Being a prominent personality unlocks many opportunities. Whether you’re an actor, a content creator, or a well-known online persona, there are millions of ways to leverage your brand.
One of the best ways to further establish your brand is to make merch. Merchandise is a product with certain elements associated with your brand. These are items that your fans can buy as a way of belonging to your network and supporting.
However, making and selling merch is challenging. Despite being famous a personality, poor entrepreneurial and marketing skills could cost your brand’s reputation.
In this blog, we’ll cover why you need to make and sell your own mech, the benefits of selling your merch, and finally, how to make merch and sell them on an online platform.
If you’re ready to dominate the world with your brand, here are important things you need to learn:
Why Do You Need To Make Merch?
Is having your own line of merchandise even necessary? If you look at a slew of famous people, you’ll realize that most of them rely on merch for promotion and collection. Knowing how to make merch is necessary for a variety of reasons. Here are a couple of reasons.
• Brand Recognition
If you want to improve the brand recall of your business, selling merch is an excellent idea. This is true especially for wearable merchandise, where your fans can use your merch as part of their fashion style.
• Additional Revenue
Once you learned how to make merch, you’ll open another stream of income. Additional income is always great, especially when you’re delivering merch that your supporters love.
• Generate More Jobs
Selling merch also create job opportunities for many creatives. In the process of making your merch line, you’ll need graphic designers, machine operators, marketers, PR specialists, and more. In a way, it doesn’t only benefit you, but other people as well.
• Establishes Connection With Supporters
The best way to return the love and support you receive from fans is by learning how to make your own merch. Your supporters will appreciate the effort and would also learn more about you through time.
• Fosters Creativity
Learning how to make merch means you’ll have to think out of the box. This is essential especially if you don’t want to repeat style every season. Making your own merch keeps you in touch with your own creativity.
Who Can Make and Sell Merch?
Not everyone can make their own merch. The reason why is because not everyone has a personal brand to sell or a story to tell in each item. Naturally, it’s the more prominent individuals who can make their own merch. Big brands could also dive into merchandise creation. Before we head on to learning how to make merch, here is a list of people who create, sell and promote their merchandise:
- Artists, musicians, and bands
- Youtubers and other content creators
- Actors
- Media personalities
- Celebrities
- Online influencers
- Models
- Corporate brands
How To Make Merch
Here’s a simple walkthrough on how you can make your own merch for your supporters. Remember that the stages on how to make merch require your own input since people would be patronizing your brand.
1. Define Your Goals
Why do you want to learn how to make merch? Do you want extra revenue? Do you want to fulfil your fans’ demands? Or do you simply want to create better value for your brand?
Whatever your goal might be, it’s vital to always make it SMART or Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound. More importantly, you’d want to create goals that are beneficial for both your and your supporters.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Your target audience would be easy to spot. It’s the people who already patronize your brand, support you, or are interested in you. What you need to do is to classify these people and divide them into certain categories.
The best way to do this is through demographic profiling. You can separate your audience based on their age, location, and other psychosocial factors. These things will help you with which designs to aim for and what sizes to make.
3. Find Suppliers for Different Types of Merchandise
You need to make arrangements with a reliable supplier to source your merchandise. Part of learning how to make merch is to find products that would comprise your collection. This typically includes custom t-shirts, mugs, personalized tumblers, lanyards, keychains, phone cases, and other related items.
4. Create a Line-Up of Designs
You can’t make merch without creating s series of initial designs. Start by producing designs for the launch of your merch. Then, move to pre-planning for upcoming events, seasons, or important holidays.
If you’re not that great at designs, you can hire graphic designers to create an array of choices. You can also hire specialists who will operate design application methods including thermo sublimation, laser transfer, and direct printing. Another great option is to outsource for freelancers on the web.
5. Determine How You’d Like to Sell Your Merch
Do you want to sell your merch as an independent selling, or do you seek partnerships with existing brands to sell? Selling merch involves different things aside from knowing how to make merch. This includes marketing, logistics, market analysis, and more.
You can consider a variety of mixed methods to sell merch. You can choose to sell on outlet stores in malls or supermarkets. You can also sell on social media sites like Instagram and Facebook. But if you truly want your merch to succeed, consider selling on an online platform like your own website. We’ll dive into that later.
6. Sell Your Merch Online
To sell your merch, you need to adapt to a variety of channels and business models to launch your products. As mentioned, one of the greatest ways to get your merch to your supporters is by creating an ecommerce store and sell your merch online.
Knowing how to make merch wouldn’t suffice, you must also master the art of selling products. Fortunately, there’s a free website builder called Strikingly that could make this happen. Strikingly offers wonderful resources that allow people to sell their merch quickly plus other amazing benefits.
If you want to learn how to sell and promote your merch online, just read the steps in the next section.
How To Sell and Promote Your Merch Online
Now that you know the basics of how to make merch, it’s time to learn how to sell and promote your merchandise. After creating your free account with Strikingly, just to your dashboard and click on “Create New Site”. After that, just following the next steps:
1. Find a Template That Fits Your Brand
Whether you want to go for a posh and preppy brand or aim for a grungier, vintage look, you’ll definitely find the perfect Strikingly template for you. Strikingly has plenty of fantastic templates that you need to sell your merch.
Image taken from Strikingly product
You have the freedom to select any template that suits your taste. In general, it’s best to pick a template that your supporters can immediately associate you with. Think about visuals and structure that your fans know is aligned with your brand.
2. Add a Products to Your Merch Collection
Refer back to the how to make merch section and ensure that you’ve complete each step. Once you’re sure that you’re done, you need to add your products to your online store.
Image taken from Strikingly product
First, add a simple store section to your website template. Then proceed to add a selection of products. Under store, hit “Products”, then choose “Add Products”. You’ll see something like the image above.
Since you’re selling your merch, make sure to add amazing looking photos for each product. Make sure the image is of high quality and highlights the best feature of each merch.
Then, add a product name that also bears your brand. Don’t forget to add a well-detailed description of the merch. Once you’ve added the price and stock number, click on “Save”.
3. Use the SEO Checklist to Drive More Traffic to Your Store
Strikingly also has an SEO Checklist so you can keep track of your SEO practices. There are great to drive online traffic and potentially persuade your fans to buy more merch.
Image taken from Strikingly product
As you can see in the image above, there are actions you need to accomplish to ensure that your site is optimized for search engines. If you want to add a custom domain and add multiple pages, upgrade to a Pro account.
4. Grow Your Audience List to Promote Using Newsletters
Another great feature of Strikingly is to create your audience list. This is perfect so you can trigger newsletters every time you have a special announcement about launching your merch or seasonal sales.
Image taken from Strikingly product
Understanding how to make merch involves selling merchandise on various channels including emails. Bonus tip: you can personalize each email so each newsletter would feel like you’re talking directly to your fans. Trust us, they would definitely appreciate the personal touch.
As a famous personality, you need to know how to make merch for various reasons. Selling merch allows you to have an extra stream of income while building your brand’s visibility. Using Strikingly, you can sell your merch online and attract more potential supporters for your brand. Create a Strikingly account today and unlock all these opportunities about selling merchandise on your website.
