Make Merch First: Don’t Let Your Design Decline

The designs you put on your merch are more than just aesthetics – they are the face of your brand, event, or cause. When planning an event or new apparel drop, putting merch at the top of your to-do list makes time for the creative juices to start flowing, and gives printers like us ample opportunity to iron out any potential issues with art files or blank availability and create the best product that we can for you.

You can never start planning too early. Depending on the event or company size, you may have a room full of people voicing their opinions on merch. Give yourself time to hash those conversations out, get approvals on designs, and discuss pricing way before your event (we recommend beginning the merch process about 60 days before your event).

Rush, Rush, Rush Fees

Design creation and production scheduling are the two most time consuming aspects of creating merch. Giving yourself (and us!) plenty of time to dream up and manufacture a great product avoids rush fees, expedited shipping on blanks, and headaches.

A print shop production schedule is like a well oiled machine when working within our standard turnaround time. When a rush is applied, the production schedule must be shifted to squeeze a new job in, art departments work overtime to get useable artwork and mockups approved, and blank garment choices are either significantly decreased or much more expensive due to expedited shipping. It’s kind of like if a teacher were to teach a semester’s worth of curriculum in one week.

So plan accordingly, avoid losing profit on rush fees, and start your merch journey early.

Avoid Buzzer Beaters

Think of some of your favorite pieces of merch – whether it’s your mom’s vintage Pink Floyd tour tee, your college homecoming sweatshirt, or a really sick Oktoberfest shirt (complete with a stein wielding bratwurst front and center). Most of these great designs weren’t created the week of their deadline date.

Don’t settle on a bad design because you’re in a hurry.

This isn’t to say every design needs to be an extremely intricate full color print, some of the best selling designs are clean, simple, one color prints on a great blank. However, limited turnaround time means limited options in the design realm. So plan ahead, ask questions, and make merch a priority!

AI designs are the Starting Line, Not the Finish

With AI becoming more and more accessible, it is important to note where the use of AI is helpful in merch-making and where it creates unnecessary headaches. The use of artificial intelligence is a great starting point for design work – you can have a single idea, plug it into ChatGPT and get a plethora of avenues to adventure down. By all means, utilize AI for the brainstorming stage of your merch planning. Where AI falls short is creating print-ready artwork.

Artwork needs to be provided as vector files (EPS, Adobe Illustrator or some PDFs), or PSD files created at 300 dpi, or a high resolution jpg or png at 300 dpi and sized to print. AI artwork normally sits around 72 dpi, which is too low resolution for us to print. This means when you provide AI artwork with a 4 day rushed turnaround time, you’ve just added at least a week to production time along with artwork re-draw fees (and missed your in-hands deadline, yikes.)

Budget for real human artists to bring your design to life. Utilizing graphic designers ensures you get a great design that is unique, eye-catching, and most importantly, print ready.

Your Designs Are An Investment Opportunity

Step into any vintage shop in the area and you’ll find vintage tees and sweatshirts marked up double or triple what they were most likely sold for at the time they were made. That’s because a great design is evergreen. Graphic tees can be an investment opportunity if done right. A great example is the Star Wars: Return of the Jedi promotional teeby Lucasfilm that goes for around $5,000 on eBay today. In 1983, glow in the dark ink was extremely innovative and hard to come by. While this is an extreme example, it goes to show taking your time and experimenting with really cool designs can pay off.

Not only can a great design be monetarily valuable, merch can foster connections and help grow your business. Tees are wearable advertisements. When you see a really cool shirt out in the wild, you compliment that person, get to talking, and boom – relationship established. Make something you love, wear it with pride, and make merch first.

Already in the planning stage and want to get the ball rolling? Click the link below and let us know how we can help.

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