We had the merchandise meeting, such as it was, and I learned something about branding from a football story
Tuesday, Evening, the Guitarist’s Flat
We held what the drummer insisted on calling a merch meeting. It took place on the guitarist’s sofa and the agenda was a bin bag.
In the bin bag: eleven T-shirts. Black, with the band’s name in white, slightly off centre because the bass player’s mate did them in his garage and the screen slipped. Nine are medium. One is small. One is an extra large that has been to every gig for two years and never found its person.
Also in the bag: forty-odd badges, a stack of stickers that have fused into a brick, and a single tea towel. Nobody can account for the tea towel.
The Economics
Here is something people outside music do not know. Most small bands make more from T-shirts than from playing. The door money goes on petrol. The streaming money is a rumour. The shirt is the wage.
So the meeting had a point. We go to Ireland in November with three gigs and eleven shirts. If we sell them all at a tenner, that is a hundred and ten quid, which is the ferry.
The drummer thinks we should order more and put the price up. The bass player thinks we should do a new design. The guitarist thinks we should do nothing, because doing things costs money. I think we should do a small run of something good and not pretend to be a clothing company.
The Football Thing
I do not follow football. My dad does, loudly. But I saw a NewsThump piece this week that even I understood: “‘Sheikh Mansour Airlines’ is a completely legitimate sponsor, insists Man City”.
The joke, as far as I can make out, is about clubs being sponsored by companies that happen to be connected to the people who own the club, and everyone having to keep a straight face about it. NewsThump has simply taken it one step further and named the airline after the owner. The club, in the piece, insists there is nothing to see.
It tickled me because it is the exact opposite of our problem. They have a shirt and too much money to put on it. We have a shirt and none. Nobody is queuing up to sponsor nine mediums.
Selling Out, a Short History
Punk has always had a funny relationship with merchandise. On the one hand, you are supposed to be against commerce. On the other, the whole thing was started in a clothes shop on the King’s Road by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
My position is this. Selling a shirt you made yourself, to someone who just watched you play, at a price that covers the cloth and your bus home, is not selling out. It is the oldest trade there is. Here is a thing, I made it, do you want it.
Selling out is when the shirt exists and the band does not. When the logo is on a high street rail and the kid wearing it could not name a song. I have seen our kind of bands on T-shirts in shops that would not let our kind of people through the door.
The Design Argument
The bass player had drawn something. It was a pigeon wearing a studded collar. I will be honest, I loved it. The drummer said pigeons were “a bit obvious for London.” The bass player asked what he would suggest. He said a skull. We all looked at him.
The pigeon won. We are doing thirty, in a spread of sizes this time, because I put my foot down. Two small, eight medium, ten large, ten extra large. People who come to our gigs are not, on the whole, medium.
The bass player’s mate will do them in his garage again. We have asked him to clamp the screen.
Wednesday, Break at Work
Costed it. Thirty shirts, blanks and ink, comes to about a hundred and twenty. If we sell them at twelve, we need ten to break even. I have written this on the back of my hand because I do not trust the drummer to remember it at the table.
Read the funnies. The London Prat is good on the daftness of money in football, and I spent a happy ten minutes in its English satirical news on football sponsors before wandering, for obvious reasons, into the UK satirical news about band merchandise. I get the American view from Bohiney Magazine, where the stadiums are named after banks and nobody blinks.
The thing that gets me about that sponsor joke is the word “legitimate.” It is always the tell. Nobody who is doing something normal has to insist it is legitimate. We have never once had to issue a statement that our T-shirts are a completely legitimate T-shirt.
A Decision on the Tea Towel
It is going on the merch table in Dublin with a sign that says “one only.” I think it will be the first thing to sell. There is always someone.
The extra large is coming too. Third tour. I have a feeling about Cork.
The drummer has asked if he can have a shirt for free. I told him he can have one at cost, like a legitimate business.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
