Alice Mayshe Rowan of Mayshe-Mayshe

TRAININGS COMPLETED:

• The Buddy System
• Ones & Zeros 101
• Make Merch That Fans Want
• Email Marketing for Musicians
• FREE + S&H Funnel Strategy

Please give us a brief overview of your merchandise strategy and offerings over the last 12 months:
First of all - I REALLY love making & selling my merch, just as much as making my music. I’m an artist & designer as well as a musician, so I design all my own merch, and making art is a big part of my music brand. You can see all my merch on my shop: https://shop.mayshemayshe.com/

Over the last few years I’ve done really well with selling merch at gigs - I played to small audiences (30-80 people mostly), often as the support artist, but would often make a decent amount per night (average £200-250 per show). Then I had to stop playing live at all 12 months ago, so this past year has been all about trying to work out how to sell my merch to an online audience instead.

Here’s what I’ve done over the last year (it wasn’t so much a planned strategy, as a working-it-out-as-I-go journey, which I’m still on!)

1. I tried making an offer to my list - I knew I was going to stop touring soon, and I wanted to try selling to my email list instead of to live audiences. I’d had a lot of success with selling t-shirts with my artwork printed on them at live shows, so I released a single and made a merch bundle of a t-shirt & poster & download of the single. I emailed this offer out to my email list and sold about 3-4 bundles/ shirts. You can see this merch here.

2. This was not a great result. And I had a lot of shirts and posters left over. So I decided to learn more about email marketing & I took the Indepreneur Email Marketing course (which was great, I’d done another email marketing course before this, but the Indepreneur one made everything more accessible)

3. I tried making an offer to my existing list (300 subscribers), using the strategies from the email marketing course. I planned a product (a new t-shirt) and planned 5 emails to sell it (2 nurturing emails, then a fan vote on the shirt design, then 2 sales emails). I sold a shirt to 6% of my audience and also to some friends, and sold 31 shirts.

4. These numbers were getting more realistic to make it worthwhile to put together offers for my audience. My next focus was to grow my online audience, so I had a bigger list to sell to. I joined Indie Founder for 3 months, and Ande helped me get a F+S&H campaign launched.

5. This has been my biggest merch focus this year: getting a really great F+S&H offer together. Like I said above, I LOVE making and selling merch, so I really wanted to wow people when they got their parcel, to increase the chances as much as possible that they’d want to buy again. Here’s what I put together:

- My latest album on CD, autographed
- A free lyric poster (to show off my art)
- A free sticker (also to show off my art & people love stickers)
- A thank you note written on a post card with my art (there’s a lot of art lol)
- You can see the offer & photos on my sales page
- My bump is my first album, again signed & with a lyric poster (you can see the product here)
- My upsell is the vinyl of my latest album, which ALSO comes with a nice art insert (you can see this product here: https://shop.mayshemayshe.com/products/indigo-album-on-vinyl)

6. This campaign has gone really well! It completely took over my life while I was running it, so I’ve switched it off now, and I’m planning to do a new test offer (a new shirt) to my new (bigger) email list to see if an audience of FSH customers are interested in buying t-shirts.

7. My plan going forward is to keep testing different kind of offers with my new list. I’m releasing two new singles in the new year & I’ll try making different merch offers to go with each and see which works best.

Please describe your best selling merchandise and your most unique/creative merchandise:
In the past t-shirts have easily been my best selling product (selling at live shows). BUT this year my F+S&H campaign has totally changed this. Since September this year (when I launched my FSH campaign) I’ve sold 710 of my free CD offers and off the back of that I’ve sold another 290 CDs and 43 vinyl albums.

You can see each of these products here:

My F+S&H CD (Indigo album): https://mayshemayshe.com/free-cd-offer-030289

My bump CD (Cocoa Smoke album): https://shop.mayshemayshe.com/products/cocoa-smoke-cd

My vinyl: https://shop.mayshemayshe.com/products/indigo-album-on-vinyl

I do also think that the t-shirt that I sold to my initial (pre-FSH) list deserves a mention, because it was quite a big deal to me that 6-7% of my list bought this off the back of my email marketing. Here’s the t-shirt: https://shop.mayshemayshe.com/products/mayshe-moth-t-shirt

My most unique merch items that I’ve sold this year are:

1. A very small number of my Indigo album on vinyl with hand-printed sleeves (I’ve sold a few of these to my FSH customers which has been cool!)

2. In my ascension email series I give people a discount code for their second purchase, but besides a discount, I offer them a ‘free surprise gift, hand-made by me’. This gift is a hand-printed lino print patch (see photo). It’s got a bug on it (part of my branding! I had a song about being eaten by bugs) and it builds the idea with my audience that I’m super hands on and personal with my merch 🙂

See links for photos of most of the merch I've talked about. Here's a photo of the lino print bug patch though.

Describe your fulfillment process for merchandise orders:
I’m really proud of this bit! I am super focused on nurturing my customers by delivering them a merch parcel that will wow them, make them feel a personal connection to me, make them feel like they got lots of extra value & communicate my brand. I do this by:

Making sure my products are super high quality - I REALLY care about this, I want my merch to look like I care about it just as much as my music.

Adding bonuses into every parcel: usually this is stickers, but sometimes it’s a lino print patch.

Adding a thank you note into every parcel, on a postcard with my art on it. I hand wrote all of these till my FSH campaign got too popular to manage this. Now I have a printed thank you note (it still looks hand written though haha) for FSH customers, but I still hand-write all my other thank you notes.

I wrap every order up in tissue paper, so it feels like a gift to unwrap when it arrives 🙂 This is quite a lot of work, but people love it (they tell me!) and I think it really communicates that I care about my merch, and that it’s a high-value product.

For special orders (vinyl & high value orders) I print little bugs on the outside of my parcel, so the parcel looks special on the outside. (Bugs are part of my brand!)

Lastly, please tell us why you think you should be a finalist for the Merch Maniac Award:
I put a massive amount of time & care & love into designing and making my merch. You can see this across the products I've already shown you, and in my merch store.

I think my merch is better than most indie artists! I have an advantage here, that I love art and design, and I will happily put just as much time into my merch as into my music. And I think it shows 🙂

My merch contributes massively to my strong artist brand.

ALL my merch is designed by me, and a lot of it is also made by me (at least partly). So it really contributes to building a personal connection with my audience, when I can send them merch parcels that provide such a personal engagement with me.

I really go the extra mile (or many miles!) with merch fulfillment. It takes a lot of time, and it might not be sustainable forever, but at the moment I love doing it, because of how much it contributes to nurturing my relationships with my fans.