Alice Mayshe Rowan of Mayshe-Mayshe

UK artist & producer Mayshe-Mayshe blends dreamy art-pop and lofi electronica to make her unique brand of experimental pop songs about moss, moomins & her glitchy brain.

Trainings Completed:

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. Probably just as much as making my music. I’m an artist & designer, so I design all my own merch, and making art is a big part of my music brand. You can see all my merch in my shop here!

Over the last few years I’ve done really well with selling merch at gigs. But a year ago I had to stop playing live shows due to health issues, 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 email 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 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. (See photos)

2. This was not a great result! So I decided to learn more about email marketing & I took the Email Marketing course.

3. With my new learning, I tried making another offer to my list (300 subscribers at the time), using the strategies from the email marketing course. I designed a new product (the moth t-shirt below) and planned a series of emails to sell it, including fan nurturing content & a fan vote on the design. I sold 30 shirts, so this was progress!

4. My next step 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 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. You can see my F+SH offer here!

6. This campaign went better than I could have hoped. My email list grew x4 in the 6 weeks I ran the campaign. (It did also completely take over my life while I was running it, so I’ve switched it off now while I record my new album). 

7. My next steps are to keep testing new offers to my new email list & see what kind of merch and offers work!

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 launching it, I’ve sold 700+ of my free CD offers and off the back of that I’ve sold another 300+ CDs and 50+ vinyl albums. (See photos below!)

I do also think that the moth t-shirt that I sold to my initial (pre-FSH) list deserves a mention, because it was cool to me seeing the email marketing strategies working so well, even with a small list!

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

1. I have a special edition of my Indigo album on vinyl and CD with hand-printed sleeves. This is super labour intensive, but it’s really cool being able to sell merch that is genuinely hand made!

2. In my ascension email series I give people a coupon to use for their second purchase. It gives them discount as well as 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 have 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 🙂

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 stickers or a hand made print).

• Adding a hand written thank you note into every parcel, on a postcard with my art on it.

• I wrap every order up in tissue paper, so it feels like a gift to unwrap when it arrives 🙂 

• For special 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. Hopefully this shows from the products I've already shown you here! I love making my designs and putting together great products, and I will happily put just as much time into my merch as into my music.

This year has been so cool, because now when I’m designing new merch, I know I’ve actually got an audience waiting for new things to drop. I’ve been making art since I was a teen, and this has been such a breakthrough, so it’s been a really special year.

ALL my merch is designed by me, and my merch parcels always contain something hand made by me. So it really contributes to building a personal connection with my audience.I really go the extra mile 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.

Thanks for reading all this! Hopefully some of this will be useful in your own merch planning! I’m super happy to chat about merch ideas (designing, producing, fulfillment), feel free to get in touch if you want to have a chat 🙂