 So one of the biggest misconceptions musicians have about merchandise is that they think about it like any other product or even worse like it obeys the rules of music marketing itself. But music merchandising has its own rules and the weirdest thing we see in this day and age compared to days before is you can see music artists where their merch is doing a lot of converting new fans as they become a fashion brand people who are barely fond of their music well done just because the fits look good and it ends up spreading the word about the artist music and funding their musical endeavor but whether you have zero or 10,000 fans and want to sell merch to them let's remember that one merch is a walking or standing advertisement for you that shows that a person endorses you so if someone is willing to wear or display that merch in their social media or walking down the street it's getting more people to see you as someone they should know about selling merch and doing what you can to make sure people get their hands on it is one of the best and easiest ways to get the word out about your music and the extra effort is often rewarded with that and you get the reward of money which let's be honest isn't always the case when you're putting out music. Merch is also one of the more lucrative ways to fund your music and it definitely beats streams so enabling it to fund you is crucial but the second misconception is the myth that merch costs tons of money to make which is an obsolete idea now that POD aka print-on-demand technology has made it so that you all you have to do is upload a design and you could begin to get paid for what you do with no money down so don't get it all worked up that it's going to cost you tons of money down since the only upfront cost is making a good design which many people can do themselves and here's the thing we live in a society that is shallow as it has evidence by the 10 million memes that exist in this world that mock that people wear merch of ours they don't even know well that's a thing the fact is merch is both a virtue signal meaning that fans will wear it to show others they love the music and they're part of the culture around this design and they want to meet other people who do even if they don't know three songs from the artist and you know this is the guy who has tattoos of his favorite musicians documentaries tattooed prominently on his body because i want to make sure no one who loves the 1975 can ever miss out on the chance to hear me go incessantly on and on about them at a bar but while merch can be signaling you're a part of a club a lot of people are trying to just look cool and this is good news for you even when you're an unknown artist since if you make great designs you could sell merch even when people have yet to become super fond of your music and may even think it's borderline trash and i say this is someone who's run merch lines that have sold hundreds of thousands of items i mean there's even articles written about merch lines of bands i've managed here's the weirdest thing though is one of the weird things people say about modern musicians is they're more of a merch line than a band well that's because if your merch game is good well a lot of people will wear it despite the fact that they may not be enthused about your music i mean let's go back to the 1975 they're my favorite band i have a tattoo of them and i don't wear their merch much despite this uh video because i don't love the band's designs but if they did better ones i'd wear more but i wear tons of merch from this band honey whose hat i wear in every video who i don't love as much as the 1975 but they have great designs so here's the funny thing musicians do and you should really listen right now because this is a concept that will help you a lot in life if you recognize and fight against it so there's this study called dunning kruger and it basically says that when you're a dumbass you think everything looks easy and even though you haven't studied a subject much you feel like you got it figured out already but when you're super smart you realize that people can be experts to such minute detail all sorts of small subjects and it's important to talk to experts so i'm going to tell you a bunch of knowledge i know as someone who has literally run merch companies that have sold hundreds of thousands of shirts and when i talk to so many of you you think this stuff obviously must not apply to your genre or you think you clearly know better because well you're part of that dumbass equation in the dunning kruger thing but i'm here to tell you i know this because i've worked in it for well over a decade and had a lot of success selling hundreds of thousands of units so please listen so let's first talk about the number one way to sell a bunch of merch even when you have a few fans just as a great song is the best marketing tool that makes all your marketing go easier a great merch design does the same in fact there's nothing that beats a great merch concept at moving units but so many musicians either put no effort in designs or think trying hard is for losers or really can't be trouble to put much thought into it but here's the reality if you're out playing shows or people see your merch and it looks good more people will buy it just remember every time you're selling one you're selling an advertisement for someone else to buy it but if you just go in ms paint and do the comic sands it's not going to work out well you need to research what the rest of your community does and put out quality merchandise that matches it or really exceeds what other people are doing and this is often by doing tons of drafts and working on ideas and designs and studying other people until you've really latched in and figured out what your audience would want to see from you and giving them sick designs that they would want to wear i'm going to be frank that can often mean drafting 10 20 or even 50 ideas before you have one that's really going to do numbers i should say this there's room for cheaper merch if a lot of your fans are poorer teenagers well having a low ticket item that isn't on the best planks can really help your sales so not every piece of merch needs to be your piece of resistance of art but there are some things that do help sales a lot one using good blanks which if you're just blank shirts if you don't know what i mean or whatever type of merch you're selling you know brands like canvas or the good quality gilded ones or any of those that start to knock off the american apparel style you will be sure to have more people buy it since music fans buy a lot and take note of the higher quality stuff that looks better on their stories when they're trying to make that e-girl fall in love with them it's not gonna happen and two making the design a real banger that looks really good and here's what i mean like i said one of tricks point never aren't even in the top 50 of my favorite ours but when i saw this fit i had to cop it because it looks amazing duela lipa is great but i would wear 20 more charlie xcx shirts before hers but let's be honest this is a look and the spice girls really only have two great songs but when i saw this bootleg that matched up choking victims classic record cover for no gods no managers and the spice girls well i had to have it thereby proving my point shallow people like me who care about looking cool will buy your merch if the design is sick even if you're not their favorite band so think about what you would think is sick and make designs around it but that was a perfect time to take a quick break before the next tip and teach you about a tool where you can actually sell merch directly from your link in bio and where you can easily and quickly create and sell digital merch for your fans koji is the first e-commerce platform purpose built for social media with tons of apps for selling products digital and physical to your fans koji is totally free to use and customize and you could be selling merch in minutes no website or Shopify type platform needed for physical merch i'd recommend koji's sell physical products feature just add an image description or price and boom you've got a merch store in your link in bio it works best with non-sized merch like hats posters pins stickers signed photos you get the idea but don't stop at physical merch use koji's sell digital products feature to add digital merch items for your fans as well the possibilities here are limitless you can sell digital vip packages printable album art and posters printable sheet music desktop and phone backgrounds song books album liner notes ebooks about literally anything your journey as an artist for example or short pdf guides to teach fans inspiring musicians the things you've learned along the way you can easily make a lot of these items in canva or even repurpose some of your existing artwork and designs for people to buy download and print at home koji also makes it easy for musicians to sell lots of other stuff too like bonus audio tracks live recordings or sample packs with their locked audio feature or sell photos and videos to your super fans with koji's locked photo or locked video features you can even sell custom video or audio to your fans with shout out or audio inbox just like cameo right from your link in bio trust me you need to jump on koji you'll thank me later so head to the description or to with koji dot com that's w i t h k o j i dot com but really click my link in the description or start selling with koji today it's easy and it comes with the world's most powerful link in bio for musicians built right in literally what are you waiting for okay so let's say you solve the first part of this problem you got some great looking merch and i can't impress the poly use enough since i know some of you think you know it all and this what i'm about to say is not going to make a difference but trust me i have seen it putting a good-looking person in your merch and photographing it hanging on them in a way that gets people horned up sells more merch than anything aside from a great design on a great blank when people can envision themselves looking that good even if they look nothing like that model it sells more merch and that tiny bit of effort to take a picture of someone in that merch truly improve sales sometimes between 10 to 50 percent in my experience and i'm not kidding you i've literally taken two hours to switch merch stores over to irl photos from mockups and watch the money machine go okay so that the next thing we need to do though is acknowledge there's like so many people competing for your customers dollars there's regular fashion brands then there's other artists hell even meme accounts are making fire merch and i buy a ton of it so one way to try to encourage people to buy more of your merch is to make it scarce mean use what the kids call drops and only make the merch available for a short time so for example you can advertise a drop happening and say things are only going to be for sale for a week or less now the trick here is you could then move some of the best performing designs to your main store with where you permanently sell them and the designs that didn't do so well can get retired or even brought back later but doing drops creates the feeling of missing out so people are more prone to act fast and buy your merch now instead of thinking about the decision because they know that decision may be made for them when your merch goes away okay so but after we got good looking merch we know how to create demand and pictures of it where do you sell it i truly feel Shopify is the best option and i've explained why in a previous video but let me go deeper since this video is about selling more merch and here's the funny thing while there are a lot of details to upping your merch game the best news i tell every musician is there's a lot of terrible things about being musicians day but the best news is that there's often a tool that could get their jobs done simply and effectively and require far less effort than just five years ago never mind 20 years ago if you work smart you can work less hours and that's exactly what Shopify enables Shopify has really good integrations with printify and printful where you don't have to pay for any merch up front you can do prints on demand designs what i really love about them is as integrations with Spotify and YouTube so while people are enjoying your music and are most likely to be the people who are going to actually want to buy your merch they can see it on your Spotify on your YouTube if you enable it and have it right there staring them down while they're enjoying your music when they could see your sick fits that you have available for them to show everyone how much they love your music and the emotion they're feeling right now and no other merch platform can do that since visibility is a lot of selling merch that makes your merch visible and it's really easy to do and as i explained in my video on Shopify i actually think it's the best platform to build a musician's website which also saves you that money for not having to build a separate website but the other reason i love Shopify is they really make it so much easier to sell more merch since they have easy to use integrations to email people who abandon their cart or email the customers who've already brought from you or retarget with ads the people who've come to your site now i know some of you don't believe me that email is the most effective way to sell merch but yet again i'm someone who's done this before and i can tell you no matter what your genre or demographic your fans are in email sells merch so i want you to repeat after me and realize you don't know what you're talking about if you don't think that's true since everyone i know agrees about this going hard on emails to sell merch is one of the most effective ways you can sell it and truly getting emails at shows of people who are enthused about you or in exchange for rare tracks from your most dedicated fans where you give away an alternate version of them and download it in exchange for an email gets you emails where you can show those fans who most love you what you have to sell and how they could support you is how you sell a lot of merch and truly after everything else is in place there is no more effective way to sell more merch than those people who are passionate enough to give you your email and sending them a picture that looks good of your merch so here's the thing you should now watch my video on Shopify so you get the whole picture which is this video right here so make sure you watch that next if you really want to level up