Apollo 11 anniversary spurs one giant leap in business B
Jo Ann Yardley, Space Shirts manager, straightens merchandise on June 11. Near Kennedy Space Center, the store has Apollo 11 related items for the moon landing 50th anniversary. renda Mulberry popped out from behind the front desk and shifted her weight up and down on the balls of her feet, eyes wide and eyebrows arched. She had the unmistakable frenzied look of someone who had far too much work on her plate.
“I’m so busy, literally, I am…,” she said, searching for an apt description. “I am on fire.”
It was a little less than two months until the Apollo 11 moon landing anniversary and Mulberry’s small T-shirt shop on the edge of Kennedy Space Center was frantically working to keep up with orders — online orders, instore orders, orders from its retail partners, all of them requesting reprints of a bevy of Apollo 11-related items the store has been making for the past year in preparation for what was sure to be a blockbuster summer for business.
Her store, called Space Shirts, anticipated the Apollo 11 frenzy. Nearly a year ago, it had already started to print its logo design for the moon landing’s 50th anniversary on July 20 — an image of an astronaut, the moon, Earth and Mars with the words “the next great leap” — onto shirts that took up a handful of shelves near the back of the shop.
By late May, Apollo was on nearly everything. It was on hats, polo shirts, tote bags, coasters, drawstring bags and even mouse pads. The quote by Galileo tacked onto the archway over the front desk was replaced to feature Neil Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
And outside, a digital sign flickered between a message that read, “Brevard County’s best kept secret” and “Apollo Tshirts!”
One recent afternoon, when the line at the register was 10 people deep and the shrill sounds of the landline were echoing through the cramped shop, a man turned to Mulberry, and thinking of the sign outside, said, secret is out.”
“Yeah. Like, oh my God,” said Mulberry, recalling it. She has owned the shop for more than three decades. “Everyone today is waiting for me to call them back about reorders for everything space related and everything not space related. The [launches are] affecting me, the anniversary of Apollo 11 is affecting me. The general economy is exploding. Someone found some money somewhere.”
A lot of that money is coming back here to the Space Coast, the site from which astronauts boarded a capsule on a Saturn V “I think the