Unleashing the Power of Branded Merch: The Ultimate Industry Guide

Hello my friends. I'm Bobby Leehue, Chief content officer at CommonScue, and welcome to our presentation Unleashing the Power of Branded Merch. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule. I know how crazy the business is. I was a distributor at one time, 20 plus years I have been walking in your shoes as a merchandise provider and e commerce store provider. And now with commonsku, it's my joy and privilege to talk about the best of branded merch and what's happening in the industry. So welcome. I'm glad you're here. Thanks for saying hi in the chat, encourage you to throw in any questions and continue you to introduce yourself as we go along. This is a presentation that's sort of a little montage of merch love, if you will. It's an overview of what's happening both in the market and in the industry in general. So I hope you will have a blast with this today. Today our webinar is brought to you by us at Commons Q. One of the things that we love about this business is empowering you to to do what you do the best, which is create incredible merch experiences for your customers. So we hope you can do more of that this year. If you are not already a CommonScue customer, you can learn how to seamlessly manage your business and collaborate with suppliers and delight your clients through a simplified workflow and order management system. So this webinar again is brought to you free today by us at Commonscue. We hope you can check it out at commonscue.com demo Also, all of the insights that we've gathered here today from this presentation are garnered from our newsletter called the Backpack. If you're not a subscriber, we encourage you to check it out. The Backpack is our newsletter that we release on the first and third Friday of every month and it includes insights into merch trends, merch life, what's happening, best articles that we publish, as well as just general merch news. It's been a lot of fun. I threw up the example there about how reception has been amazing folks have really included as a part of their bi weekly inspirational boost. I encourage you to check it out. You can register for that newsletter, community.com all right, let's get started with our presentation. Now I want to warn you if your volume's up a little bit, I want you to encourage you to turn it down because this next video is a little loud but it's a lot of fun. So crank it down just a little bit and Here we go,

Sam,

what a fun campaign. What an absolute, absolute fun campaign. I love that. We're going to talk a little bit more about that campaign. Who put it together? It's a company called Butterfly Canon. They're an agency. But we'll discuss that here in a little bit. Here's how I want to encourage you to use this presentation today. First of all, if you are new to the industry, welcome. This is an incredible business and I know you are going to be delighted to be a part of it. And this is going to provide you a great overview of what's going on in the market. And B, if you are a pro, I hope you showed up today in between putting out fires and taking care of clients so that you could get a little boost and inspiration boost as you go along in your busy week and your busy day. And C, I hope this drives value with your clients. I hope you're able to take some insights from this presentation, steal them, present those to your clients and use those in your next client presentation. Whatever you can use, I hope you can take it away and put it to use in the next quarter and the next year coming up. And yes, this is being recorded now. One of the things that I love for folks to attend this presentation, whether you're brand new to the business or whether you're a pro, is because if you're, especially if you're a pro, you're so busy in this business that oftentimes our expertise dulls our experience and we sort of lose the magic of the merchandise industry, for one thing, just because it's a complicated and difficult business to do. It's a really fun business to receive, but it's a very hard business to do. So hats off to you for joining us today. Hats off to you for putting in the work to do this business. But I want to encourage you to step back and look and see what's happening in the market because it's phenomenal what's happened in the world of merch. The other thing is I know how busy you are. So the fact that you could carve away time from your busy schedule just to check it out and get your inspo boost is encouraging to me. So I know it's very busy and this is what life feels like at the moment. Step back a minute and look at how the world once viewed swag. Okay, at one time, articles like this were everywhere and you'll still see them crop up every now and then. But you'll see articles like this Fast Company article. It's time to stop spending billions on cheap conference swag. We of course had Elizabeth Segrin, who wrote the article on one of our events, also on a podcast. You can check that out@community.com and sku.com but that's really a perspective on the industry. And I want to go as far as to say an industry that mostly was we have a lot of work still to do, but now the world kind of use merch in a different way. And I want to show you what I mean by that by just pointing to headlines that point this out. Not me, but you're seeing headlines, headlines like this everywhere. How Supreme Style Merch Drops took over Corporate America. Why every brand is making merch right now. If you've noticed branded merch everywhere, you're not alone. And then of course, the fast food companies are selling out of merch so quickly, as quickly as they put it up. Why? Because of what I'm going to show you here today. There's a lot of magical things happening with merch. There's also some interesting things going on in terms of just merch is getting name or getting is getting new kinds of names left and right. There are names I'm discovering all the time as we put together the backpack that highlights the best of what's happening with merch in the world. I heard the term affirmation, forward merch, trial merch, and of course the political meme merch. Here's my disclaimer. We picked no sides, but we will evaluate the best political merch just for our own object lessons. So there you go. There's my disclaimer. But we have a few to uncover here today because it's phenomenal what's happening with brands. Whether those brands be food brands or whether those brands be insurance brands, consumer brands, there's really no distinction. It's how folks are using merch today to make an impact. The other thing that really led to a lot of these insights that we're discovering today is the change in the nomenclature around merchandise. And this is really critical for us in the business as we move forward. Hardly anybody calls it swag anymore. And that's actually a good thing. Now, if you have swag in your name, don't panic, don't worry about it. Clients love to use easy language handles for what it is that they are trying to get and do. They don't always have the right nomenclature for it. But I encourage you to see what's happened in the world in terms of search and what's going on with search terms for what we sell. First of all, promotional products going back to 2004 has been on a decline as a search term for a long time now, and it continues to decline. And swag itself has also continued to decline. This goes back to 2004 again, up to the present moment. These are from Google Trends reports. And finally, just merch as the overall handle for promotional products. Swag, things like that has taken over as a term. Now why is this even important? Is it semantics? Are people like us merch nerds the only ones who actually care about this kind of stuff? Well, it's really important I think because the old swag is as a phrase from our friend Beth Palmer at I and M Marketing Group said, it's the stuff we all get that's used to be a, a very common phraseology for the merchandise that we sell. But the new merch and what's going on, especially in in culture, is the gear we covet, especially when it's done right and it's done well. So the old merch, the old swag is stuff we all get. The new merch, the gear we covet. Merch has become synonymous with products that people will pay a premium for. They create skyrocket, demand scarcity, they can create radical brand love and they allow individual expression, which is new I think over the past several years. Plus they build bonds of identity between folks. Now this simple nomenclature around words is really, really important for us because it has potential. It has potential for SEO. If the market is calling it merch and you are spending all your ad dollars on something like promotional products, you may see some results, but not near as much, obviously as if you're targeting what folks are using for the phrase. So for our SEO, for our brand identity, for conversation points with customers, and I think for the respect our medium carries. Cheap giveaways versus merch just has a different connotation behind it. And then for attracting top creative and sales talent to our organizations, I, I think if you were going to hire a gen someone in Gen Z, they would probably have a higher respect for a brand that is in the merch business versus a brand who's in the giveaway business for also how our team members connect with the medium they already embrace. I think it just has a lot of potential for us and I think the most important one for us in the industry is that how you and I see the market? Do we see the market as a finite entity with promotional products and just the folks who claim that they sell promotional products? We see it merch in general, from what's happening in B2C world as well as B2B. Because branded merch is no longer simply advertising. And today we're going to uncover the 10 paradigms that are shaping the fact that branded merch is no longer simply advertising. First, our first paradigm is that merch creates cult like fervor and followers forging this real communal identity. My favorite story of all time is the New Yorker tote bag. You're probably familiar with this if you are not. The New Yorker tote bag is responsible for giving away over half a million bags at one point. This is an article back from 2014 to 2018. Excuse me. Duane Shepard, the VP of consumer marketing, Conde Nast who publishes the New Yorker, said that he's been at Conde Nast for 20 years and he's never seen anything like this. The fact that the New Yorker Topac has become such iconic part of the New Yorker brand. Also, we'll cover this a little bit as we get down. There's a couple of reasons why a simple toe bag has become so iconic. In fact, there was an article in Vice magazine, probably my favorite copy around a merchandise product ever was written by a guy named Sam Wolfson. And he was talking about this crazy New Yorker bag that became a bigger status symbol than a $10,000 Hermes bag. And he said this famous tote bag company, the New Yorker, has become so successful they also produce a weekly magazine filled with investigative journalism, restaurant reviews and satirical essays. The bag remains its flagship and most popular product, which is somewhat surprising because it's not that good, is it? It's just the logo. Logo, which is hilarious because there are so many things, nuances happening with this bag recipients love. Is that a part of their brand identity, social signifier, which we'll talk about here in a little bit. But also just the fact that New Yorker knows their market. They you wouldn't give. You wouldn't give a can cooler to a New Yorker person. Give them a tote bag. Because why? Because a bunch of us book nerds are hauling around books. That's why. But one of the most popular merch items, I always like to start with this because I think it's such a powerful example of what can happen. Now the other thing that's really happening that's interesting in the market is that merch kits are now becoming the talk of the Internet as it relates to all kinds of industries like the book industry. In fact, Esquire had this article published called the Merchification of the Book Publishing Industry. It's a nearly I think it's like 5,000 word article on the merchification of the book publishing industry. I encourage you to Google it and check it out because it's phenomenal. Here's a couple of key phrases. When I stop by a bookstore sometimes I get a comment from a bookseller about the merch frenzy. The more digital we are. Little things that are tangible and unique have a lot of currency. This is feedback from folks who were interviewed for the article. Book merch has more social currency than ever before. And then finally promotional items act as the ultimate seal of approval. Again, I just love the fact that there is a 5,000 word article that talks about the power of merch and what's going on in our culture when it comes to merchandise as well. Which brings me to a really critical point is that we in the business do not need to distinguish between B2C versus B2B. In fact, Forrester goes as far as to say that there is no such distinction anymore. We have what we call now the rise of the business consumer. The business consumer, it's someone who is out there who sees trends that's happening in the marketplace. But they might work for a quote, boring B2B business. Trust me, I loved quote boring B2B businesses. I love selling to insurance and finance. I love those folks as customers. They had some of many of them had incredibly internal strong brands. An insurance company we once sold to was a Fortune 100 best company to work for. Fortune 100 best company to work for. And we did some killer merch for them to celebrate some of those experiences. But the buyer is out there seeing what's going on in the consumer world. And they bring those purchasing predilections and those choices and those tastes back into their purchasing element. And the more you are aligned with what's going on in the market with consumer, the better you'll be no matter which industries we sell to. And of course in this business, I have had the privilege now, especially through hosting the skewcast of talking to over a couple hundred different entrepreneurs who run different types of business in this industry. And I talk to folks who have incredible NFL, NBA and collegiate licensing models, folks that sell to consumers and folks that sell to B2B. So the industry itself is made up of folks that sell to both. All right, get off that. All right. Number two, merch is no longer simply advertising. Merch is the new press release instigator and provocateur. One of my favorite examples is this example from Panera Bread. A Glamour magazine published an article that said why is everyone obsessed with this Panera baguette bag? And then they said the fast food, fast food chain accidentally created an IT bag. Well, they didn't accidentally create anything. In fact, it was a very, a strong part of a very strategic plan by Panera Bread to do this. And I love this because the press release introduced this bag and they knew it was going to be a hit. They knew it because they've actually had experience with this. Panera Bread has used their, present their merchandise as a press release for a while now. They dropped a swimwear collection a few years ago to talk to launch their soup collection. Now, it's really hard to sell soup in the summer, as you can imagine. So they thought, what can we do that would provoke some interest in our brand through the summer to drive soup sales? And they created a swimwear collection. How did it go? It sold out. It went so well that they redid it again not too long after that. So Merch is no longer simply advertising, it is actually a press release. There are lots of examples of this out there in the market. Plenty of examples. A fresh one here is from the 711 merchandise collection that was just released. They released a new part of the collection and Golf Digest magazine sort of took umbrage with it a little bit. They didn't think it was that cool, right? Actually, the merch pieces they thought were very cool. They were worried that it might have missed its target audience. So this is a quote from the piece. Do the pieces look cool? Undeniably so. Are they really golf appropriate? Unlikely. The target audience. Lifelong golfers with Jhin numbers and club memberships, also unlikely. Here's the thing, though. If 7 11's part of their strategy was to achieve mention in the press, they got it. So there are multiple uses for merch. That's the other thing that I've learned not only do working in the business so long, but also talking to so many of you that you have expertise in so many different areas. There are so many different uses of for merch. But we'll get back to the 711 example in just a minute. All right, number three, if you have any questions, by the way, I encourage you to throw those in the chat or the Q and A and we'll tackle those as we move along. So thanks again. And by the way, any comment you want to make in the chat, feel free. Anything you want to mention in a Q and A, feel free as well. Number three, Merch is an emotional connection and a conversation spark. Our good friend Mitch Silver at Printable Promotions calls merch memory makers. I thought that was a brilliant phrase. Memory makers. You might have seen this story from nascar. Guy doesn't have a shirt, he wants to go to the NASCAR race so he decides to make his own. Gets out of Sharpie, blank T shirt shows up. NASCAR noticed them and their savvy social media people highlighted the fact that there's a guy out there watching the race with his own hand drawn NASCAR shirt and fans started responding like immediately like. And NASCAR of course said we love the effort. Later, smart as they were, NASCAR tracked down the fan and gave him his own official NASCAR shirt. I encourage you to check this out on TikTok. It's a really heartwarming look at the experience of what happens when people receive a merch item. Those of us that are in the business that are tied up with taking care of clients and putting out fires and meeting deadlines and those that don't know the business at all don't realize that that's a lot of what the business is about is creating incredible merch experiences but also navigating supply chain. We often forget this little moment and I encourage you to check it out just to inspire yourself as you move along. All right, another one of my favorite stories is Apple's merchandise. We tend to think that Apple doesn't use a lot of branded merch, but they do. It's pretty rare when they do, but they use it in a very special way. Wwdc. They have a scholarship that allows kids to qualify to go to their national conference every year. And of course a student named Firkin qualified 17 year old Junior iOS developer. And what did Apple do? Of course they sent him a kit and said we can't wait to see you. Congratulations for qualifying for this. You knocked it out of the park. And he put this response on Twitter. Of course they got 47,000 likes. Thanks at Apple. It's a beautiful use. You in the business put together campaigns and kits like this all the time. I'm just showing you the end recipient result and what you can share with your clients. The magic that happens when they receive that. Again, merch is no longer simply advertising. This moves way beyond the realm of just advertising. All right, number four, Merch is the new affordable luxury and has actually entered the world of high fashion. This is kind of a fun one. You might have seen Aldi's discount food grocery chain launched a merch collection and it is amazing. The takeout called it their new drip is sexy as hell. In fact I want you to point out I want to point out that shoppers are scrambling to buy the hottest new items before they sell out. So popular customers are having trouble finding some items, which is amazing because Aldi's is a discount grocery store and they. We're going to uncover this a little bit in our E commerce section when we get to it. But all. See all these did something incredibly smart for a brand and they were probably advised by an incredibly smart merchandiser as well. We'll unpack a little bit of that secret moving ahead. But all these new merchants came in with everything under $10 perfectly on brand for this brand, which we're talking about in a second. But Aldi's is the fastest growing US grocery chain, according to some reports, and you can see why. I've noticed that the brands that have a strong connection with community also have a very strong affinity. They know how to use merch and they know that it is a part of that communal belonging and together and identity. So the brands that are really strong about community typically have a very strong marker for merch as well. Vogue had an article called welcome to the era of Cult Hotel Merch. Of course you can get the Ritz Carlton, Carlton Hotel Ritz Paris jacket, your barrel bag. You're seeing things like this in the fashion world where streetwear, fashion and merch are coming together in a really unique way. White Castle, when they recreated their staff uniforms, they hired fashion expert Telfar Clemens to come in and redesign their merch. And of course, it was incredibly popular after Telfar worked out. You're even seeing brands like Taco Bell partner with companies like State Bicycle company create this. I mean, this is a really rad looking merch collection from Taco Bell. But they partnered with State Bicycle Company who has a very unique audience. So it's a really cool combination. We're going to talk about this story a little bit later. But this blows my mind in terms of what's happening in the world of merch and just the perceived value of merch in general. This Fortnite Balenciaga sweatshirt that you can get, again, we're talking about just sort of this, this crossroads of merchandise in high fashion. You can get this or fashion, you can get this Fortnite Balenciaga sweatshirt for a cool $725. Now, we realize some of you might be cheap, you might only be able to fork out $475 for this T shirt, but we're going to talk about what this, how this might have been a miss down the road, but maybe they don't care. There's also a really cool shop out there called the Gift Shop. It's the finest merch from the finest places available. This was just a fun stumble that we came across as we were putting together insights for the backpack that somebody created a merchandise store that you can go to and actually buy merch from some of your favorite brands, period. Like, you're not there at the experience, like at the cafe drinking out of the mug. You can actually just go to this website and buy it because you're a fan of the brand. I just thought that was kind of fun and cool. All right, Number five of branded merch is no longer simply advertising. The world's most iconic brands started with a merch strategy. This was a little surprising to me because of some of the brands behind it. But if you've read Phil Knight's book Shoe Dog, we have a backpack, what we call a backpack read along where every month we'll throw in a book recommendation that we can read along together. And we read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. And as. As you read the book, you'll notice that early on, T shirts were a big part of the Nike culture. And they knew that they had to make a dent in the market. Back then, it's hard to think of Nike as the underdog, but at one time they were. And they use merch as a way to create that experience. And now, of course, a vintage 1972 Nike T shirt is going for 10 grand. Really cool experience. I was also pleased to discover that when Yeti, you're all familiar with yeti, that in their first few years, with every cooler they shipped, Ryan and Roy, the founders, threw in a Yeti hat and a T shirt. Why? To create a conversation around the product. Again, merch is more than just advertising. They did that to spark a conversation around the product. Apple. Some of you might have seen this, that Apple actually started with some incredible, robust merch experiences. They had a catalog back in the. I think this was late 80s, may have been early 2000s. Sorry, late 80s, probably 1991 somewhere around there. But they had a catalog called the Apple Collection, and it's really cool. It honestly looks lifted right out of today's fashion magazines because there's been this real retro trend around 80s and 90s apparel. But one of the things I wanted to point out was that they released this collection. Now, again, Apple themselves wasn't near the iconic brand that we know today. Back then, they were a big brand, but they were still up and coming in a sense. And so that year, 22,000 people bought Apple shirts from the Apple Collection. I just thought this was kind of interesting. This paragraph from the entire catalog is, at the Apple Collection, we find manufacturers who make their products the way we make our computers, which made me realize that Apple may be the OG of conscientious sourcing. I don't know. It's kind of fun, though. Kind of fun to think about. All right. As you've noticed going through some of these examples, every brand that wants to do a really great job at branding, they want to be a lifestyle brand. Now, that doesn't mean they want to be a lifestyle brand for everybody. Nike's not a lifestyle brand for everybody. Nike is a lifestyle brand for certain segment, a certain audience. But every brand kind of wants to be a lifestyle brand for their community, their fans and employees. You might remember me talking about the example where we had a customer that was in the top 100, a Fortune 100 best companies to work For. They were an insurance company. Well, the insurance company doesn't want to become an internationally known brand that everyone's going to be wearing their shirt, but they want to become that lifestyle brand for that particular community. So I think that's part of the magic that we have here. We interviewed a wonderful creator by the name of Gavin Matthew from Supervision Studios who partnered with Microsoft to create their collection called the Hardware Collection. Here's a great example. What's happening when you have an iconic brand partner with a really amazing design agency and create an experience. I just love the word hardware for their merch around their brand.

My style is normcore, you know, and it's just because I wake up and I'm like, man, let's throw a hoodie on and get to work. I'm styled style over fashion at all times, but function and style coincide for me. I'm originally a graphic designer. That's how I started. So everything that I'm doing is with intention and making a statement. I believe in the energy, not just of how something looks, but like color. I believe in shape. I believe in how people receive things and how that can impact them. For this line specifically, I tapped into a couple things, obviously, like mine, lifestyle today, but also just my connection to Microsoft as a brand and the history that has played in my life growing up as a child. And just like that, being the first computer that I ever used. Ironically, as I think about my journey as a designer and a creative, like, it really all stems to my pops. The beauty of that whole thing is his career was as an attorney. I used to catch him late nights in his office on his computer. And I look on the other side of his computer, and he's on Ms. Paint. I'm thinking he's reading documents. For me, that was, like, a place that we connected because he taught me art. You know, he taught me how to draw. But also he showed me that there's more to all of us. We all have a creative bonus item. I think I've always been kind of the underdog. I've always felt that way. It just became my driving force. I feel the energy of Nipsey. I feel the energy of my pops. I feel the energy of Tupac. You know, like, all these people are still in me. The goal is for everybody to become aware of their energy, and energy never dies. This is, like, in everything that I do. It's just a gift to my community. It's a gift to my peers. It's a gift to the people that are creating alongside of me. Like my homies who, you know, we shot today. Shoot with Mark Peace. You know, that's my boy. We've known each other 10, 15 years. This is for all of us. Like, a lot of it. Sometimes it connects back to the Bike Richard photo, which was like, this imaginary place, which is like, dang, I'm gonna go there one day. I just always want to empower people. If there's more people that think and can imagine and dream and actually create those things, what can the world.

You can check out the entire interview, by the way, with Matthew at Skewcast on Skewcast. So just Google skewcast and Gavin Matthew, and you'll find that there. All right, number six. Number six of branded merch is no longer simply advertising. Is that merch is now leading trends, actually creating trends versus just always following trends. If you've been in the business, well, you know that merch for the longest time was always a couple of years behind. That's no longer the case. In fact, now merch is actually leading trends. In fact, a recent example we highlighted in the backpack of what's going on in the music industry is merch is now responsible for propelling albums to number one. Complex had this really interesting article on what's going on with merch and album sales. Recently, Travis Scott's album Utopia hit number one, and out of the 252,000 album sales, a third of those were merch and music. And it's what they call bundling in the music business that you. That they actually can attribute merch sales as long as. As long as they're bundled with an album. Or a music item of some kind. And so what Travis Scott's team did was they offered a 499 album or music experience as long as they bought a piece of merch. And so this is why Complex said, wow, merch is now driving number one album sales when a third of the album sales were tied to merchandise sales as well. So it's really fascinating what's going on in terms of the music business with merch. And of course, we've seen this with lots of things regarding the Taylor Swift sweatshirt and the lines that we see at the Taylor Swift concert. And I'll remind you that every brand wants to become a lifestyle brand. Going back to the Johnnie Walker example that I showed you earlier. First of all, I hope you have a few takeaways from that. Number one is that moving images are starting to really work in the merch world. You're seeing videos like this. You'll see if you go to the 711 merch site, by the way, and you hover over one of those apparel items, a lot of them, you'll see an animated movie image as well. So not only did they go out and they shoot images of the models wearing the merch or folks wearing the merch, but they also did video too, and included that as well. But this is a really great article written by somebody outside of the industry. And I always love it when folks write about the industry outside of the industry. The company that put together this Johnnie Walker collection is a company called Butterfly Canon. And Emma Ralphs wrote this article. From Tacky to Trendsetting. How to create covetable Merch. And she said, done right, branded merch is a way to elevate your brand from product cult icon. To create covetable merch, you need to be playful, collaborate wisely, respect the influence, and tread the line between exclusivity and inclusivity. With these these in mind, you're on your way to becoming a part of today's cultural zeitgeist. Notice when they created this collection, it was a very intentional part of their. Their mission with the Johnnie Walker brand to try and create that experience at the front end. So really cool. I just love the way they did the video. I love the way they shot the merch. You'll notice the merch is. Is cool, but some of it's kind of basic. And I don't mean that in the negative connotation. But I just want to encourage you that sometimes it's what we do around the merch and the energy, we create it with the colors and with the narrow product selection that can create more of a buzz around the merch itself. This is an old article, but of course there are things popping up, and have been for a while now, of different types of zimmercore, zisma core, local core. The fashions in New York are hyper local and that means that folks are really proud and create affinity around brands they love, even if that's a deli that hardly anyone knows about but them. Phenomenal. What's happening in terms of merch in general and of course the Taylor Swift sweatshirt. We already all know the stories about what's going on with the Taylor Swift merchandise, but I want to remind you as you look at things like that, that a brand is a band. And the more you think about a brand and your customers as a band and the fact that they have their own fan base, that they have their own loyal following, I think the better merch experiences you're going to create for them. All right, number seven, we're getting close. Number seven of branded merch is no longer simply advertising. The merch is the new social signifier. I first heard this phrase from Tara Isabella Burton in an interview with Matt Klein in Zine in Zine magazine and merch is the new social signifier and part of the cultural zeitgeist. Now, social signifier can be both negative and positive, but I want to point out the positive for the most part. So right now this is a study done by our friends at Venue Advenue provides software for the concert and music business and they had this really cool study they just released. It's their year in review 2022 called the merch Edition. I encourage you to google this and check it out, but this is the kind of info that is great to share with your clients because sort of outside perspective of what's going on in the merchandise business from somebody that doesn't sell merch directly. What they noted was that in 2022, 20% of fans bought merch at concerts, which is double the number since 2019. And also what's up 40% is the percentage of fans buying, the money spent per fan and the gross merchandise sales, all up 40% from 2019. The interesting thing to note is that it's not just Taylor Swift. Small and mid cap shows have the largest percentage of fans buying merch. All right, let's move over again to the political arena, which is always real dangerous. But again, I stated our position. We don't choose sides, we just actually highlight interesting merch experiences. You might have seen this happen with President Biden's dark branded meme merch. But this is a stunner that the campaign declared that 75% of the traffic going to Biden's campaign there for a while was driven by merch. And that was a stunner. That Merch is driving 75% of all traffic to Biden's campaign site. That's incredible. Campaign managers said that the products have been so successful that merchandise manager Emma Watson launched a campaign where new products featuring the dark Brandon designer added to the storefront every Monday. Now, if you want to go down the rabbit hole and understand what the dark brand and meme means and all that, but I think the key takeaway for us in the merch business is that meme merch, It's a phrase. I think we made that up. But it's a phrase that's definitely going to see more of this as we move on in the political world. Meme merch plus the right moment plus the right message equals high impact. The Trump campaign created this mug themselves. Biden's mug, Mike Pence, was castigated for being too honest. So he created some shirts that talk about that very thing. The other thing that I didn't know until we do a lot of this research for the backpack is that in order to qualify for the presidential debates, you have to have a certain number of individual donors. I forget the number right now. Maybe 40,000 or 400,000, I can't remember. But it's a certain number of individual donors. And these individual donors, a lot of their merch sales are how they actually capture those donations. So, surprise, surprise, merchandise plays a critical role in the political system in a way that qualifies candidates to even be in the presidential merch campaigns. Really interesting what's going on with merch. I think we're going to continue to see some of these examples going on in the political arena. And don't worry, we at the backpack, we've got our eye on the campaign merchandise so that you don't have to. All right, all right. Finally, I'm trying to come up. This is me playing around with an idea. All right, so I'm giving this to you live on the webinar. And I. I'm trying to play with a concept. I'd love your feedback on this. I'm trying to come up with a merch matrix, or you could look at a campaign, or you can consider a campaign for a client and you can determine its worth by looking at its weight. You've probably seen these kinds of indexes I think New York magazine puts out an index like this where it has highbrow low brow content and different matrix that go on with news that happens in the news cycle throughout the week. Well, this is the merch matrix and one of the things that I've kind of noticed in studying the merch trends that are going on through the backpack is that something that has a high social signal and and is wickedly on brand is incredibly on brand is it has a quick add to cart mechanism or creates fandom around the brand. So it's a real high social signal in the sense that it's a signifier. People love to buy it as a way to signify who they are as a part of the identity. We saw this with the Duncan product where Dunkin Donuts was releasing these really cool merch experiences and people wanted to identify that that's their favorite coffee brand so they would buy the merch like crazy. You see this also in things like the language apps, any kind of business really. There's the grocery store chain Aldi's that we talked about, the New Yorker tote bag, the Taylor Swift sweatshirt. So you're seeing this high social signal and somebody that really gets it and they're wickedly on brand. You'll see this really cool experience happening where they're creating merch now wildly off brand experience or maybe they just don't quite get their audience. This is where one article pointed out that the Fortnite Balenciaga might have missed the boat is when they were their audiences, Gamers. And perhaps $750 hoodie or $450 sweatshirt might not have been the right target audience. Wasn't me that said it, somebody else said it. But there you go. There's the Tiffany's and Nike collaboration that sort of fell. So it's interesting to use social signals and whether your fan base and whether that fan base can be just employees for the brand would actually care. You're seeing some real merch pros create interesting experiences not around the merch and the logo, but around the merch. The logo and some insider lines, some straight line copy that talks about some things that are happening that only employees at that company would get or would love. So we'll come back to the merch matrix at some point. I'll keep working on this, but I'm trying to come up with a way for us to facilitate this. I mentioned the 711 one Golf Digest magazine pointed out that it might have been a miss in terms of audience, but it's some really Cool merch. So it had a low social signal. Folks that received that message might not add to cart or create. It might not create fandom around that merchandise experience. But it was kind of cool and it was on brand. They brought back a retro shirt from 7 11. Anyways, kind of cool experience. All right, number eight, thanks for letting me play with that real time live in front of an audience. I'd love your feedback. All right, number eight of branded merch is no longer simply advertising. Merch is a one to one medium to drive social impact. It's fascinating what's going on in the world of merch. This is probably one of my favorite stories that we unearthed, pun intended through the backpack. And that is you might be familiar with Organic Valley, Organic Valley Butter, Organic Valley Sour Cream. They have one of the coolest merch experiences on their store and the reason is is because they that proceeds of their merch goes back to farmers. I forget the number now but their entire product line is fueled by individual farms, small farms. And so they are really big into entrepreneurs in the farming business and their purchases go to help support these small organic family farms. And the thing I love, I think the most about their merch is that they celebrate this but they also talk about this being a way that you can support, you know, they're tapping into their audience that that sort of culture of zeitgeist. When they print a T shirt that says I went organic before it was cool or this hat saves small family farms. It's a real fun way and contributive way to create merch experiences for your customers. We've seen this also with ups. If you're familiar with this, I encourage, if you're not familiar with this, I encourage you to google it and check it out. The be unstoppable gear that they created along with black designers for the New York Fashion Week. The first time UPS advertised at New York Fashion Week they partnered with emerging black designers to create this incredible pop up shop online and in person pop up shop as well and built this entire experience around it. I also want to show you one of my favorite examples of just what's happening in terms of merch and social impact and the way that if you just trained your framing around how we see merchandise that's no longer simply advertising, something beautiful can really unfold. This is from our friends at Sanmark. Very cool experience if you want to check out by the way, if you want to dig into more about what's going on in terms of merch in the merch world. We did this really great interview with with David Smith, the founder and CEO of Cotopaxi, who talked about impacting the world through ethical sustainability. And it's just a phenomenal interview with him that talks about how you can impact the world through making contentious merchandise choices, not only through sustainable sourcing, but also just the way that you understand how the supply chain affects and impacts lives. You can check that out@community.com and sku.com, a couple others I encourage you to check out too is an interview we did with Eric Liedtke. Eric is the former CMO at Adidas, or Adidas, however you pronounce it. And he is now the CEO of Unless Collective. It's one of the first completely compostable apparel brands that are impacting the streetwear world. And of course, our good friend Seth Godin has been with us on the podcast and through interviews at our events multiple times. And our last one that we really encourage you to check out is Seth Godin on climate change. You can find that again@community.com and quote skew.com one last video and we're going to wrap up here in just a minute, but I wanted to show you again what UPS is doing with merchandise in terms of making an impact on their community. The heartbeat of Awake is New York City. Being born and raised here, I'm always trying to focus on hyperlocal and that was the reason why I wanted to work with the high school of fashion industries. When the opportunity for the collaboration with UPS came to the table, the vision was how to be unstoppable. And that evolved into Echapalante. We came together to create a scholarship fund. We all start as a small business. And my hope and my wish as young Latinx creatives that participate in this scholarship program will become the future of the fashion industry. Love that. All right, a couple of more points here. The last ones 9 merch and the booming boutique E commerce story. The industry, if you're new to the business, the industry reported revenue hovers around 26 billion. The revenue is reported by a couple of industry organizations. One is ASI and the other is PPAI. But they both kind of hover around this 25, 26 billion mark. Now this is reported numbers from industry players, distributors who are reporting their sales. And so you're seeing this interesting growth mark happen around 26 billion. But when you consider, remember when I encouraged you earlier in the presentation to not just consider industry reported sales, but to consider merchandise industry as a whole. When you look at licensed sports merchandise or look at global TV and movie merchandise. We're talking about an industry that's in the multi billions. Multi billions, far beyond the 26 billion. So I encourage you to widen your scope. Now one thing I want to point out, we had a great interview with Dell Denim CEO at PPI about the PPA 100 list that he put together. Some of the top 100 companies in the industry. It's a really cool list. It's really cool that they do this. They create these interesting benchmarks for the industry that I've always used both with ASI and now PPAI as a way to understand margins, as a way to understand impact, as a way to create excitement around building a socially conscious brand. But it's a cool list. But in the interview with Dale where we talked about the top 100 companies, he unpacked a little bit of this when I asked him what is the number one trend that you're seeing happening in the industry? We've talked about a lot of things. What is the number one trend? And he said the number one trend is these pop up shops, these boutique E commerce pop up shops. Now of that $26 billion pie, this is just me speculating on what's happening with the industry. 80% of the sales are around just like normal dropship sales or normal promotional product sales. 20% of it is reported to be E commerce sales. Now here's what's interesting is that you have companies like for Imprint that are becoming the first billion dollar company that we'll see as a distributor. On the distributor side, first billion dollar company, you have a couple of those coming up this year that are hitting the billion dollar mark for Imprint. Already put out a press release that they're going to hit that number this year. When you factor in the fact that the reported numbers of E commerce sales don't parse out boutique branded shopping experiences versus the what I would call the shopping cart experience through a company like for imprint, then this 20% number becomes just a mixture of all types of E commerce sales. What I encourage you to think about though is that most of the brands as you already have experienced because you're doing some of these shops for your customers, they want to create boutique experiences for their own brand. They don't want to throw their brand and their mixed messages in with a bunch of other merchandise. They want to create their own boutique experiences. So we're seeing this real growing trend. We, it's funny, I, I have had 20 plus years in this business and we focused on E commerce shops and company stores. That was our focus and the three J's January, June, July were always the slowest months for us. But July for Common SKU was the biggest month we've had so far in shops and typically summer in July is a very very slow shop sales. So I'm just trying to point out that there's an interesting high marker going on with e commerce boutique shops. If you're not creating this for customers, I encourage you to really be dig into this as well. Because your oldest buyers are now millennials. A third of your customers are Gen Z and that's the real real now. If it's not now, then what's reported is then in about 24 months now about 12 months. Because this is an old stat, it will be the case. So by 2025 or 75% of the workforce will be digital natives. They were born through the in a digital era and then in the late 2000 and twenties. Gen Alpha enters the workforce. The late 2000 and twenties. That's not very far away. Gen Alpha enters the workforce for the first time. We created an article for this called if you want to win client loyalty, you need to solve for the digital first promotional products buyer. And this goes for your B2B buyer who's just simply buying merchandise through as well. Creating boutique merch experiences. You can check this out@commonscue.com shops if you want to learn more about creating boutique e commerce experiences for your customers. But this I think it's fun to look at the merch business and step back and see what's happening at large because companies like Whataburger are creating some incredible merch experiences for their brand. Chipotle has always had a really cool merch experience and it's tapping into that boutique desire for every brand to create their own fandom, to create their own merch madness experience, to align with their own values, to create something boutique and unique to them. Our friends at Harper and Scott launched just this past year Incredible Shop for Chick Fil A and we did two interviews. One with the founder, co founder Michael Scott Cohen and also we did an interview with my good friend Kate Hallett, CMO at Harper and Scott about how to craft visual identity that sparks curiosity and speaks truth. I've interviewed hundreds of folks in the business and my interview with Kate Hallett was easily one of my favorites. And Michael Scott Cohen and what he is doing with this company and his team and what they're doing for creating brand and merch experiences for all kinds of brands is incredible. I encourage you to Check it out. All right, one last trend I want to point out with the E Commerce, what's going on are the pop up shops, the physical pop up shops. Ed Sheeran had a pop up shop with exclusive merch that were only available to things like an American Express customers. But I love the visual around this that they created this unique pop up experience in person. Those are growing, by the way. Another trend that we're seeing are things like for Formula One, Formula One has something like 1.6 billion fans. And we reported this in the backpack that talked about inclusivity and things like that. And also the fact that this campaign received over half a million likes as well. Now, going back to Aldi's campaign, they created this merchandise experience for their customers. I pointed out that one of the most important things that they did is that they dropped a merch collection and kept everything under $10. What Aldi's had to do do to do that is they had to subsidize some of the cost for this campaign. They had to underwrite some of the costs for this campaign. I think it's an incredible merch lesson for your clients that you can take back to them and say, look, in order for us to create a campaign that's reachable, I think we need to invest in this just like you invest in any other form of brand experience. But I love how they sort of underwrote the cost of this so that they could keep up with their brand alignment and their brand mission to be a discount grocery chain. They had to keep this merchandise affordable. So that's the merch lesson for us, is that how did Aldi sell a tracksuit for $10? They subsidized some of the cost. We also have these incredible experiences that we create. This one was created by our team, the Barbie collection that highlights a lot of the pink merchandise that it still hasn't died down of what's going on out in the market. We created these through our collections where through the platform, you can actually handle everything from clients placing reorders to you processing your orders, to going from a collection to presentation to a sold order in minutes. So we highlight this on our collections page. You can check that out@commonsensequeue.com all right, final wrap up here. I mentioned at the beginning, merch is no longer simply advertising. Let's cover again what we covered in this presentation. Merch is the new press release. Merch creates cult like fervor and followers. Merch is an emotional connection and conversation point. Merch is the new affordable luxury merch is now leading trends, creating trends versus following trends. And merch now falls under a bigger umbrella, brand experience. And the last thing I want to leave you with a couple of thoughts is that selling thoughtless merch is really, really easy. But making intentional merch memorable and collectible is really, really hard. We want you spending 60% of your time working with clients and working on your business and not just handling orders. That's our goal for you. So as you look at the complexity in this business, as you look at 3, 500 suppliers, a million product options, dozens if not hundreds of clients, and you look at the layout of your team, and as you grow, just know that we've got your back with a really cool management system for you and your team. Last point I want to leave you with is that merch is the concrete symbol of the abstract brand experience. I mentioned this in a presentation that I did a few years ago, and a friend of mine whom I really respect said this really spoke volumes to him. The fact that merch can create a concrete symbol for even an abstract brand experience. A couple of resources you can use. You can check this out. This. For promotional use only. It's a book. Dale Denham sent me this book. It's a wonderful book created by A24. Yes. The film producers created a book around merch called for promotional use only. If you have a showroom, this should be in your showroom for sure. Everybody on your team should have this book because it celebrates what's going on with movie merch through the years. And if you're a fiction fan, you might know Hiraki Murakami, who has this book that's simply called the T Shirts I Love. And that's all it is. It's a celebration of the T shirts that he loves. And it's everything from a cafe to a restaurant. You name it. All right, thanks for joining us today, my friends. You can find us at the Skewcast. You can find us our newsletter called the backpack, all@community.com and if you need a system to power your business, thanks for letting us talk through this today. We encourage you to check out commonsqueue.com demo. All right, have a great day. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.