The chart on the left outlines the 10 most profitable merch items, according to Jakprints, and as you can see, 6 of them (single and full color stickers, patches, magnets, guitar pics and buttons) are fairly inexpensive to manufacture, ranging from $0.20 to $0.40 each. The surprising thing is that most of these items generally have at least a 400% markup to as high as 750%.
While t-shirts are a perennial favorite, the biggest problem is the multiple sizes that you have to stock, and the space required for the inventory. There are a lot of other items that get the promotional job done for a lot less money and hassle.
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1 comment:
Point taken, especially for a band just starting out or bands that may only last for a year or so, that's definitely the Econ Approach with Savvy Markup.
To each their own, however isn't worth considering that fans may not necessarily be the "impulse grocery line buyers"?
1.Unless these fans are constantly liquidating your merchandise on ebay, yardsales, etc. Who... these days has tons of additional living space for rows and rows of concert buttons, stickers, etc.? (guitar picks, custom designed slides, autographed drum heads, extreme limited edition cds sold only at venues are all the exception here)
Realize this is not negative prosperity consciousness against the artists, musicians, their income or the time it took to design and implement their merchandise, I just think it's worth considering our times today whether your fans are age 15, 65 or in between.
2. All the concerts that I've attended, I always valued the T-Shirt merchandise more than anything and still wear 90% of them to this day; not only because they are beautiful shirts, but also because they were not mass marketed in suburban store X and especially at the time a lot of people either didn't know the musicians or did a doubletake at some of the t-shirts' artwork. Speaking of a doubletake, for example, one day when I was working at an old job, while walking in the long corridor someone saw me wearing my David Byrne t-shirt and stopped me with an odd look and asked, "what is that?" Of course, I told them who it was and the label, etc. They said, "oh yeah, that's that real weird guy I've seen in those videos, etc." Lol,considering where I worked at the time, I wasn't surprised at this person's comment. Anyway,as you probably remember this shirt has the Luaka-Bop Red Third Eye Design. It's a t-shirt with that intriguing "Eye" and nothing else except a blue, white and orange background that I bought from the "Feelings" tour. Everytime I wear it, people still stare at it, and at times I still get that question. Which makes me think of the possibilities of how many times broke newbie band could get known simply by an aesthetic, odd looking t-shirt, hummm.
3.And then the final reason to value the T-shirts. One never knows when that well-known, yet non popculture musician is sadly suddenly gone, yet not forgotten as for example in the case of Mark Sandman or Clarence White.
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