Sorry, out of yellow, says Bersih after record T-shirt sales
The Malaysian Insider – 3 hours ago
Despite printing 35,000 pieces, there is an insatiable demand for the Bersih T-shirts as the supplier ran out of the yellow material to produce them, rally organiser Bersih 2.0 said.
There has been a long queue since this morning outside the Bersih 2.0 office in Petaling Jaya, with scores hoping to get their hands on the last 5,000 pieces on sale.
"In my years of working with Bersih 2.0, I've never seen T-shirts selling this fast or this kind of overwhelming support from Malaysians.
"We can't print anymore as the supplier has run out of yellow cloth and the last batch is expected to be sold out within the next hour," Bersih 4 secretariat manager Mandeep Singh told The Malaysian Insider today.
The office had to be closed over the weekend after the T-shirts ran out of stock.
On Monday morning, they re-stocked 3,000 T-shirts and within 40 minutes, they were out of the large-sized ones.
On average, 200 T-shirts were being sold every hour, and more than 2,000 pieces were sold at the end of yesterday.
Bersih 2.0 chairman Maria Chin Abdullah said they had initially ordered 10,000 T-shirts but had to increase their order due to demand.
The Bersih T-shirt is sold at RM20, which means the organisers would have collected RM700,000 for the 35,000 T-shirts sold.
Maria yesterday also revealed that Bersih had amassed RM 1.5 million in contributions from the public, believed to be more than three times the amount received for the Bersih 3 rally in 2012.
"This amount far exceeds our initial budget of RM200,000 which was based on shoe-string estimates and our sense of the economic hardship Malaysians are enduring," she said.
She vowed that Bersih will show its accounts to declare the expenditure of the donations once the rally is over.
The 34-hour rally will be held on August 29 to 30 to demand institutional reforms and also the resignation of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
This is the first Bersih rally to take place in three years, with the last one having taken place in April 2012 in a call for electoral reforms.
Previous rallies in 2007, 2011 and 2012 drew tens of thousands of Malaysians to the streets. The 2012 rally ended with scenes of violence as police and protesters clashed, and also saw journalists being roughed up by police.
Some 80,000 people took part in the 2012 rally, which ended with 60 protesters and 20 policemen injured, and the arrest of 512 people. – August 25, 2015.
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