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!

Dan W. and Guitar

Originally uploaded by getcultstatus

Being busy is good for me, but not so good for a waning blog audience.

I/we have completed quite a bit of work recently (photography, screen printing, graphic and web design, etc) -which explains the lack of blogging.

Here’s a photo I took and edited of a local artist, Daniel Wieken, for his website that will be launching shortly.

As promised a while back, I’m about to upload a series done for an Irish rock band, The Langer’s Ball.

This links over to the CULT STATUS flickr account, so feel free to browse more.

More soon,
-Alex

Have a good time and stay safe!

Update: Cult Status has received an inordinately large amount of design and screen printing work, thus explaining my lack of ability to blog much. I’ve re-structured some duties around the shop and will hopefully have more time to get things back up to speed in the blog front after the weekend.

I’ve known people in the past who have been squeamish about spending the money on the posters, whether it was because they are so limited-use, or they just didn’t see the value in them. I can honestly say that I don’t blame you if you have shared this sentiment. I know I have –both back when I used to promote events, and sometimes even now as a screen printer.  The fact is, they aren’t very cost effective as a marketing tool, and they’re certainly not too big of a money-maker for a lot of print shops either.

… but that was BEFORE you started reading cultBLOG!

It has always been interesting to me that high-quality posters/prints can be sold for between $1-5/poster (depending on quantity, # of colors, complexity of registration, etc.) to the band (who then uses them for marketing purposes) and then can be sold on ebay for $20 each after the show. It’s kind of nuts and I’m here to put a stop to it!

By all means, use screen printed posters for your band’s marketing. They look great and demand attention, and all that good stuff… but what I am really concerned about is using the posters as merchandise. It seemed like a few years back, there was some craze that involved art-deco and vintage absinthe posters bedecking the apartments of pretty much everybody I know. I think the time is ripe to do that with rock posters.

If you’re serious about running your band like a business, it’s imperative that you have a diversified offering of merchandise and music for sale. Having a couple rad posters for sale is a great thing to offer at the show, but is also something that would do VERY well online. In addition to your website, you might look into listing some posters on ebay under the art section, possibly getting them listed on Etsy or other indie websites that specialize in hand-made or unique products and perhaps you could even try framing them and trying to get them into local shops.

Any way you cut it, screen printed posters hold the potential for being mid to high-ticket items for bands willing to use them as merch. The other added bonus is they will typically carry a much bigger profit margin compared to the typical 50%-100% mark-up of most merch.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was dealing with all sorts of drama with buying my first house. On top of that, I’ve got a lot of heavy design work in the pipe, so this week has been full of stress and lacking in sleep.

…and cultBLOG suffered.

More blogs to come starting monday and I promise that there will actually be some. (I’ve already stared writing one or two)

see you on Monday

-Alex

Image via Wikipedia

The problem for many bands is that embroidered patches typically have to be bought in pretty large runs and can be fairly expensive. The Punk scene had a very simple alternative to this, which is to take a piece of material (usually canvas, but anything will do) and they would print their logo on it. The patches were often attached by safety pins, or sometimes sewn on by hand.

Our conversation got me thinking about how the punk patch is a really great and cheap way to expand your merchandise line. Because of the printing process, it’s possible to make several designs and/or sizes of patches which means that you can expand the merch line by several different patches for the same cost as one. You can’t do that with a T-shirt!

If you’re looking to expand your line, or if you just want something a little outside the ordinary, I recommend checking out the punk patch.  Pricing on patches like this can easily be in the $0.10-$0.20 per patch without having to purchase thousands of patches. In fact, you can get about 20 sheets of patches for that price which leaves you more money for marketing or other merchandise –always a good thing.

Contact Us if you have more questions about ordering some punk patches for your band.

In the meantime, you can check out the MPLS pops website www.mplspops.org

The website still has some updating after my client sends some more information, but it’s currently in a usable state in time to send out some newsletters.

I’m still dealing with some house-purchasing drama (inspectors and appraisers, etc.), while at the same time getting a ton of design/print work done for the new portfolio. I should have something up this week to post to the “The Process” category.  The Langer’s Ball and The Minneapolis Pops have provided me with some good portfolio opportunities. More on that this week! (drama not withstanding)

Expect some major updates to GetCultStatus.com as well –in the medium term– including some better information and interactivity with portfolio, pricing and purchasing information.

More soon!

-alex

Image via Wikipedia

I’m the process of trying to purchase our first house and are having some issues with the city inspection requirements possibly exceeding the value of the house –which makes for an unfavorable lending situation for banks (especially during a housing crisis).

More posts to come next week.

Happy Weekend!