For ecommerce businesses, the benefits of creating your own merchandise go beyond the money you make from sales. It’s also a valuable marketing channel.
According to the Marketing Rule of Seven, a potential customer has to encounter your brand’s marketing between five and seven times before making a purchase decision. Every hat, tote, or sticker you sell is an opportunity to build brand awareness.
Read on for a step-by-step guide to creating merchandise to sell in your online store.
What is merch?
Merch refers to products businesses sell to promote their brand, including T-shirts, tote bags, hats, coffee mugs, water bottles, books, and much more. The product design for merch typically includes a business’s logo and brand colors.
People wearing your merch rep your brand identity wherever they go. Some even share their endorsement on social media, as is the case for comic book store Revenge Of.
“We have a lot of branded merch that people tag and share when they’re at conventions or other signings,” cofounder Joe Myers says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We have tote bags, and people reuse those and then tag those.”
How to create your own merch
- Source merch ideas
- Develop your merch design
- Make your merch or find a supplier
- List and promote your merch line
Here’s how to design merch that appeals to your target audience:
1. Source merch ideas
For merch ideas your audience will love, consider asking your customers directly—via surveys or social media.
“They’ll tell you things they are and aren’t interested in,” Epic Gardening founder Kevin Espiritu says onShopify Masters.
He says customers are often very clear with their demands.
“Just offer them the thing that they’re asking for—or maybe sometimes even begging for,” he says.
Kevin cites the example of a content creator famous for viral aquarium videos who created her own merch line: quirky aquarium kits for kids.
Consider merch ideas that directly complement your core product. For example, wine retailer Vinovore sells a branded bottle bag that meets an immediate need customers have when buying wine.
2. Develop your merch design
If you don’t have previous design experience, you might collaborate with an artist who can create unique merch designs for you.
For fish sauce brand Red Boat’s tote bag, Tracy Pham, the company’s chief flavor officer, says that partnering with an artist helped them capture the brand’s cultural essence.
“For the tote we partnered with Stacy Wyn, who is an illustrator up in Seattle. We wanted to do something fun,” Tracy says in an interview. “It’s called the Vietnamese Kitchen Friends Tote, so there’s all of these tools that you would probably find in your mom or your grandma’s kitchen.”
Whether you choose to lead with your logo or commission new artwork, your merch design should capture your brand’s values, mission, or identity in a way that fans enjoy.
3. Make your merch or find a supplier
To find a supplier, first determine how you want to create products for your merch line. For fully custom merch, find a manufacturer who can meet your specifications.
Consult a manufacturing directory like Thomasnet or Sourcify, create a shortlist of potential partners, share your designs, and gather quotes. Ask manufacturing candidates about their quality control, lead times, minimum order quantities, and setup fees, and establish a cost per unit. Before you commit, review samples to ensure the products are up to your standards and match expectations.
For a simpler approach, use a print-on-demand (POD) service to have your merch made and shipped to order. With this approach, there’s no upfront cost, no inventory you have to store, and fulfillment is automated. When choosing a POD supplier, select one that integrates with your ecommerce store, so customers can make purchases directly. Gelato and Printful are two POD services that integrate with Shopify stores.
4. List and promote your merch line
Once your merch store is live, consider running a dedicated marketing campaign to promote it. Post about it on social media, and include it in your email newsletter.
Consider how Canyon Coffee shows off their merch on social media platforms. For the brand’s new diner mug, they shout out their artist collaborator and share a series of images showing the mug in home contexts.
You can also enlist your customers to create and share user-generated content. For example, former CEO of Ouai, Hannah Beals, says on Shopify Masters that the brand rewards customers with loyalty points when they tag the brand in photos of themselves wearing merch.
On another episode ofShopify Masters, Elavi cofounder Michelle Razavi says that resharing customer posts prompted even more customers to post in the hopes they would be featured. This gives the brand a continuous flywheel of content.
Create your own merch FAQ
How much does it cost to create your own merch?
The cost of selling merch online depends on your production and distribution method. Print-on-demand services generally have no upfront costs. Ordering custom merch from a manufacturer usually requires a minimum order quantity, and the costs are higher, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the product type.
Is print on demand a good way to start a merch business?
Print on demand is a good option for starting a merch store because you incur costs only for the items that you sell, which means you avoid paying for shirts, mugs, or hoodies that nobody buys. The downside is that your profit margin may be lower than buying custom products in bulk due to the fees charged to print and ship your merch items.
