Quick! Everyone! Stop what you’re reading and click over to ChaCha’s tee store for their unbelievable 25% off sale!!!!

Still here? Good. We’ve gotten rid of the easily influenced. Or financially stupid. Apparently there must be a lot of those people for a storefront like ChaCha to even exist. But I get ahead of myself. The facts are these:

• ChaCha is admittedly a kinda neat text service. You text a question to 242242 and you get an answer back. Simple. Straightforward. Free. Useful.
• They raised $16 million in funding.
• Did they find a business model? Did they invest in new functionality? No, they opened a t-shirt shop.

For some reason companies with cash to burn think this is some kind of statement that can attract talent: “Hey everybody, look how young and hip we are! Forget stock options! We literally are the clothes on your back!” But the thing is, unless the designs have resonance with the society at large who in their right minds pays money to shill for a company with a silly name? And given that the creative well seemed to dry up after plastering the logo on… well, even the employees would be hard pressed to wear these outside of work.

At least LinkedIn had the good sense to use existing employees in their orgy of corporate non-hubris. It appears 16 million will also buy you some “hip” and “youthful” modeling as seen below. The entire thing smacks of so much self-obsessed popularity posturing I can smell the desperation to be accepted. Of course, this being the Internet, I suppose ChaCha’s apparel fits in just fine..