Delighted and embarrassed students and other internet users shared on TikTok and elsewhere that a private Lutheran school, Concordia University of Michigan, appeared to have recently debuted a rather unfortunate and/or glorious new line of athletic wear. The new line prominently featured what people assumed was the university's acronym: CUM.
T-shirts, hats, sweatshirts, all celebrated school spirit, and then some. One of the best items was a sweatshirt with a sparkly heart and the word CUM in the middle. Posts cackling and face-palming at the apparel went viral over the weekend. One TikTok got over 760,000 views.
The only problem? The university says it never created the items in the first place. It has no affiliation with the online store that's selling them, Prep Sportswear; does not use the "CUM" acronym as a logo; and has no idea where the items came from.
"We have no idea how this happened," Lisa Liljegren, Concordia University Wisconsin's Assistant Vice President of Strategic Communications, who manages communications for both the Wisconsin and Michigan campuses, said. "It was a surprise to us as well that someone put a video out on TikTok of that cap, and that just kind of blew up overnight."
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Prep Sportswear is a third-party website that lets users create online merchandise stores. There is an option to create a new "college" store, but it appears to be turned off. When Mashable attempted to create our own college store, we received the error message: "We do not take new store requests for U.S. colleges."
It is not clear who made the Concordia University Michigan store. Mashable reached out to Prep Sportswear to learn more, and will update this article when we hear back.
User generated merch companies have been at the center of branding messes before, sometimes getting the law involved. Recently, the creator of the viral listening to Fleetwood Mac's 'Dreams' while skateboarding and drinking cranberry juice, aka Doggface 208, sued the streetwear merch site Culture Kings for using his likeness on a t-shirt. A March 2020 report from Wired dove deep into how print-on-demand companies often get in hot water for copyright infringement.
The TikTok creator who made the original viral video appears to be a Concordia student, according to her Instagram.
In the meantime, it appears that Prep Sportswear is taking some action. Liljegren said her team contacted the website over the weekend to ask them to take down the items. The "CUM" items appear to be disappearing from the store, although some apparently cached versions of the site still show them on menu pages. Mashable was able to capture a screenshot of the infamous "CUM in a heart" sweatshirt in the women's sweatshirts menu. But clicking on the link of the sweatshirt redirected to a more innocuous "Concordia Cardinals" item.
Even if the items are being taken down, the virality of the rogue logo has already done damage. High profile Twitter users have gleefully shared the images far and wide. A Reddit post about the items has thousands of upvotes, while tweets are getting RTs and likes by the tens of thousands.
It's been a morose sort of chaos for Concordia administrators.
"We're proud of our athletes and our athletic program," Liljegren said. "We take pride in raising young men and women in service to Christ. And for this to happen was just really disappointing."
That hasn't stopped the internet from delighting in their apparent mistake. The tweets and merch are pretty funny, until you realize they're wreaking havoc for a team of well-meaning educators. All apparently enabled by a do-it-yourself merch store.
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Tweet may have been deleted
Tweet may have been deleted
The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away.
