Retailer Juicy Couture came up with “Keep Calm and Choose Juicy” a few years ago, while Major League Baseball promoted inter-team rivalry by selling sports merchandise such as “Keep Calm and Beat the Red Sox.” E-retailers like Amazon and Etsy have thousands of products with various versions of the slogan. Brands haven’t hesitated to incorporate it over the years. There’s “Keep Calm and Have a Cupcake” merchandise for sweets lovers and “Keep Calm and Kill Zombies” for wannabe zombie slayers.
It has also spawned remixes and parodies, in part because brands have come up with their own versions and in part because one U.K.-based company has trademarked the phrase across the European Union and the U.S.Įither way, there seems to be a version for everyone. Since then, it has become a global cultural meme, plastered on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs to cuff links. “Keep Calm and Carry On” was discovered in 2000 on an abandoned propaganda poster from the Second World War in a second-hand bookshop in England.