100FOLD Merch: Is less more?

Introduction:

One of the artists' biggest revenue generators is merchandise, but you must create something that speaks to your brand and is also financially able to generate a profit. Given my visual art/sales industry experience, I was selected to lead our merchandising efforts. I led the design and sales strategy of everything below. 

 

Problem Framing

After being allowed to lead our merchandising efforts, I focused on a few critical problem areas artists dealt with in merchandise.

 

  • Uniqueness
The items must speak to your brand and be unique enough that fans decide to purchase

 

  • Pricing

The items must be priced appropriately for your fan base to be able to purchase while also generating some profit.

 

  • Availability

Items should be available and accessible for purchase

 

Design

Deciding that the first piece of merchandise would be a shirt because of the ease of making it unique and the high price-to-cost ratio, I began the process. I focused on a new release of ours that was growing in popularity and sketched the front and back of the shirt, ultimately resulting in the above designs. The idea was to capture the nostalgia of a past card game named Yu-Gi-Oh due to the song's relation to it and our fanbase being a fan as well.

 

 

Testing

 

After designing the product and launching it on the website we noticed a few things from sales:

 

Good Things:

  • People loved the products 
  • People loved the inspiration 
  • No complaints about recieving items 

Bad Things:

  • Items did not sell out, which led us to overstock items and overall lost profits until we could sell later at a discount

Iterate

 After watching our product not sell out as anticipated I began to revisit each of the three things under my problem framing. If I lowered the price, our profits would diminish; if I made things more unique, it would raise the price due to complexity and could price us out of the market, and vice versa. If I made it less special, fans may not want the product. 

This only left the availability. Inspired by how TJ Maxx used the "treasure finding" method at their stores and how other artists created demand by artificially limiting their supply, I decided to test this method. 

 

For our next release we would do limited runs under the guise that once supplies were gone, they would be gone even though we had virtually an infinite capability to make more. 

 

Design #2

To add variety this time, I decided to focus on snapback hats; this removed the need for varied sizes between people, thus making stocking cheaper and more accessible. I designed the logo by adding a dragon inspired by an anime named Dragonball Z and an old Detroit logo to our original logo.

 

Here is our original logo for context:

 

 

Testing #2

Deciding on a burgundy color due to my love of Fall colors I launched our following product with a tiny change. There would be only five released initially. These sold out in three days, so people texted, emailed, and called us to release more. Releasing ten more two weeks later and notifying those interested they were back in stock, these sold out in less than a week. When we announced the second selling out and that we may not do anymore, people demanded we did. Knowing we had about 20 left, we waited about a month before release, and when we announced it this time, they sold out in less than a day.

The plan was a success. 

 

Finalize

The "limited release" plan was a success, and future design of releasing products that would be 1 of 1s is currently under development with the idea that it would further support the notion that scarcity sells