Viral shop sold $9,800 of NYC earthquake shirts in 21 hours—run by an ex-banker who quit from burnou

Just after a magnitude 4.8 earthquake rattled the northeastern United States on Friday, Kerry Colley glanced at his on-staff graphic designer and said, "Think we can make a T-shirt out of this?"

It took 15 minutes for Colley and his team to make the shirt and hang it outside his customizable apparel shop, in New York's Upper West Side neighborhood. Colley didn't advertise it on social media, and priced the shirt at $10, not expecting to turn a large profit, he says.

Soon, his shop — a franchised location of Big Frog Custom T-Shirts and More — had 70 customers waiting in a two-hour line, trying to get their hands on a grey, red and blue "I Survived The NYC Earthquake" cotton shirt that afternoon, says Colley. A customer told him that the shirt had been viewed almost 2 million times on social media platform X, he adds.

The result: his highest-earning retail weekend ever, he says. The shop sold roughly 1,000 earthquake shirts over 21 hours on Friday and Saturday, resulting in more than $9,800 in revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Colley estimates 20% of those in-store sales are profit.

Colley — who opened the shop in 2019 after leaving his job as an executive director at JPMorgan Chase, according to his LinkedIn profile — says he's never experienced a weekend like this. The store has been so busy that its staffers haven't had time to come up with a follow-up design, or one for Monday's solar eclipse.

Tourists stopped by because their friends had seen videos of his shop on local news channels in Italy, says Colley.