TWE: Merchandise
“I couldn’t sell water in the desert.”
Matty Kerr
Matty Kerr is co-creator with John Brancaccio of The Working Experience. Check out our website, theworkingexperience.com, for podcast episodes, videos, blog posts and merchandise. You can also find us on Twitter, Linked In, Instagram and Facebook.
The brand, the brand, the brand! It’s all about promoting the brand.
Marketing baby, marketing!
Full Disclosure: I did not invent the concept of marketing; it’s been around for a while.
Budweiser is no better than Schlitz. Everyone has heard of Atari but no one remembers Colecovision. Hilary Clinton was obviously the more qualified candidate but Donald Trump is President.
Marketing works. A great ad campaign will push an inferior product over a superior product any day of the week.
It’s all about promotion.
I love doing the podcast. I love doing research, having guests on, coming up with new ideas and formats. I find it very fulfilling.
But I would also like to make money from it. Not a huge amount; not a necessarily the $100 million Joe Rogan was paid by Spotify for his podcast. But I would like to be able to make a living from it.
We, John and I, have laid out a fairly substantial amount of money over the last three years and we do have monthly expenses to keep the website and the podcast going.
I would, at some point, like to see a return on that investment. In order to do that we need to grow the brand which means getting a bigger audience. In order to get a bigger audience we need to promote ourselves, which costs money. It’s the old, “You got to spend money to make money” situation.
Merchandise is an age old method of promotion. I remember the shirts for my Little League baseball team having the name of a local auto-body shop on the back.
First, we needed to have products to sell. For that we hired a designer to create a logo and image for a t-shirt, for which she charged us $1,000. It seemed rather steep but she produced a great image for us which we call Homo Industrious. It shows a creature crawling from its primitive stage to sitting behind a desk to then finally lying dead on the other side of the desk. I think it is very funny and quite apropos of our ethos.
(Side note: we paid a junior designer a lot less to do another t-shirt and it is not very good. You get what you pay for.)
We then set up a Shopify “store” to sell merchandise with The Working Experience name, which is linked to the website. It costs $30 a month to keep it live. We pay another vendor to print the t-shirt and to fulfill the order (shipping and handling).
At this time, we have available on Shopify the Homo Industrious t-shirt for $19, a trucker hat with The Working Experience logo for $26.50; a Hard in the Paint tank top for $29.50 (this is the crappy one, the font and the pciture look terrible); a Meditation Hoodie for $44.50; and a Homo Industrious Hoodie for $39.00.
However, I think we need to make some serious adjustments to our product line.
I would like to lose the hoodies; they are way too expensive and I just can’t see a demand for them. The tank top needs to go as well. Seriously, who is going to pay almost $30 for a tank top?
I think, for now, we need to keep it simple: t-shirts, hats, mugs. We also need to cut the costs; nothing for more than $10. I realize that this means we will barely make any money from the products. If, for example, we sell a t-shirt for $20 we make about $6 after costs. If we cut the prices in half we will make less than $3 per product.
But I see more value in the exposure rather than making a profit from the products themselves. Companies give away swag for free all the time to get the name of the brand out there; we need to do the same. If and when we have a live event, I imagine that part of the promotion would be free stuff. People love free stuff.
I am a terrible salesman. I hate trying to talk people into things. If I had to sell insurance or real estate for a living, I would starve. Trying to sell people stuff that they really don’t need or want feels cheap and tawdry.
But I love The Working Experience; we are truly invested in it. I see value in it as something I helped create that people might enjoy.
I am proud of it.
