How Do I Know Your Tees Are Officially Licensed?

We make a big deal about the fact that we sell Officially Licensed tees. It's important to us for a number of reasons, including;

It's the right thing to do
We like to sleep well at night, and getting scary letters from lawyers hurts that
When creators make money on their creations, it increases the likelihood that people will pour their money and time into making new creations.

Despite the fact that we've been selling on our website for over 20 years (crazy that we have sold t-shirts from a 10 year period for over twice that amount of time!), there are many people who are just finding out about us for the first time ever on a daily basis, and we have plenty on online haters. Mostly because they think we as an organization charge unfairly high prices, and if that's you here's an article to read about our pricing.

This article is to at least give us ammo to counter the haters who say that "anyone can say their merchandise is officially licensed." So, how can you tell our merch is officially licensed?

Third party verification: Our licensors over at Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast link to our Dungeons and Dragons merchandise directly from their website. While the main Hasbro website doesn't have us in any lists, they do have this Monopoly link which indicates that we have a deal for officially licensed tees.
We've been in business for 20 years: This one feels like it should be self explanatory, but if we were bootlegging, it would be hard to stay in business for 20 plus years with our business model. Now, there are some business models that seem to thrive with bootleg merchandise due to protection provided by DMCA provisions of the Copyright Act that requires the removal of infringing materials when a proper takedown notice is sent, but sending takedowns becomes very expensive and these companies have managed to thrive selling unofficial merchandise. Examples of these companies include tee a day sites, Redbubble, Teepublic, and even Amazon. Because we are the direct seller and don't hide behind a platform that advertises for "third parties", we can't use the DMCA provisions the way these other companies do.
We pull designs when the license expires: We had a deal with Harmony Gold to sell Robotech t-shirts. That license expired. We no longer sell Robotech t-shirts because our license expired and it didn't make financial sense for us to renew.
We don't sell designs for every movie imaginable: If we didn't care about licensing, we'd have tons more tees! We talk about that here.
We don't offer every design on all kinds of apparel: Licensing provides approvals for a limited range of merchandise. If we were going to bootleg, why wouldn't we offer every gender and garment type possible?
We can't tweak your design even if you pay extra: If you want something changed on a design, it has to go through the licensing approval process, which is not cheap due to administrative costs and sampling costs. So, while we want you to ask for changes, we can't guarantee anything due to the nature of officially licensed merchandise approvals.

If you've read all this and you still don't believe us, I don't think there's much hope for us to change your mind. If that's the case, we actually don't want you to buy from us because we want to love our customers and you sound like someone who would be hard to love!