In our last blog, we gave you some suggestions on the fundamental items of your merch table. Now what?

Achieving Maximum Exposure

Let’s go a bit deeper into putting together and managing your merch table at your shows. These are some solid tactics that will help you sell or use those T-shirts, hoodies, pins and stickers you ordered for maximum exposure.

Clubs usually have a merch table that artists can use for selling merch. However, you should have a small folding table you can easily bring with your gear to the show.

That way, on the off chance the merch table is broken, another act has taken it over or the table’s simply missing from the club, you still have one. But usually the club has a table there already.

Make sure to get to the venue early so you have time to set up your merch table and to make sure you have a prime location set up.

I’ve personally played shows that don’t have enough room for everyone’s merch tables. That usually ends with someone sitting in the corner with a box of shirts and CDs in the hopes that fans would even see them.

Don’t be the sad act without a merch home. Get there early and set up shop asap!

Crucial Elements of Your Merch Table

Once you have your box of merch (an old suitcase makes a great portable merch box) and your folding table, make sure to have the following:

• Signage for your table with prices of everything you are selling, website address and whether you take cash or card. (Square readers are a great, affordable way to allow fans who don’t have cash on them to buy something). A basic item list printed out or hand-written and taped to the table will do just fine.
• A small cash box or manilla envelope with a little bit of basic change for fans who have cash. The simplest tactic is to break up a couple twenties into 10 one-dollar bills and 4 five-dollar bills per twenty-dollar bill prior to the show. You can do this at a bank or customer service of a grocery store.
• Tracking sheet for all sales/giveaways.
• A small battery powered table lamp. You may not need it, but if the club is really dark and your merch table is in the back, it’s going to be difficult to make transactions and see the right change, see the signage, the merch or your fans! No one wants to go to creepy corner in the back of a dark club to buy something they can’t see.
• You can’t go wrong with a tip jar for the band and/or the person running the table!
• And don’t forget to have a sign-up sheet (or cards you pass out to audience members before and after the show) for your email list!

Man (or Woman) the Ship!

You should always have someone manning the merch table throughout your show, whether it’s you, a bandmate, a friend or fan.

My last band always made sure the person at the merch table (aside from band members) was attractive, dressed for the part and engaged every person who walked by or came up to the table. Fans are much more likely to approach a smiling attractive person than a scowling, stand-offish introvert.

If your merch person is lost in their cell phone, rude or doesn’t really want to be there, it’s not gonna help you sell any shirts. Our merch girl became an informal member of our crew and one of our fans’ favorite aspects of our live shows.

Make sure your merch person knows how to handle the transactions.

Show them how to use the square reader if you have one, and make sure they know the prices for everything and where the cash box/envelope is.

Make sure they track inventory sales and promos.

And remember, when you play an Afton Show, you keep 100% of all of your merch sales at ours shows!

The Merch Table Hang Out Session

We encourage you to use your merch table not only as a place to sell merch, but also as a place to meet and interact with fans.

Invite the crowd back to your merch table after you play. Hang out there before your set.

Offer a free sticker to people who come talk to you at the merch table after your set, be creative so that you have a LINE of people at your merch table as soon as you’re done playing.

Have your lead singer or YOU, if you’re a rapper or solo artist, walk from the stage to the merch table after the last song and make an announcement to meet up at the merch table.

Our founder Ryan Kintz did this for every show he played as a band, and his band always had a crowd of people lined up at their merch table after their set.

Hanging out at the merch table is a tactic that even national touring acts use, as it gives fans a chance to have a face-to-face meeting with their heroes and it helps you sell shirts, CDs and get people signed up for your email list.

Don’t Be a Cheapskate

When it comes to the actual sales of merch, don’t be a penny pincher.

Offer discounts and deals like a couple bucks off if people want a shirt, sticker and CD. Buy two get one free. Get a free sticker with every t-shirt. Whatever. Be creative.

You can put this on your signage or you could simple offer it verbally to your fans as a one-time special.

If a fan is a buck or two short of being able to grab a shirt from you, sell it to them for what they can afford. This makes fans into super fans who will tell their friends how cool you are.

It also put another walking billboard for your act in motion.

If You Build It They Will Buy

Once you’ve got the hang of running a merch table for your basic gear, and you start making some money, DON’T POCKET OR SPEND THAT MONEY! Use it to reinvest in adding new pieces as time goes on.

Having as many different types of merch as you can is a great idea. Bring in new shirt designs. Add beer koozies with your band name on them. Get some posters (and always sign them!). Flash drives with your music preloaded on them.

Anything you can think of that your fans may want. The more diverse selection you have the more “deals” your fans can cash in on.

If you only have a CD, shirt and stickers than within 1-2 shows your fans will essentially own all of your merch!

Got any cool tips or tactics that have worked for your merch table? Drop us a comment below. We’d love to hear from you!

The post Merch Table Tactics That Work appeared first on Afton.

Getting Your Name Out There

One of the most important tools in an artist’s toolkit is Merch (or “merchandise” if you’re classy). For a local act, it’s a no-brainer. As any nationally-touring act will tell you, if you don’t have any merch, you need to get some now!

Most bands make the most money with the biggest return on investment with merch. They are also one of the greatest promotional tools you can employ on your rise to fame and fortune.

But there’s a lot of types of merch to consider: T-shirts. Hoodies. Stickers. Buttons. Hats. Singles. EPs. CDs. Vinyl. Digital Download Cards. Flash Drives. Totes. Key Chains. Beer Koozies. Pint Glasses. Posters. Guitar picks. Drum Sticks. Etc.

What is the best return on investment and where do you even begin?

Where to Start

To get started, all you really need is a decent hi-res logo. You can build out fancier graphics and artwork as time goes on, but you don’t need to in the beginning.

You can have hundreds or thousands of pieces of merch that can help you get your brand out there and put some money in your pocket with a basic black and white font of your act name.

A logo is pretty attainable, too. You can crank one out in an hour or two in Photoshop if you’ve got some chops with free font packages.

For my last band, I built two font-based logos of my band, which took me about two hours total, and we used those two fonts on every piece of merch we ever made or sold.

If this is a bit much, you can pay a graphic designer a little coin to make one for you. FIVERR is a great source for affordable, reliable freelance work like this if you don’t know any artists locally.

Once you’ve got the logo, a quick Google search of “band merch” or “custom tshirts” should give you plenty of options to compare prices and packages. Do your homework and make sure to find the best deal for your needs.

Now, the question really is, what type of merch is best? What’s the best “bang for your buck”?

Stickers and Buttons

The most affordable and easiest items to stock your merch table with are stickers and 1-inch buttons. You can usually get 100 1-inch buttons for about $15-$20. Expect 1,000 stickers to cost about $100, or 10 cents a piece.

You can sell the stickers and buttons at your shows and online to help recoup some of the costs. Your mindset with stickers and buttons should NOT be to make money, however. Think of them as a line item of your act’s marketing budget! That being said, you should have a price tag on them and make them available for sale, so fans can see they are getting something valuable when you give them away.

You should mainly use these items to get your name out and to use for Deals You Offer Your Fans. You can even tell your fans that they get a free sticker if they promise that they’ll put it on their car. Isn’t it worth a dime if your fans are driving around town with your band logo on their car?

T-Shirts, Hoodies and Hats, Oh My!

Nothing should stop you from having T-shirts, hoodies, hats or other clothing apparel with your act name and your artist website on them. Ever.

If you don’t have T-SHIRTS you need them NOW. These are the bread-and-butter of any merch table. T-shirts will generate more revenue than anything else you will probably ever sell. They are also a relatively affordable piece of merch you can invest in and will sell easiest to your fans.

In terms of cost, expect to spend anywhere from $2-10 per shirt (they get cheaper per unit with the more you purchase). The good news is you can almost always sell your shirt for far more than you paid. Fans don’t balk one second spending upwards of $60 for a t-shirt for a nationally-touring band. Metallica recently rolled through town here and that’s what they were selling their shirts for. Every single merch station had 10 lines of constantly streaming fans. If you keep your prices between $10-25 per shirt, you might have a sell-out on your hands in no time.

Let’s say you find a deal of $3 per shirt and you sell them for $10 each. You will more than triple your return with every shirt sold. If you bought a meager 25 shirts for your upcoming show, you’d spend $75. If you sell them all, you’ll bring in $250 total. That’s $175 pure profit on a $75 investment.

HOT TIPS

HOT TIP #1: The biggest investment in merch is the first one. Don’t pocket or spend the money you make on merch once you start making that money. Reinvest in more merch! Keep the cash cow fed and you will never worry about having a source of revenue for your act! My old band never spent the money we made as a band, we always used it to build the band up, whether it was merch or studio time or whatever would save us from spending our own money in the future. It works!

HOT TIP #2: Have as many friends as you know wear a t-shirt (even if they didn’t buy it) and take a pic of them. Then post to your socials and have them do the same. This way with 1 t-shirt people keep putting on, taking pic, taking off and give back to you – you can create this BUZZ on social media that makes it LOOK LIKE YOU JUST SOLD 50 t-shirts. An apparel company did this grassroots approach and with just 1 t-shirt they made it look like they were blowing up in their city.

HOT TIP #3: Consider giving out free t-shirts or discounted ones to cover your costs of production to INFLUENCERS you know. People who are good looking, have big social media following in your city, etc. and say they get it free for cheap if they post to socials about it 2x this month. etc.

No Funds for Merch? No Problem

Artists tell us they lack the funds to get merch made. Well here’s a couple tricks to tackle that so you have no excuse!

Tactic #1: The “Pitch In”

A super easy way to get merch is just have each member “pitch in.” How much does it cost to order what you want? $100 or $150? If you have 3-5 members in your group just have each member pitch in $20 or $50 and you’ll have what you need to make your first merch order.

I know money is tight. But if each member skips out on going to dinner or grabbing their daily coffee, they can put that $40-50 toward your merch fund.

Ryan Kintz, the founder of Afton, and I personally used this tactic many times while we were in our respective bands over the years. In fact, Ryan recently ordered custom beer koozies with his new cover band’s name on them. Each band member pitched in just $19 and bam, they had what they needed to make the order.

Ryan also solved the “lack of merch problems” in about 7 days with this next tactic, without spending a dollar of his own money up front.

Tactic #2: The Custom Pre-Sale

Explain to all of your friends, fans & everyone you personally know that you are taking orders for T-Shirts (or hoodies, etc) and that you need to know what SIZES to order. Your friends, fans, and family should understand that you can’t order 50 shirts in sizes nobody wants. You don’t want to be stuck with 10 XS shirts.

When Ryan’s band did this, they sold 21 shirts in less than 1 week! They had $210 in cash, and 21 shirts already ordered and paid for. That funded their entire merch order! Now they had money for extra inventory and now 21 fans were walking around as personal billboards, spreading the band name around town.

Merch is the Backbone of Your Act

This should get the ball rolling for you on the most fundamental ingredients to your act’s brand. Your merch is the backbone of your act, both as a promotional tool and source of revenue.

It’s tough making a living as a musician, but it’s next to impossible without merch. So don’t ignore this crucial aspect of your music career.

We’ll get into more details on the next steps of building your merch table in a future blog. Make sure to check back to MyAfton blog regularly and drop us a comment below with your thoughts on getting merch for your act.

The post Stocking Your Merch Table appeared first on Afton.