This week, set up one new test ad set using the WeScale design-testing rules from Call #23: 10 designs in one ad set, $25 a day, each ad links straight to its product page. Fill it with these 10 existing shirts instead of 10 brand-new designs: One More Plant, Home Of Seed Savers, Perfectly Imperfect, Good Gardens, Garden Co-Conspirator, Kindness Keeps Blooming, The New Has Come, Follow The Sun, Squat Diddly, Respect The Locals. After 7 days, any shirt with a purchase gets its own ads. Cut any shirt that spends $54 with no purchase. Call #23 worked that number out as IGL's cut point at a $50 order and break-even return.
Leave two out. Red, Ripe & True is a Fourth of July design (all 5 of its orders came between July 1 and July 19), so save it for June 2027. Too Many Tomatoes No Regrets is already selling on its own (16 orders since September 15) and is part of the tomato test the September audit planned.
Henry Singleton's best investment was his own underpriced stock, bought while Wall Street called it weakness. IGL's equivalent is 12 summer shirts that sold more than once with almost no ad money behind them. Nobody looks at them while the question stays "how many new designs this week?"
When buying companies got expensive, Singleton stopped asking which company to buy next and asked where the next dollar earns the most. The answer was Teledyne's own stock: about 90% of the shares bought back across eight tender offers from 1972 to 1984, at a 42% compound annual return, while Wall Street read buybacks as a sign of weakness ("our stock is simply too cheap… coiling a spring"). In apparel terms, a listing that already sells without ads is underpriced stock. Each new design is a new acquisition at full price.
The September merchandising audit measured catalog-ad spend for each listing over its first 42 days. Across all 312 listings created June 14 to July 27, 2026, 244 got under $5 of catalog-ad spend. 41 of those still had a paid order, and 12 had two or more orders on two or more different days. Even the audit's worst-case spend estimate keeps every one of the 12 under $5. Tonight's check of IGL's ad database (data through 2026-10-05) shows none of the 12 has ever had an ad of its own. The audit's own test queue covers the moss, Chaos Gardener and tomato families, not these 12. Customers do respond to some of them. The 2026-09-28 Loox review snapshot (marked CURRENT system of record) has 5-star reviews on Home Of Seed Savers ("SHOWS THE TRUE SPIRIT OF AMERICA"), Perfectly Imperfect and Red Ripe And True.
No single knowledge base reaches this. founders-kb supplies the capital-allocation question. wescale-kb supplies both the per-listing exposure data and the ready-made test procedure. igl-brand-kb supplies the customer reviews. Call #12's "strategic fork" gives the general rule (low revenue per design: audit the existing catalog before adding more). It never names which listings, and the audit never turned that into a test.
Related prior card: nugget-043-2026-09-26-one-message-eight-listings found that Red, Ripe & True, Home Of Seed Savers, Perfectly Imperfect and Too Many Tomatoes are each split across several listings, and asked for message tags. This card is a different move: put ad money behind the underfunded ones. Where #043 found sibling listings, use the product ID named below.
Limits, stated plainly. Two orders is a small number. The audit cannot tell whether those orders came from email, organic visits or non-catalog ads, and some carried ordinary discounts. Most of the 10 have sold nothing since late August (table below). That is exactly why this is a capped $25-a-day test and not a scale decision. The 42-day figures are from a research artifact dated 2026-09-20 (status verified-partial-coverage). The since-September-15 column is a fresh read-only query of igl.db.
### Worked examples (all 12, full result set)
| Shirt | Product ID | Listed | First-42-day catalog spend / clicks | Paid orders, first 42 days | Orders since Sep 15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| One More Plant | 9335324213463 | 2026-07-19 | $2.34 / 9 | 3 | 0 |
| Home Of Seed Savers | 9306898661591 | 2026-06-25 | $4.34 / 4 | 2 | 0 |
| Perfectly Imperfect | 9335325294807 | 2026-07-19 | $0.83 / 0 | 2 | 6 |
| Good Gardens | 9335325720791 | 2026-07-19 | $1.94 / 4 | 2 | 0 |
| Garden Co-Conspirator | 9335326114007 | 2026-07-19 | $1.93 / 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Kindness Keeps Blooming | 9335324115159 | 2026-07-19 | $0.17 / 0 | 2 | 0 |
| The New Has Come | 9346309456087 | 2026-07-27 | $1.03 / 1 | 2 | 0 |
| Follow The Sun | 9346307752151 | 2026-07-27 | $3.38 / 8 | 2 | 0 |
| Squat Diddly | 9346309488855 | 2026-07-27 | $3.99 / 4 | 2 | 0 |
| Respect The Locals | 9346305917143 | 2026-07-27 | $2.44 / 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Held: Red, Ripe & True | 9306898956503 | 2026-06-25 | $3.50 / 0 | 5 | 0 (all orders Jul 1–19) |
| Held: Too Many Tomatoes No Regrets | 9322886103255 | 2026-07-06 | $3.19 / 7 | 2 | 16 |
Garden Co-Conspirator's image was used as a base image in the September CW36 humor ads (cw36-asset-gap-audit.md). Those ads did not carry its name, and no spend is tied to its listing.
founders-kb/founders/henry-singleton — seed profile: about 90% of the stock repurchased; "If everyone's doing them, there must be something wrong with them."founders-kb/episodes/431-how-henry-singleton-worked — 8 tenders from 1972 to 1984, 42% compound annual return, read by Wall Street as weakness. Verbatim "our stock is simply too cheap" and "coiling a spring" verified in founders-kb/transcripts/431-henry-singleton-worked-transcript.md (line 18–20).wescale-kb/research/igl-design-merchandising-audit-2026-09-19/all313-age-aligned-exposure-results.json — per-listing first-42-day catalog spend, clicks and paid orders. The operator re-ran the query: 312 → 244 → 41 → 12, exact.wescale-kb/research/igl-design-merchandising-audit-2026-09-19/paid-design-demand.json — orders through Sep 14. Confirms these are separate from the shortlisted Red Ripe And True listing 9306898923735.igl-brand-kb/community/customer-reviews-current — CURRENT system of record, 2026-09-28 Loox snapshot; the 5-star reviews quoted above.wescale-kb/calls/call-23 — 2026-03-26: Phase 1 design test (10 designs, $25/day, direct product link, $40 cut), and line 210's IGL calibration to a $54 cut.wescale-kb/calls/call-12 — January 2026 strategic fork: "Low RPD + High Volume → … Audit your existing catalog… Test more ad angles on winners before creating more." (RPD = revenue per design.)