, the company is going for something much more subtle in an effort to give fans a way to express their love for gaming without looking like walking billboards.
“We just want to make gaming apparel cool without making it ridiculously expensive,” Insert Coin cofounder Dan Long told GamesBeat.
The company got started four years ago when Dan Long looked around and realized that gaming-related clothing kind of meant going to a store like Hot Topic and getting something really loud and obvious.
“We’d see something and it would instantly appeals that really base nature, but then you get it home and realize you’re never going to wear it,” said Long.
When Insert Coin got started, it didn’t want to paint its clothing with characters and box art. It didn’t hurt that it was doing a lot of stuff unofficially.
“We started from an underground route,” said Long. “And you can’t just sorta show up and say ‘where are all of our licenses?’ But we also didn’t want to make stuff that looked like advertising.”
So instead of a T-shirt featuring the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood logo and boxart, Insert Coin introduced a beaked hoodie that looked similar to outfit the game’s hero Ezio wears. It caught on quickly as fans loved that it looked like something anyone could wear while also incorporating something from this popular game.
Above: Insert Coin’s Saints Row-inspired jacket.
The Brotherhood hoodie isn’t even one of Insert Coin’s most subtle designs. It has a brown varsity jacket based on the one that a character from Hotline Miami wears. It only appears in Hotline Miami’s start screen, but fans love the oblique reference while again appreciating that it’s something they can really wear. Other examples include the beanie that Infamous: Second Son hero Delsin wears and the flannel shirt Joel from The Last of Us sports.
Only the most dedicated fans would recognize these items if they saw them.
“We’ll hear from people that they saw someone wearing something and they gave them a nod of recognition,” said Long. ‘That’s the kind of the buzz that we want to make. People who play games and engage with geek culture don’t like always going for the obvious thing. They want something that requires a deeper knowledge to appreciate.”
Long says that apparel companies love to tell people what they should want, and that doesn’t really work with fans of gaming. Insert Coin wants to serve its specific fanbase by listening to it.
“We roll the other way,” said Long. “We want people to tell us what they want. Ultimately, we are there to provide them with products and a service. We hope they will come back to us because we listen.”
Of course, publishers have caught onto Insert Coin, and they have reached out to work with them. The company provided a preorder hoodie for the character-action game DMC: Devil May Cry and a preorder hoodie for Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs. It even works directly with developers who want subtle T-shirts to wear to events.
“We want to give people a way to express their love of gaming in the exact way that they want to,” said Long.