Wendy Day explains how musicians can sell merchandise without upfront costs using print-on-demand services like Printful and Merchly integrated with Shopify. A $12 t-shirt sold for $20 nets the artist $8 profit, and data from sales helps identify which designs to produce in bulk for tours.
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Hi guys, Wendy Day here. Let's talk about merchandise because merchandise is an awesome way for an artist that has a fan base to make money. And we've been talking up till now about how to build your fan base, how to market, how to promote, um, budget. We've even talked about like some of the mental side of it to help you get to the point where um, you are now. So let's talk about merchandise because it's a great way to make income once you've got a fan base, right? So for my clients, we use print on demand, and the thing that I like about print on demand is that you don't have to put a lot of money or storage into t-shirts. Like, if you're gonna print up t-shirts with your logo or um, a section of your lyric on it or whatever you decide that you want to sell. If you print the traditional way, you're going to spend a lot of money because you're going to need small, medium, large, extra large, double X, triple X, maybe even extra small if you're selling a lot of t-shirts for women, you know, baby tees, t-shirts, long sleeves, sweatshirts, hoodies. It can get really expensive to print all of that in different sizes. And when you do that, you've got to be sure that your design is what people want. It's got to be hitting, right? So what my clients do is we use print on demand. We use Printful, Merchly, Zazzle, um, CafePress. These are all companies where you can build a website, and you can build a website through Shopify, or you can use your own website that has any, cart program attached to it so that people can actually buy your stuff, pay, right? So, um, there's a multitude of ways to do it. I'm a big fan of Shopify. It's $30 a month and they've got the shopping cart already built into it. And then it attaches— I can't remember if it's Merchly or Printful, but it attaches to one of those. There's an app inside of Shopify where you can put the artwork on your merch, whatever merch you want to sell. And there is a ton of choices of products at these companies. So you could have water bottles, you could have hats, you could have all different kinds of t-shirts, all different quality of t-shirts. Um, and I'm a big fan of print on demand, not just for financial reasons, but you shouldn't have to turn a room in your house into storage or your garage into storage, or even worse, having to stand in line at the post office to, you know, to mail off merchandise a couple times a week. For me, that's a little slice of hell. So I'm a big fan of print on demand, and this is going to seem a little bit like a commercial, and I don't mean it to, but I want you guys to see an actual example. Um, we set up— actually, Rep Graphics set up Little Donald's, um, merch store. It's littledonaldshop.com, and I ordered a t-shirt from there um, last week so that you guys could see what it looks like. This is, um, a lyric from his song, um, Do Better, right? And it's a song that we put out, uh, almost exactly 2 years ago and then took it to number 20 on the urban radio charts, which was kind of exciting. It's made him a nice chunk of money. It was a hit record. Um, it could have gone further than it did, but it didn't get the chance to for reasons I won't go into detail here. But what he did was he set up a merch store and he's selling product based on the album cover. Um, other album covers that he has of merch, you can actually stream music on his merch site, but it's a way for Donald to make money other than just shows and features, touring. You know, the ways streaming, the ways that artists first start making money when they first start building their fan base. This is a great quality t-shirt. I think it's Bella Canvas. I chose a v-neck when I bought it. It's not a shirt that I will ever wear outside because it's got the n-word on it, and I'm very anti-n-word, but it's amazing merch, right? I can't remember what I paid for it. It may have been somewhere between $20 and $25. It fits real well. It's great quality. It's a double X. I haven't washed it yet, so I don't know. You know, I was with Donald this weekend in, um, we were in Cali, Colombia. I really should have done this episode with him, um, and, uh, how sad I'm thinking of it now because I just came home yesterday. Anywho, um, print-on-demand merchandise, the way that it works is they give you a price of what they charge for the t-shirt, and then you put your profit on top of that. So let's just say for the sake of example that a t-shirt is $12 at one of these print-on-demand companies, then you turn around and you sell it for $20. You keep the $8, um, profit, and then they drop ship it. They put it in a, um, in packaging. They mail it out for you so that you don't have to worry about any of that. And then they just send you the profit via PayPal. It's really a wonderful way to set up a merch site. And I noticed when we were working with Trouble— actually, Tony's the one that noticed this. Tony went on to Twitter and started, um, searching for lyrics to Trouble songs line by line. Like, how insane is that, to like go through and search every freaking line of a song, every lyric line of a song? But he did that, and he found that the most popular line from Trouble song ready was Can't Get Involved Too Deeply. So we had t-shirts made that said Can't Get Involved Too Deeply, and I realized how successful that was when I was in LA at baggage claim and I saw an older white guy wearing a t-shirt that said Can't Get Involved Too Deeply. And it was obvious to me that he was not a Trouble fan. So I went up and asked him, you know, where did you get that t-shirt? And he said he found it online. Um, we placed Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads for, um, for all of my clients do that for their stores. And at the time when we were promoting, um, Trouble Store, back when I was working with him, this guy happened to receive the, um, the ad. He saw the ad in his feed. Um, I think he said it was on his son's page, I can't remember. But anyway, he bought the t-shirt because the lyric resonated with him. He didn't even really understand that it was a lyric. He just saw the line, 'Can't get involved too deeply,' and liked it. It was a really cool design, and he bought the t-shirt. And, you know, we sold a lot of merch based on lyric, based on design. There's people that will see a shirt and they'll really resonate with how it looks, you know, the artwork on it, as opposed to what it says or who it belongs to. But it's a really great way to promote and market yourself and make income as an artist. You just have to have a fan base to do it. And that's why in some earlier videos I went hard on getting real followers and real viewers, because you can't sell a t-shirt to a bot in Indonesia or Russia. It just doesn't work. Um, so once you once you have done this for a while, you know, built your store and sold shirts, the great thing about it is it's a really wonderful way to test market what designs work. So you may find that a lyric is outselling the album cover on a t-shirt, or maybe just the artist logo across a shirt. Maybe hoodies are selling better than t-shirts. Maybe v-necks are selling better than regular shirts, right? But once you have that research and that data, you're going to be able to then go to a t-shirt pressing plant and press t-shirts that are your best sellers, take them to shows with you and sell them. And you can sell them off of a table in the back, you can sell them off the side of the stage, like however you want to do it, you can sell them. But at least you'll have an understanding of what are the most popular sizes, what is the most popular design and then you don't have any waste really. You know, I've seen so many artists press different designs and then they have to go and have a sale because they've got 100 medium-sized t-shirts in their logo that didn't sell very well, or they have to bundle them and give them away with music and with other, um, merch in order to make money. This is just a really great way to test your product. I'm a big fan of merch. It's one of the ways— the ways that artists make money earliest is the show money comes first, the streaming money comes, and the merch money comes, and then the publishing money. So make sure that you're not missing out on this stream of income. Check out these really great shirts, um, and I hope this helped you. Okay guys, go make money!
