In this talk Wendy Day explains how merchandise can serve as an additional revenue stream for artists, framing them as brands whose fans are willing to buy products bearing their name, lyrics, or logos. She illustrates the concept with real examples, such as her own Wendy Day logo shirt and Trouble’s "Can't Get Involved Too Deeply" tee, showing how a popular lyric can be turned into a sellable item. Day emphasizes the importance of using print‑on‑demand (POD) services (e.g., Café Press, Zazzle, Printify, Printful) to avoid upfront inventory costs and storage hassles. She walks through setting up an online storefront—primarily via Shopify, which she trusts for reliability and payment processing—and integrating POD providers, while noting the need to ensure the store generates enough profit to cover monthly fees. For live events, she recommends selling merch on‑site using a trusted team member and a mobile credit‑card reader like Square. Throughout, she stresses understanding the fan base to choose appropriate products (e.g., water bottles for an outdoorsy audience, winter hats versus baseball caps) and testing product‑market fit before committing large sums. Design quality and clear messaging are highlighted as crucial because each shirt or item acts as a walking billboard for the artist’s brand. Overall, the talk provides a step‑by‑step, pragmatic guide to launching, managing, and profiting from merchandise without becoming a full‑time retailer.
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Hi guys, welcome back. Merchandise. I want to talk about merchandise. Um, it's another income stream for you as an artist. Um, actually it's an income stream for you as a brand, and artists just happen to be a brand. Um, but the value of merchandise is once you start building a fan base, there will be people in your world who are willing to buy products with your name or part of your lyrics or saying or your logo. For example, um, this is my Wendy Day logo. Right? This is what my logo looks like. And I had that made into t-shirts, and you can see that I'm wearing one now. This is, you know, it's a giant blow-up, so you can't really get a good feel for what the shirt looks like, but it covers the entire right-hand side of my shirt, and it doesn't say Wendy Day. It's just the headphones and the microphone. And then let me give you another example. Who ready for cell phones? This is me wearing a Trouble t-shirt. He has a song called Ready, and the first line in Ready is, can't get involved too deeply. And for some reason, fans just really like that line, and Tony noticed it because he noticed in going through, um, Twitter, he was just, you know, he every now and again he'll type in, um, hooks from Trouble Song just to see how many people are talking about him. And these are the people that either don't hashtag, you know, Trouble Duct Tape, or they don't @TroubleDTE him. Um, it's just people on their feed talking about Trouble. And he noticed that the phrase "Can't Get Involved Too Deeply" was being tweeted like a ridiculous amount of times. So what he decided to do was with that popularity to monetize it, and he had a designer design, um, basically t-shirts, logos with that phrase "Can't Get Involved Too Deeply." And then on the back of the shirt it says "Trouble," and it might have the duct tape logo on it, I can't remember. Um, but the point is that it is for sale on his website, on Trouble's website, and it gives him an additional income every week because there are people that want to buy that shirt and wear it. Um, no matter what level you are as an artist, you can always sell merchandise. As long as you have one fan, you can sell a t-shirt. Um, the best way to do it is to work with a company that will print on demand. Um, and what I mean by that is if you press up t-shirts in advance, like if you buy a couple dozen of these, you're going to have to pay for them up front, and then you're gonna have to store them somewhere. So boxes of t-shirts will be sitting in your living room or your garage or your bedroom or wherever you have room to store them. And rather than doing that, you can start out with a print-on-demand company like, um, Café Press is a print-on-demand company. Zazzle, I think it's Zazzle, is a print-on-demand company. Printify is another company where you can design your shirts, hats, water bottles, whatever you feel your market will buy. And this is where you really have to know your market. You really have to understand who your fans are and whether this even makes sense, whether they'll even wear a t-shirt with a phrase or your logo or your name on it. Um, but once you know your, your fan base, you're going to be able to add a page to your website, or you can even set up a website that's a storefront at Shopify. I've got two different Shopify accounts. I think I pay them $30 a month, but I sell enough product to warrant paying them that fee every month. And once you join their site you can, um, you can make it your own site so that it looks like your store, and you can add it to your website, or you can leave it as a freestanding store, or you can, you can do whatever is best for you, whatever you want. And in that store, you can sell merchandise that's print on demand from Printify or Zazzle or CafePress. It works very easily with Shopify to do that. The thing that I like about Shopify is that they're legitimate. I dealt with another storefront prior to Shopify and they shut me down, um, kind of erratically and with no warning because somebody used a fraudulent credit card to buy something, um, and for some reason they, they didn't like that, so they basically shut me down and kept all my money. Um, but Shopify hasn't done that. Shopify has been really legitimate and really great to work with. Um, so I, you know, that's who I use. That doesn't mean you have to. Do some research, find out, find out who else is out there in that space. But why not add some sort of a store to your website? Just make sure that you can make more than $30 a month in profit and income in order to warrant the expense of having that store. And make sure you market and promote your merchandise to your fan base. For Trouble, we also have printed— we have, you know, we have the print-on-demand stuff on his website, but we also have product that we've printed because we take it out to shows and sell the merchandise at his shows. Um, and for that you need to have somebody on your team that can man a table and somebody that you actually trust to handle money. Um, you can also use, uh, Square, which is a credit card reader that works on your phone so that you can turn your phone into basically a credit card processing machine, and then you pay a percentage of the sale for the, the, the right to use that. Um, and ditto with Shopify, you pay them a percentage of sales to act as your shopping cart. Um, but for me it's worth it because I don't want the hassle of having to become a merchant. I would much rather pay somebody 3% of sales to handle all of that for me so that I don't have to deal with that. I'm a marketing person, not a retail operator. So I want to make it as easy as possible on myself, and I want to spend as little money up front in building, um, in building a store. But merchandise is a really great way for you to make additional income. It's a little bit harder when you're new because you're going to have less fans to, to sell to. You also don't want to become overly promotiony or overly salesy with your product to the point where you turn people off. It's, it's kind of a delicate balance. And of course you're gonna want as many people in your circle wearing your shirt as possible because it's sort of a little billboard for your product or for your career. And, and, you know, I've always had— in the, in the 25 years that I've been doing this, I've always had an easier time giving away t-shirts for free for people to wear than I have giving away music. I almost make a joke about how the music, you know, has to be free in order to build the fan base large enough so that we can sell t-shirts. It's almost like we're in the t-shirt business, but we're not. We're in the music business. We're in the brand building business. But it's Everybody that's out there wearing one of your t-shirts is a walking billboard for you. So you want to make sure that your message is clear and easy to read. You want to make sure that the design is really cool. You know, the thing about, about the Trouble t-shirts is even if you're not a fan of the, the saying of "Can't get involved too deeply," it's just a really cool design. On a t-shirt. So even someone who's not a fan of Trouble that likes what that says and likes the way it looks would spend the $20 for the t-shirt. So, um, merchandise is a great way to make income. Um, another great thing about the print-on-demand companies, um, like CafePress and Printful and, um, Zazzle is that you can offer products for sale without actually buying them and print— printing them. And what I mean by that is, let's say it's summertime and you feel that your fan— but your fan base is somewhat athletic. They're out there walking or biking, or, you know, they're just a little bit more outdoorsy, or maybe they smoke a lot of weed and they're just really thirsty all the time. So you can print your logo onto water bottles, and instead of actually spending that money to print on water bottles to find out if, if it's feasible. You can put them up for sale, print on demand, and you can put your logo on the water bottle and put it in the storefront. And if it sells, then the company prints it, drop ships it, sends it off. They keep their cut and they send you the, the, the, the, you know, what's left, the profit. And you can do that as a way to test what items are important to your market, you know, to the people that are your fans. We found with Trouble, we sell a lot of winter, you know, caps, winter hats, but not a lot of baseball hats. So I'm really glad we didn't spend a couple thousand dollars printing up baseball caps because his fan base doesn't really wear them. But they buy a shit ton of winter hats for the winter. So we learned that that was a better, um,
