Interestingly, both Mozilla and Microsoft unveiled new t-shirt initiatives last week, and although there are obviously more important things about each company than the way they sell shirts, the differences between the two stores say a lot about the way we each do business.

Microsoft’s new Softwear line launched with a fancy party and some retro 80’s-styled shirts created by hip hop star Common. Their store looks good and features a bunch of undoubtedly well-designed shirts, but the whole thing also feels pretty forced, in the way it usually does when a massive multinational corporation tries to show that it’s ‘down with the kids’.

On the other hand, we launched our Community Store with not much more than a few blog posts, and we just grabbed some folks from around the office to be the models. Instead of having celebrities create our shirts, we’ve put our brand in the hands of our community to see what they could come up with…the results certainly look good to me.

Surely a proliferation of stories in the media about how the “browser t-shirt wars” are heating up can’t be far behind…

(hat tip to Jane for the heads up on this)