Omg Their Logo is my favorite band.
Also local bands.
The shirt material will grate your nipples off.
The shirt material will grate your nipples off.
Don’t kink shame
No shame. You do you. For some, it may be a warning, for others, it’s a suggestion.
To be fair as a local band it is really hard to make money on printing merch these days. I always try to spring for the Bella when I’m ordering but it’s like 11 dollars a shirt for one color printing and people are cheap buying it
Just gotta go the “silk screened in mom’s garage” route to pump them babies out on demand. Once you’ve made the screen, you’re golden. Pretty easy if you’re just printing out transparencies, $3 or $4 per Gildan, $8 per Bella at a craft store[1] and paint costs are negligible after initial purchase. Frankly I wouldn’t spring for anything fancy since when it comes to “how much will I pay for band merch” the quality of said article is likely irrelevant.
though you can get em half that if you shop around online, getting stuck with shirts you’ll never sell would suck ↩︎
I’ve found that streamers tend to have pretty nice merch. Unfortunately it tends to be pretty expensive because of special requirements and fairly small production runs. They also interact with the viewers directly, so complaints likely come up on stream.
It seems like Youtubers on the other hand just send a picture to a merch producer and let them deal with it.
Custom T-shirts with extremely limited runs (hundreds) cost $10. Creators are selling them for $20+. Creator merch is a scam or if you want to look at it more positively, a donation with an item in return but no items sold by a creator is even close to a reasonable profit margin.
Buying for $10 and selling for $20 is pretty reasonable. You do realize there are other costs than just material right? They aren’t taking home $10 on every sale.
I hate to tell you this but that’s exactly what stores do as well. 2x is not even a very large profit margin for some products.
You can do t-shirts for $10 with even smaller runs than that. I’ve done batches of 50 or less at $10 a pop going with a local screenprinter. This is usually 1 or 2 colors.
Some people here are saying they won’t be an ad. I get that, but I proudly wear my Darknet Diaries t shirt. I’m sure there’s a large margin that goes to Jack. But it’s worth it to me. I might get another shirt now that I’m thinking about it.
I feel differently about clothing that has the name of the clothing company on it than I do clothing that has the name of a podcast or something like that.
Exactly
If I’m paying for the shirt why do I need to do free advertising for the company I bought it from?
There’s people out there I’d gladly be ad for, Drachinifels comes to mind.
I’ll be annad for SAAb. Bring back SAAb!
The comfy in-between is references that seem broadly appropriate, and blatant in-jokes that just sound interesting. Respectively: the “you go girl” shirts with Jax on them, and bumper stickers reading “stay sexy and don’t get murdered.” You don’t have to know the thing they’re from. You don’t have to know they’re from a thing.
Omg. That is the only yt merch I’ve ever purchased. I got a shirt and a print! Big ups fellow listener!
There’s no bit of branding on there though and the artwork is pretty neat. I wish the print was higher quality though.
My opinion on this is that they’re already getting money from ads, I have no desire to wilfully turn myself into an ad for 99.9% of YouTube channels. I felt the need to clarify because, truth be told, I along with many others are already walking advertisements sometimes.
I wear band shirts, and I love advertising the shit out of them. But it feels different to advertise bands and musicians on clothing than it does most YouTube channels. The impact is something I think about: maybe I don’t feel as strongly about them because they have not been impactful in the same ways, in the sense that I still listen to music from when I was a kid occasionally (and I can’t imagine saying this about YouTubers in general).I’d probably rock classic British comedy stuff too. Anything timeless I suppose.
My opinion on this is that they’re already getting money from ads
Are they? With so many people, especially here on Lemmy, willing to go hard to adblock plus a steadfast refusal to pay for YT Premium I’d guess that most smaller YT Content Creators are getting very little ad revenue. Without Merch sales and Patreon how are they supposed to get any money to support themselves?
I understand your point about being a walking billboard and I feel the same way but these days it just feels like no one wants to contribute in any way to help support small time creators.
That’s why I go out of my way to support the Lil guys when possible. Wish more had better merch vs logo on generic t.
Milo isn’t exactly a “small” channel. Hell he averages almost a million views within 24 hours of dropping a new video these days, but Miniminuteman has some really good merch. I want his latest knee jerk Pangea hoodie, and I got myself a Sahara swimmers cave ring.
the only clothing I own with print is a band shirt from I band I really like, even then I feel a bit awkward having such a large print of something on me, I would much prefer the print was on the back of the shirt instead of the front
Tonight on stream I decided my first piece of merch will be a sleeping blindfold with the eyes of my avatar on it.
Now I only need about 15.000 more followers and 1500 more subscribers on twitch to make it actually a viable thing.
I ran a YT channel for a decade and it never gained traction, but I always imagined if we had merch then it would be something people would actually want to wear and not just yet another shirt.
Tooled leather vest, hat, belt, stylish vambrace with a little card pocket, etc.
The kind of fingerless gloves you get at hot topic except these aren’t made in taiwan so they survive more than a week of regular wear and an occasional wash cycle.
T-Shirt with some actual content like a crab monster from a videogame we streamed weekly back in the day dressed up as mr. crabs and the hunter slashing it with the speech bubble “are you feeling it now?!”
The best merch I’ve seen so far (except for LTT and GamersNexus) is by ObscurestVinyl. It’s actually something I’d buy. https://obscurestvinyl-shop.fourthwall.com/
https://crowdmade.com/collections/geminitay
GeminiTay’s merch is really cool too!
Love the deer design!
The merch of Julien Bam (german youtuber) is pretty cool, but it is its own brand rather than merch tbh.
The “titty on fire” shirt?
I’m more of a fan of the “shit your dicks off” and the “velvet chodes” shirt. Also, “Aloha, cunts!” is always a great way to great your family!
I made merch for my tiny channels but only because I really like how my profile picture looks and wanted it on a shirt for myself
Is this what narcissism is
Nah. I’ve made fake tour tshirts of my old old old high school band and given them to people.
That’s actually pretty cool, and it makes me want to form a band to make one lol
Me and my friends already have a fake band name with some fake albums under its belt, so maybe we could fake go on tour soon too
I made a few band logos for the front. On the back, for the tour dates, I used backstreet boys and Taylor Swift tour dates/locations, and just changed the years lol
And then they cost like 50 bucks. I wanna support you but I can buy at least 5 shirts for that.
Ok but like, the Linus Tech Tips merch 🔥 tho
Glad someone else said it. Conflicting opinions about Linus aside, dude makes stuff he’d want to wear/use and it shows in the quality.
I think my favorite one I’ve seen recently was for someone on Instagram. It honestly doesn’t seem like they really do anything but upload selfies so I was surprised to see they had merch…
When I went to the page it was full of $60 tshirts and $120 hoodies that just had a small monogrammed logo that was basically just their initials lol it was done in the same exact color as the shirt so it was basically invisible unless someone’s getting VERY up close and personal with you lol
I just found out it’s called professional line and it’s a thing. A streamer I watch has a mostly adult community and without fail every time he puts out a merch line there’s people asking for the professional line. Its basically the clothing blanks with no mayor logos and maaaaybe a tiny monogram somewhere that blends in.
Granted his shirts aren’t usually just solid color so a professional line makes sense, they have some sort of pattern or are dyed in weird ways and then have his art on it. He hasn’t put out merch with just his name since the early days, it’s actually cool stuff now.
most channels dont have/cant afford/gave a shit about having a product designer on board
