Creating Custom Event Merch that Generates Awareness and Revenue
Thomas Hilton
Overview
Creating custom event merch, promotional swag, or designing gear for your fans and followers to show their support is a great way to earn extra revenue and gain continued exposure after your event has ended. Whenever an attendee wears or uses your merchandise in public, they’ll promote your brand and event to those around them. So, naturally, the best way to get your audience to continue repping you and your brand or event is to create high-quality, unique, attractive merch.
You’ll get continued exposure, and your attendees get a keepsake to commemorate the event, solidifying the connection between you and your audience.
Maybe you’re organizing a kid’s soccer camp, a half-marathon charity run, looking to have merchandise created for a local music festival or business conference, or celebrating the bicentennial anniversary of your company. For most events, creating custom products your attendees can take home with them extends your event’s brand value and drives brand awareness long after the event ends.
How and Where to Make Custom Event Merch?
You can take a few different routes to create custom merchandise for your event. However, some options are much more expensive, time-consuming, and logistics-heavy than others, such as seeking out a manufacturer yourself and creating everything from scratch.
Your most accessible, inexpensive, and simplistic options for creating custom event merch or custom merchandise for any purpose are a collaboration with one of the following:
Promotional Products Company, like Stitchi: Custom merch platforms like Stitchi have the experience and know-how to guide you through the process of choosing the best type of products for your event and can assist with creating your designs by providing in-house services, ready-made designs, or suggesting options for sourcing original graphic design.
Print-On-Demand Company: This low-cost option is ideal when you’re unsure how much interest you will have in your event merchandise and don’t want to run the risk of paying for a bunch of custom gear that will end up stacked in your garage for a decade or two. Partnering with a print-on-demand service automates production, shipping, and fulfillment, making it a low-effort, low-overhead way to get your custom event merch in the hands of your audience. A downside to this option is that you’ll be more limited in your choice of products and customization. Another drawback to going the print-on-demand route is that your attendees will only have a couple of options to pick up your custom event gear.
Event attendees will have to either pre-order their product choice – included in the ticket price or the option to add event merch before checking out is a common strategy – or they can have their merchandise shipped after the event concludes.
How to Design Custom Event Merch?
Step 1: Identify Your Audience
Whom are you selling to? What are your audience’s attributes? Are they zoomers, millennials, middle-aged, or elderly? Are they college students, cybersecurity professionals, music fans?
Where and how do you interact with your audience?
Why does your audience value you and your brand or your work?
Are you promoting a specific event, album release, or something else? Will you create evergreen gear that you can distribute at multiple events, or is it a one-off type of scenario that’s done when it’s done?
Step 2: Brainstorm Product Ideas, and if Possible, Validate Them with Your Audience
As you might have guessed, the most popular and common form of custom event merch or promotional product is the ubiquitous t-shirt. They’re a great option that almost everyone regularly wears to some degree.
T-shirts aren’t the only option available, though, and depending on the company you choose to work with to create your custom merch, the types of products you can put your design on are virtually limitless. Backpacks, coffee mugs, hats, phone cases, tote bags, portable charging blocks, and just about anything else you can think of can be sourced and branded.
What does your audience want, though? What are they hoping you’ll have for them to spend their money on or include in their swag bag?
Well, why don’t you ask them? A social media poll or suggestion box on your website gets your audience engaged in the process, making them feel like they participated, and helps you choose something that people will actually want.
Step 3: Choose the Perfect Design & Mock-Up Your Products
Depending on the company you choose to work with to produce your custom event merch, they probably have a bunch of ready-made designs to choose from and maybe even in-house graphic designers.
Other options are to source a graphic designer through freelancer platforms like Upwork or create it yourself through a website like Placeit, which has thousands of templates to choose from, along with mock-up functions to see what your design will look like on the product before you purchase anything.
Some things to keep in mind when sourcing your design from a third-party graphic designer:
**Provide Context -**The type of product intended for the design. -Details about your audience.
Overexplain Your VisionThe graphic designer can’t read your mind. Tell them everything you can about what you’re looking for in a design in explicit detail. -Share examples, references, or a drawing on a cocktail napkin. -Provide feedback on designs and use revisions to dial in what you envisioned.
How to Sell Custom Event Merch?
One of the most significant differences between creating custom merchandise for a product line and creating merch for an event is your primary audience to market your product to already exists, as attendees. Fishing for an outside audience to sell to is secondary and not done at all in many cases. After all, who wants a t-shirt for a Bass Tournament in a town they’ve never visited?
Selling merchandise is a great way to augment the revenue generated by your event. In the 2016 Pulse Report Survey by Eventbrite, 850 event organizers were asked what percentage of total event revenue came from ticket sales alone. Perhaps surprisingly to most readers, the majority of organizers reported that for most events, less than 20% of total revenue came from ticket sales. Keep in mind that every event is different, and where your revenue comes from depends wholly on your unique event. For example, a music festival will likely sell more t-shirts than a cybersecurity conference.
In the 2019 Event Planning Industry report by Eventbrite, to contrast with the above percentage, for B2B events like conferences and trade shows, ticket sales for 48% of events accounted for 60-100% of revenue. To be expected, though, right? Most people probably aren’t going to be wearing their cybersecurity industry conference t-shirt anywhere but around the house, unless you create some really cool, high-quality products that they’ll want to regularly wear or use, which brings us to our first tip for how to generate interest and sell your custom event merch.
Some of the ways you can market your custom event merch and get sales rolling in:
Great Merch Sells Itself: Everyone will want to know where your customer, fan, or event attendee got their super rad hoodie or t-shirt (or backpack, hat, coffee mug, phone case, the list goes on). Make sure your custom event merch isn’t low-end, junk products, and people are more likely to spread awareness by word of mouth, as well. Be sure to get samples of any products to quality check before committing to a contract with a promotional product or print-on-demand company, manufacturer, or supplier.
Engage With Your Followers or Attendees: Use social media, email lists, print ads, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, and your created content, whether a blog, Youtube channel, website, whatever. Consistently get your products in front of your audience through multiple outlets and get people talking about them. Build the buzz.
Presales Build Hype: Who doesn’t want their hands on something cool and exclusive on Day 1 of release, or know that their custom merch will be waiting for them at your event? Presales have the added benefit of allowing you to gauge interest level before making a large order that may or may not sell.
Ask Your Audience to Share Photos and Videos of Them Rocking Your Gear. You can make this more enticing, and something people are more likely to do by having a contest with rewards for sharing or by coming up with another incentive. 96% of event organizers use social media contests and consider it an effective strategy for connecting to their audience and driving interest. An example of the effectiveness of this marketing and awareness tactic: A news media company called Morning Brew partnered with Stitchi with the primary objective of acquiring new subscribers, which they achieved to the tune of 70,000 new users. That wasn’t their only goal, however. They wanted to provide their audience with a unique customer experience and engage with them in a fun and memorable way. Customers that have a favorable experience with a brand are much more likely to make repeat purchases with that business. Morning Brew asked the 7,000 loyal subscribers that participated to share pictures of them wearing their jogger sweatpants, which generated a return on investment they could not have achieved without leveraging the networks of each of these 7,000 subscribers. Morning Brew provided their audience with high-quality promotional swag leisurewear. As a result, their audience casually advertised for Morning Brew everywhere they wore their joggers, along with organically spreading brand awareness throughout their networks. This led to thousands of additional subscribers and revenue.
Get Started Today
If you’re considering creating custom event merch for your next event, contact Stitchi today to discuss the options available to you. Creating chic, high-quality gear that your audience wants to keep wearing and using after your event has passed will achieve valuable continued brand exposure that will increase brand awareness among a broader audience. Increased brand awareness, reach, and reputation will boost revenue and improve your overall bottom line.