I’ve had the distinct pleasure and honor working with The Minneapolis Pops for a couple seasons now. The Mpls Pops is a professional orchestra, mostly comprised of musicians who are also employed with the Minnesota Orchestra and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, that plays free concerts for Twin Citians. Over the years, the Mpls Pops Orchestra has managed to really pull in a very large audience to their performances. They tend to attract people from various demographic groups, and because they often play outdoors, they tend also attract passers by.

Since they are a completely FREE endeavor, they rely heavily on the support of local and big businesses, the Musicians’ Trust (a trust fund that gets paid into when people buy CDs), and of course merch merch merch.

They have been offering the same great merchandise for years. Thousands of people sport the Hanes Beefy-T with the Pops logo on the left breast… which can also be a problem. When everybody has the same shirt (the Pops have three color variations), what else is there? It forces the merch sale to stop at one shirt –or for the die-hard supporter, you can get one in each color.

This year we added a Canvass Tote Bag to the mix. We designed the bag to include many of the graphic elements found in their logo and on their new website. We kept the navy/light blue in their logo which had a refined look against the tan color of the canvass. The new merchandise was a hit. In fact, after only three performances in two weeks, they cruised through almost all of their inventory.

This sends a clear message to those with an established audience –whether you are a band, orchestra, or even a t-shirt label or small business: When you have a built-in audience that wants to support you, you have to give them new options. For most bands, this means that in addition to having your logo on a shirt, you should vary your merchandise offerings. Sometimes, you might want to change the design of the shirt, sometimes you might just want to keep the same design but put it on another product, and most of the time you might want to do both.

It’s always good to learn from the successes and failure of others. I’m glad this worked well for The Minneapolis Pops!