Taylor Bradshaw

TRAININGS COMPLETED:

• The Buddy System
• 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
• How To Create Your Brand
• 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 Profit From A Launch Campaign
• 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:
My Free+Shipping funnel primarily consists of signed CDs with pressed flowers that include a letter and a postcard. My most popular non-CD upsell is a personalized notebook with a pressed flower collage, a verse of handwritten lyrics, and a fountain pen. There are also small extras such as magnets, more postcards, signed Polaroid, evergreen tea bags, etc. in this bundle and others.

My real-time merch offerings tend to be higher-ticket, as my fans appreciate personalization, exclusivity, and scarcity. They also appreciate that I have my hand in this merch, and heat-press all of the tees and hoodies myself.

I include a letter with each real-time merch offer. These aren’t something that I promise, but rather something that I do to take this experience to the next level for customers. It makes them personal and timely, and lets them know that I’m a real human on the other side, forging a personal connection with them.

Please describe your best selling merchandise and your most unique/creative merchandise:
My best selling merch is my Free+Shipping CD offer. I’ve sent out 8,202 of these packages in the last year. They’re signed CDs of my first album, Twine, including a pressed flower, letter, and postcard.

My best selling real-time merch tends to be more “Deluxe” items. I usually offer a more affordable “Basic” option for each offer, but people seem to go with the deluxe versions, with “if I’m going to buy this at all, I might as well get the REALLY cool version” in mind.

For example, with my most recent album release, almost everyone bought the deluxe version at double the price. The basic version was just the live concert CD with digital downloads and a full concert movie download. The deluxe version had the CD signed and numbered out of 200 total, with a pressed flower and a lyric sheet on hand-made paper infused with flower pedals, prints of my drawings, and hand-signed.

I also throw in fun extras. For that release, since I had made five drawings for the lyric sheet, I randomly included those five drawings in deluxe packages during the sales run, and told them they had a chance to win one if they bought before a certain date.

Describe your fulfillment process for merchandise orders:
I’ve built a fulfillment process over the last two years as I got absolutely steamrolled by many thousands of orders.

I now employ my cousin Charlotte and my grandma to take care of my regular merch fulfillment and help with customer service. I also employ friends and other family to help out during periods where order volume is too much for the three of us to handle.

Charlotte now handles all software allocation, printing, reaching out to customers with incomplete addresses, returned packages, refund requests, post office pickups, PO box management, and sourcing overflow labor.

My grandma handles pressed flower prep, order packing, reorder alerts, and flagging manufacturing issues.

I handle all personalization, signing, creation and sourcing of products, creation of SOPs, heatpressing apparel, ordering inventory, and general tasks that they need help with.

I include asks for fans to film/photograph their unboxing experience, printed on the outside of each package. They have a QR code and also an email link for them to upload afterwards. They often post these videos themselves to social media and tag me. I also use these photos and videos to great “user generated content” montages for use on socials, my store, and FSH ads (with their permission). I’ve received 563 responses so far.

My next hurdles are refining my offers to decrease fulfillment labor, creating better SOPs for hiring overflow labor, better inventory management and sales forecasting, delegating more fulfillment labor, decreasing fulfillment mistakes, and sourcing products at lower prices as bulk sizes increase.

I also cook everyone dinner as often as possible 🙂

Please describe your best strategic merch offer to your fans over the last 12 months:
My best offer this year (other than FSH) was a surprise live album release. The concert itself wasn’t meant to be a live album, but we freakin crushed that concert, and we had multitrack audio recording and video for the night. So I made it into a release.

Though there was a basic version, the deluxe version is almost exclusively what sold. It included:
A CD of the concert, signed and numbered out of 200
A hand-signed lyric sheet with firefly drawings made on hand-made lokta paper infused with pressed flowers (I know my fans LOVE pressed flowers. And they voted in a survey to have my song Firefly as the lyrics for this)
A pressed flower
A chance to win one of my original 5 firefly drawings

Lastly, please tell us why you think you should be a finalist for the Merch Maniac Award:
I’ve moved a lot of merch this year. 8,202 packages to be exact. This has caused me to create systems of fulfillment that resemble a small business more than just little old me sending out packages.

I’ve also had opportunities to learn what my fans respond to and what they don’t. I’ve found that they love personalization, scarcity/urgency, and timeliness of an offer. They don’t like complicated offers or making a lot of decisions.

I think I’m a good candidate for the Merch Maniac award because of the sheer volume of orders I’ve received and fulfilled this year, the lessons I’ve learned, and the systems of fulfillment I’ve created.

I haven’t used a third party logistics company or print on demand. This is a fully home-grown operation through Indepreneur principles, and I now have merch fulfillment scaling experience that I’m excited to share with our community.

Thank you for your consideration.