About Unsnail

Unsnail Merch started the way most good in-jokes do: in a Slack thread. A few of us have spent years in web performance — the kind of job where you explain to a client, for the third time, why a hero image shouldn’t be 4MB. Somewhere between a particularly brutal Core Web Vitals audit and a running joke about cache invalidation, someone said “there should be a shirt for this.” So we made one. Then seven more.

We’re a small team that actually works in this field — performance engineers, front-end developers, and one person who unironically has opinions about TTFB. Every design starts as a joke that only makes sense if you’ve stared at a waterfall chart at 11pm, and we only ship the ones that survive being read by someone outside the industry without an explanation. Everything is printed on demand and shipped through Printful, so nothing sits in a warehouse and nothing gets made until someone actually wants it. That’s slower for us in exactly the way we’d never tolerate in a page load, and we’ve made our peace with the irony.