Braxton Ballew of Valentine Wolfe

TRAININGS COMPLETED:

• The Buddy System
• Run A Successful Crowdfund
• Selling Tickets for Live Shows
• The $1-A-Day Traffic Plan
• Build The Perfect Artist Website
• How To Get New Fans Daily (Fan Finder)
• Fan Page Optimization
• Ones & Zeros 101
• Be Your Own Videographer
• Make Merch That Fans Want
• How To Turn Listeners Into Real Fans
• Email Marketing for Musicians
• FREE + S&H Funnel Strategy
• How To Generate Sales Year-Round
• Grow Your Email/Text List
• Spotify Field Guide

Please give us a brief overview of your merchandise strategy and offerings over the last 12 months:
www.valentinewolfe.store 
https://www.valentinewolfe.store/collections/lost-to-the-night
https://valentinewolfe.com/haunting-of-mary-shelley-free

We released two t-shirt designs, a full length album including for the first time, a run of vinyl, re-stocked two sold out CD titles due to FSH sales, offered custom song commissions, and over on patreon, delivered a monthly mixed and mastered song and a monthly online concert. We funded inventory through a successful Kickstarter (raising over $8000, after fees and dropped backers), a pre-order campaign for one of the t-shirt designs, and a grant from our local arts council.

All of our releases were timed to a 6-week promotional calendar, usually coinciding with a significant date relative to our brand. For example, our first t-shirt run featured a design based on our most popular song, a setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee. We launched the preorder campaign on Poe’s birthday in January. The campaign paid for the entire run of 100 shirts.

Our Kickstarter campaign launched on the Tuesday closed to May 24, Queen Victoria’s birthday, reflecting our fascination with the era, our lyric subject matter, and acknowledging that our fans often refer to our music as “Victorian metal”
The album that campaign funded, Lost to the Night, was officially released to our fans on October1, which we all know is the beginning of the best and spookiest month of the year.

Please describe your best selling merchandise:
By percentage, and given its relatively recent release, the vinyl edition of Lost to the Night has already sold 87 of 300 copies. The CD edition has already sold 200 copies; for us, that’s really fast! The vinyl edition has only been available for retail purchase since November 22.

The vinyl edition of Lost to the Night features a gatefold interior depicting the haunted world the music exists in. During our album launch experience, our fans learned our music exists in a shared universe, with each album represented as a haunted building.

Please describe your fulfillment process for merchandise orders:
By percentage, and given its relatively recent release, the vinyl edition of Lost to the Night has already sold 87 of 300 copies. The CD edition has already sold 200 copies; for us, that’s really fast! The vinyl edition has only been available for retail purchase since November 22.

The vinyl edition of Lost to the Night features a gatefold interior depicting the haunted world the music exists in. During our album launch experience, our fans learned our music exists in a shared universe, with each album represented as a haunted building.

Fulfillment: We’re a two person team, and Braxton’s role in fulfillment is sorting orders and preparing shipping labels. Sarah added a flair of creativity to her role of preparing and packing each order.

Each order (including our FSH) ships in a black envelope. CDs are signed and wrapped in black tissue paper. Each order included a lyric or poetry fragment, handwritten by Sarah and signed by both of us. Each order gets a unique lyric fragment: Lost to the Night orders include a fragment of Poe’s The Conqueror Worm (which was included throughout the LTTN promotion), FSH orders feature a poem by Emily Dickinson (our core offer is Only Gossamer My Gown, a CD devoted to Dickinson’s poetry), and each order also included a signed thank you message from both of us.

We continue to refine our fulfillment to reflect the branding/emotions we want to invoke; getting a Valentine Wolfe package should feel reminiscent of a bygone era.

Please describe your best strategic merch offer to your fans over the last 12 months. This would include dedicated merchandise offers, new merch launches, merch bundles, etc.
Our crowdfunded campaign for Lost to the Night. We always work to do everything to Indeprenuer specifications. When we deviate, it is usually a combination of deadlines and skill at work. When we launched the crowdfunding effort for Lost to the Night, our goal was to 1) follow the new training precisely and 2) to improve on our 2023 campaign that we did for a dark ambient instrumental album.

This process demonstrated we had more earning potential than projected, that we could afford vinyl, and that we should set a goal higher than we’d ever tried before: $7500

We raised $9368 and received a grant to support the album of $1500. Our previous Kickstarter raised $5,186. We’re very proud of the number of backers too: we increased that from 114 to 171.

We offered an online listening party to backers when the mastered audio was available. In addition, our backers received two bonus tracks, currently exclusive to the campaign and our patreon supporters.

The reason this campaign is our best yet, though, is the demolition of a “one and done” model for us, and a continued community and connection that has lasted nearly 6 months.

Lastly, please tell us why you think you should be a finalist for the Merch Maniac Award:
We received this comment from a fan on November 27

“I just received my vinyl of LTTN, and it's beyond anything I expected, even the lyric sheet. If I could have chosen which song to receive the lyrics to, "The Dead Travel Fast" would have been the one. The package is so beautiful! The bonus tracks are awesome, too. There isn't enough melodeclamation* in the world. Thank you so much”

We have a supportive community, responsive fans, and a fully stocked and paid for inventory collection of our most compelling music yet. It’s going to be difficult to top that in 2025, but that’s our current goal.

Currently, music revenue is 100% of our income. There’s some music side hustles (Braxton holds an adjunct teaching position and free-lances in local orchestras), but Valentine Wolfe accounts for 75-80% of our income/gross revenue. The band can generate enough funds to pay our bills, and our goal is to move that into secure sustainability.

And, obviously, merch sales are a great way to do that. However, our experience selling merch transformed when we focused on connection. We emphasized making our merch reflective of the world we were building. We chose to make our vinyls gatefold, for example, so people can hold the sense of melancholy grandeur that inspired us. And we wanted to reward curiosity, too (we’re already getting texts of people finding the hidden ghosts in the gatefold)

Essentially, we feel like merch design and fulfillment is one of the best parts of the job: we pay our bills by making people happy (even if, for us, happiness is a bit gloomy).

*melodeclamation: this advocacy stage fan taught us this word; it's poetry recited with orchestral/musical accompaniment, and was huge in the 9th century.