A GoshWow data study · Updated July 2026
The Weird Obsession Index
We design funny t-shirts for a living, which means we sit on an unusual dataset: 2,656 designs and years of real sales behind them. So we crunched the whole thing to answer one question: what are people quietly, and sometimes ferociously, obsessed with? Below is everything we found, from the single best-selling shirt we have ever made to the niche that is, statistically, completely dead.
A note on the numbers: everything below is shown as a 0 to 100 index, a ratio, or a share of the catalogue. We rank relative popularity, we do not publish our raw sales figures.
The headline finding: it is the axolotl's world
A pink Mexican salamander that most people cannot spell is the second biggest obsession in our entire catalogue. Across 195 designs, axolotls out-sell cats and dinosaurs combined. Only the broad kawaii category beats them. If you had asked us to guess the runaway niche before we ran the numbers, not one of us would have said "the salamander". They also own our single best-selling design of all time (that is next).
The Hall of Fame: our 6 best-selling designs ever
Individual designs, ranked by lifetime sales and shown relative to our all-time number one. Two of the top three are axolotls.
The Obsession Index
Total pull of each niche, normalised so the biggest obsession sits at 100. This measures sheer size.
The Devotion Index
Sales per design, normalised to 100. Not about size, about intensity: which small fandoms buy hardest.
The devotion ranking tells a different story from the size ranking. Doctors, sushi lovers and samurai fans do not have many designs to choose from, but the ones who want them really want them. Doctors, with only a handful of designs, top the Devotion Index outright. These are the tight, passionate niches a big brand would never bother drawing for, which is exactly why we do.
The rivalries: who actually wins
Some match-ups people always argue about. The data settles them.
Cat people out-buy dog people more than 8 to one. It is not close.
Zombies out-sell vampires nearly 29 to one. Vampires are, statistically, dead.
Dinosaurs sell more overall, but only because we draw far more of them (424 designs to the cats' 182). Per design, cats win comfortably.
The cryptid league table
Within our cryptid corner, the folklore monsters do not sell equally. Volume and devotion are indexed to 100.
| Cryptid | Designs | Volume | Devotion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bigfoot | 101 | 100 | 52 |
| Mothman | 36 | 63 | 92 |
| Nessie | 16 | 30 | 100 |
Bigfoot rules by sheer volume, no surprise: he is the face of the whole genre. But look at the last column. Nessie is the most efficient cryptid of all, selling hardest per design despite having the fewest. The believers who want a Loch Ness shirt really commit. Mothman, the introvert's cryptid, is right behind. Bigfoot is famous; Nessie is beloved.
The 90/10 rule: a tiny few carry everything
Everyone knows the 80/20 rule. Our catalogue is more extreme: a mere 5% of designs drive 81% of sales, and the top 10% drive 91%. A handful of breakout hits (that axolotl, the periodic table, the plague doctor) carry the entire shop on their backs, while thousands of designs sell a trickle each. This is the brutal maths of print-on-demand: you cannot pick the winners in advance, so you draw a lot and let the audience vote.
The seasonal graveyard
Here is the trap the numbers exposed. Halloween and Christmas have some of the most designs in the whole catalogue (286 and 252 respectively), yet each design sells a fraction of what an evergreen niche does. Seasonal shirts are a firework: a short, bright window, then nothing for eleven months. The Animals collection, by contrast, is a slow furnace that never goes out, and it accounts for a staggering 59% of every sale we make.
What we take from it
One pattern runs through every chart above: the internet rewards the specific. The biggest, most loyal, most efficient audiences in our data are not the broad, safe categories, they are the weird, oddly precise obsessions. A salamander. A soft-goth aesthetic. A profession that rarely gets its own joke. A cryptid in the woods. We have always designed for those people on instinct. It is quietly satisfying to watch the numbers agree so emphatically.
Use this study
Writers and researchers are welcome to cite or link to the Weird Obsession Index. Please credit GoshWow with a link back to this page. Want a custom cut of the data (by collection, season, or theme)? Email contact@goshwow.store.
Method: based on 2,656 of our own designs and their real Amazon sales. To keep our absolute figures private, every result is expressed as a 0 to 100 index (relative popularity), a ratio, or a share of the catalogue, never as raw unit sales. Niches with fewer than six designs are excluded; the Devotion Index also requires at least ten designs so a single lucky shirt cannot skew it. Sales are lifetime cumulative as of July 2026.
Curious about the winners? Meet the axolotls, the cryptids, the soft-goth crowd, or just browse the whole weird shop.