Anatomy of a campaign

Shepard Fairey's Obama posters have been a runaway hit. Here's how it happened.

ORIGIN: Like most of Fairey's work, the Obama image came from a photo he saw online. Fairey colored and tweaked it, then added the word "Hope." Variations featured the words "Vote" and "Change."

PRODUCTS: Fairey sold about 4,000 posters on his website, ObeyGiant.com, for $45 each. He ultimately printed 300,000, distributing them to people across the country who said they'd plaster them in public spaces. "Anybody who was in a state that hadn't had a caucus yet, we would send it to them," he says. He also created T-shirts that sold for about $25 each. Stickers were free and later sold at cost - about 50 cents each. In the end, about 500,000 stickers were produced.

MONEY: Any profits during the campaign were rolled back into the effort. T-shirt sales through a San Francisco clothing company funded bus-stop Obama ads in Pennsylvania. Sales through Fairey's fashion line paid for "Manifest Hope," a temporary exhibit of Obama-inspired art he organized during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Fairey received no payment from the Obama camp until the Presidential Inaugural Committee hired him to create the official inauguration poster. That print, sold for $100 to $500 with the artist's signature, will earn him a 5 percent royalty. He also received about $10,000 to license the image for inauguration T-shirts. Meanwhile Fairey and his wife gave about $80,000 to the campaign through various avenues, including the Democratic National Committee.

BOOTLEGS: Reams of unofficial Fairey-based merchandise were sold in Washington last week. "When I walked the streets, it was just stands on either side of the street with bootlegged T-shirts, bootlegged hats, all my stuff," says Fairey. "My personal gain on this is only cultural currency."