“The first piece of merch I ever bought was when I was seven,” smiles Carolyn Worsley, General Manager and Director at Artist First. “It was a KISS iron-on transfer at the Bendigo Show; one of those glittery silver logo ones. It was really cool.”
Founded in Melbourne in 2015, Artist First specializes in selling band merchandise online to consumers in Australia and New Zealand, while working with artists to help them sell more merch and music.
With a background in the independent record label sector, Worsley’s role as Senior Brand Manager and then Head of Marketing at Shock Records in the early-2010s saw her work across the WWE wrestling range of products.
“I went to WrestleMania and I just couldn't believe the mentality of the fans. They're just so into the merch. They're so happy to spend all this cash on this stuff. And that was when I went, wow, okay. This is a really good business. It’s making people happy. And there's good money to be made. And it's in entertainment, which is what I've always been interested in. So it kind of all led me down this path.”
Here, Worsley discusses ways to optimize merch sales, tips for marketing merch on social media, the must-dos of selling merch on tour, and much more…
What are the artists that sell a lot of merch getting right?
I think it's understanding your audience. And also having a strong visual representation of your band. So Frenzal Rhomb, for example, always work with generally the same two or three illustrators that do their artwork. And because they’ve developed those relationships over a long time the artists know what vibe Frenzal are going for, they understand their fan base. They know they want it to be a bit cheeky and funny and irreverent.
Same with Cosmic Psychos – again, it's a little bit cheeky and funny. But it's very uniquely Australian, because they're from the country, they're always referencing that. It's very representative of who they are as a band, as well as their fans.
And do you see any particular lines of merch consistently performing well?
T-shirts generally always sell best. It's kind of a no-brainer for the band and the fan. I think it's what they're expecting when they go to the show. They’re ready to buy a T-shirt.
That said, winter it’s hoodies, long sleeves… Metal will sell more long sleeves; indie will sell more tote bags. Podcasts you might sell more tote bags, or posters are even kind of back in at the moment – posters and signed posters.
You’ve got fashion trends to consider as well. So T-shirt cuts change. Used to be tighter now it's baggier. People want more vintage looking boxy cut stuff at the moment, faded, stonewash. Even distressed – we did a band, I think it was Korn, where they wanted holes in the T-shirt and stuff like that. So generally speaking, it's a T-shirt. But within that there's so many variations.
Is there much of a market for limited edition merch?
Always. Fans always want something special.
We do a lot of skateboards, which are limited edition. Sometimes we'll have a number on them and people will email and say, “Can I get number one?”
So limited edition is really big, and I think it's only getting bigger. Because everybody's conscious of wastage and leftovers. So a lot of people now do limited merch drops where they'll just take orders for a 24-hour period and then cut it off, and then they just produce exactly what they need. And the fans know that you get one shot to order that and then it's gone.
"Limited edition is really big, and I think it's only getting bigger."
In terms of marketing merch on social media, are you finding any one platform more effective?
I think Instagram is the most effective for us at the moment.
Instagram’s good because it has big photos. Product photos being nice is a big selling factor. If we can have a photo of a T-shirt, like the actual finished product on a human being, it’s always going to perform better, get more likes, get more purchases, than a mock-up of a T-shirt that's been made in Photoshop on a flat background.
People want to see what the real finished product looks like.
And quality is important to consumers as well. They want it to be a nice T-shirt. They want to know how it fits. And I guess for young people, trends are important. So they want to know what the T-shirt looks like as well.
And even with vinyl, if you've got the actual finished vinyl here, on release, we'll always try and post a photo of the actual thing on Instagram as well. Because sometimes the color might be slightly different to what the mock-up looked like when it went to the pressing plant, especially for splatters and marble colors and things like that, which the fans love.
Facebook is good because you can directly have the link next to the image. Whereas in Instagram, you have to do ‘link in bio’, or now you can tag products, which helps, but it's still a few clicks to get to the actual checkout.
We don't do a lot with TikTok, we don't do a lot with Twitter.
The other big thing is Spotify – people are selling merch on Spotify. And that makes a lot of sense. They're listening to music, they're scrolling on their phone, they see the merch and they're like, I'll buy that. So we get a lot of sales through Spotify.
If an artist asks for your input on their merch line, what are some of the key pieces of advice you offer?
Think about the seasonality – what's the right garment for the time? Thinking about what it looks like on a display wall at a show, especially if it's for a festival.
If you're on a wall that's at the back of a festival tent with 50 other bands, it's good to have something that's big and bold and easy for somebody to see, at night especially.
If it's for online, [a design with a lot of intricate detail] might work great, because you can zoom in on your phone, get that detail and see what it is. But it's also about thinking, where is this merch going to be sold?
The main thing is really not to overwhelm people with choice. You don't need to have 20 pieces in a merch drop. It’s kind of like the Netflix effect, you just keep scrolling, because there's so many things to choose from. And then you can't decide.
People go like, I’ll come back to it later, it's too hard, I can't decide, I'll talk to my friends about it, and then I'll see. And then they don't end up buying anything because they forget and they've spent all their money on groceries or whatever.
Three or four items, maybe five is all you need. That's enough.
"Think about the seasonality – what's the right garment for the time? Thinking about what it looks like on a display wall at a show, especially if it's for a festival."
We’ve talked about social media marketing, but how important is having your own database that you can target directly?
Very important. It's the number one thing.
Social media platforms come and go. They're great tools and they're free and they're immediate and they have such a big reach and that's awesome. But MySpace was around, and that's gone.
So if you've got your fans’ emails, that's the number one thing, because then you can market to them for tickets, you can market to them for albums, you can market to them for merch, you have their direct contact for all of those things. So I think that's invaluable.
We just did an email newsletter for Rancid over the weekend, which wasn't about much at all, it was just a teaser for a new song that's coming. But when I looked at the stats I would say at least 50% of people had opened it within eight hours. So you know that those fans are interested in that content.
And as long as you target it, and pay attention to who's signing up and who's unsubscribing and make sure that you keep it fresh, it's the best tool you can have.
When it comes to the logistics of selling merch on the road, what are some of the key pieces of advice you would offer artists?
Get organized early.
It’s really important when it comes to tour, because you can't move those deadlines. The show day is the show day. And things take time to make and deliver. And it's a little bit tricky, because a lot of venues aren't open during the day.
So you need a little bit of leeway for couriers not being able to deliver, or the manager says they're going to be there cleaning out the beer lines or whatever, but maybe they've gone for a smokeo. So things can go AWOL very easily.
So being organized early is the number one thing I would stress.
Good communication on the road really helps as well. So if you have a tour manager or a merch seller that's traveling with you, if they can communicate with the merch company after each show, even just send the figures of what you sold, then we can keep on top of reprinting or top-ups, or there's too much of this design, let's mark it down for the rest of the run so that we can try and move it, or whatever it is. That really helps.
If you can also make sure that you have a proper sales sheet, which has all your quantities, the dollar value of what you sold – all that data that you collect at every show you can use to forecast for your next tour and you can see if you're trending up or down, you can see what designs have worked, what hasn't worked.
It's just about keeping good records. And once you do that forecast and that sales sheet, it's just a matter of updating it each time. So having that good template at the start really helps you ongoing. Putting in the work at the start of the tour makes it much easier as you go along.
"Digital printing is probably one of the bigger innovations of the past five years."
Have there been any innovations in the last couple of years that have really helped you do business?
There are a few things that have happened recently that have helped in the merch world.
So digital printing is probably one of the bigger innovations of the past five years. That's helping those smaller bands to have fresh merch each time at a lower cost.
Once you're selling a lot of merch, it's easier, you can do screen printing and have 10 colors and still make a profit. But if you're just starting out, and you only need 20 T-shirts, before that was really hard to do. But now with digital printing, it's a lot easier.
And the quality of digital printing has really improved in the last two to three years, the machines are now a lot better, it looks a lot nicer. It used to kind of wash away a lot more quickly than screenprint. Now you can get better machines where the print lasts longer.
The other one in terms of banking, there's now new systems like Airwallex and Wise where you can make international payments a lot easier with less fees. So that's really helpful for international artists touring, just saves everybody a bit of banking admin and costs.
In terms of conversions, Shopify was a big game changer for merch selling, it made it a lot easier for people to set up their own web store and things like that. And it's still really the marquee program that everybody uses.
And now I think a lot of the postal services are catching up with that, and making sure that they improve their online systems to integrate with web platforms.
Visit Artist First here. Follow Carolyn on LinkedIn here.
