This is the entire process of merchandise development.
The designs for all of our merchandise came from Charlie Webb, who we first contacted to design our cover art. We decided that she would be better suited to creating our merchandise since she has more experience in graphic design. to make it simple, we decided that we only wanted designs for black or white standard short sleeve t-shirts. Being a small band, there isn’t a need for us to have a full line for people to pick from, one or two items should do fine. As Charlie is a big music fan, she already knows a lot about band t-shirts and has seen plenty from gigs and shops. Because of this, we had faith that she would know how a good band t-shirt would look and therefore we told her that our main priority was to have our logo somewhere in the design. Below is our logo that we gave Charlie. This is what we use for promotion and on social media platforms.
Everything below is what Charlie had designed and first sent back to us.
We were very impressed with these designs and thought that they would make great merchandise. One big factor in creating this merchandise was ‘would we wear it ourselves?’. This is because our target audience is mainly males our age so we were the perfect testers. We all decided as a band that we would wear these shirts and be proud to wear them. However, we later decided that one design we wanted was to have our cover art on a t-shirt. This made the most sense as the t-shirts would be promoting the release of our EP, and most bands have t-shirts with their album art on so that their fans can represent their music. We sent Charlie our final album art and she sent us this design in return:
We thought that this t-shirt looked the most like something you would see at a show or on tour so we decided that we would go for this one in order to have a professional looking merchandise line that our fans would be proud to wear. However, to give a bit of variety, we decided that we would also go for the design below
We decided on these two designs to have a bit of contrast between them. one being the more complex design of our EP cover art, and the other being a simplified version of our logo, both unique enough to make them stand out. We then decided to use Charlie’s connections in t-shirt printing to try and get some printed, below is the correspondence that we had:
As you can see, due to the price set, we decided to only go for a limited run of the bad habit design to save money and not go overboard with the merchandise.
Because of the overall cost of printing these t-shirts, as a band we decided that it would be better if we leave merchandise until we are a bit bigger, getting more regular gigs, and making more money, as this was out of our budget. This process wasn’t a total waste though, we now have some really cool designs that we can use whenever we want and also learned some really valuable lessons. One thing we learned was that t-shirt printing is not cheap if you’re going the commercial route for it. This is because it works out cheaper for companies to print in bulk as it does smaller orders.