{"id":65731,"date":"2018-11-30T08:58:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-30T08:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/331832"},"modified":"2018-11-30T08:58:00","modified_gmt":"2018-11-30T08:58:00","slug":"put-your-merch-to-work-an-indies-guide-to-merchandise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/11\/30\/put-your-merch-to-work-an-indies-guide-to-merchandise\/","title":{"rendered":"Put your merch to work: An indie’s guide to merchandise"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u0092s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. <\/small><\/i><\/strong> <\/p>\n

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Weather Factory<\/a> – who made Lovecraftian card game Cultist Simulator<\/a><\/em>, you should buy it – recently opened a merch shop. We\u2019re a microstudio of two people (Alexis Kennedy<\/a>, creator of games like Fallen London<\/em> and Sunless Sea<\/em>, and myself<\/a>), so I wanted to see whether selling physical merch was a worthwhile side-project for an already over-busy indie team.<\/p>\n

We launched our Church of Merch<\/a> on Monday 17th September 2018. The following three-parter will take you through the deets: set-up, the merch itself and how it did in Month 1, and then some searingly insightful takeaways on, like, the ontology of enamel pins. It’ll be a zinger.<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t be bothered to read \u2019em all, my conclusion is that\u00a0if you have anybody in your team who\u2019s interested in doing it,\u00a0you should totally set up your own merch shop.\u00a0<\/strong>Read on to find out why. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

\u263d\u2605\u263e <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

TLDR: merch is just another game dev project. Be clear about what you\u2019re trying to achieve.<\/em><\/p>\n

Weather Factory has a rich, weird, jazzy IP that lends itself nicely to merchandise. I wanted to lean into this and personally design rich, weird, jazzy items (#branding). Cultist<\/em> is a niche game, so I also wanted to see if I could make merch that appeals to people who haven\u2019t heard of Cultist<\/em> as well as its core fans.<\/p>\n

This meant our stuff had to be high-quality enough to attract buyers without relying on the quality of Being From That Game You Like. This put extra pressure on initial design, but I\u00a0<\/span>hope<\/em> pays long-term dividends by enabling us to reach beyond our game\u2019s user base and generate sales from a wider, non-Cultified audience.<\/p>\n

Finally, we want to incorporate physical items into future Weather Factory games, so our merch experiment was also about market research and practicalities. Is it possible to set up and manage a merch store with only one part-time resource? What sort of items do our fans particularly respond to? Are there any types of merch which are a particular pain in the butt to make, so we can avoid them in the future?<\/p>\n

In short, and in order of importance, the Church of Merch\u2019s aims were to:<\/p>\n