Launching Merch / Online Shop

Good Morning! Happy Tuesday! I’m writing this blog from the cafe, playing Voxtrot’s “Early Music” album, which is a remastered collection from this year of some of their early popular stuff. Really great cafe music, would recommend it for sure, upbeat 2000’s indie pop rock. A lot of this style of music would play on pandora cafe radios in the early 2010’s and Voxtrot was a staple. Anyways, this week we’re past the hurricane and deep in to fall. We’ve had merch and fall-merch for about a month now, so let’s talk about that.

Why so little merch, why this choice in merch?

I see plenty of coffee shops and other cafe-adjacent shops open with tons of merch. Shirts, hats, mugs, etc. I’m not a fan of this, I have two opinions on why; Firstly more merch is more clutter in your space, and I wanted to start with a very minimal build so we could grow. Merch is not part of the architecture, and when you open that’s what’s important. Secondly I feel like merch is an extension of your culture, and you can’t totally understand your culture from the get go. That said, my choice in merch isn’t totally radical haha, it’s just the door logo on shirts, and the sign logo on stickers. My design principal is “know what you need to know,” which is our name and that we do coffee. But! If our culture hit in a really strong or unexpected way, I’d want to capitalize on that once I had a grasp on it and maybe I would have pivoted. I’ve pivoted on some small sticker runs like the character from “over the garden wall” in our color scheme, for our movie night.

So we started small with what we could make in house, being printed stickers and hand screen printed shirts. Our first shirts were given away as part of our latte art throwdown, and our first few stickers were given away free to the first customers we had. Doing these free were a great way to test the waters and get honest feedback; Our stuff has improved since in quality, and our income has never been super dependent on how well these did. That’s another important point, merch isn’t a massive dependable short term money maker as a coffee shop so you shouldn’t treat it that way. Doing a small run of something you like will be more impactful to the culture then pumping out 100 of something completely forgettable.

How and why we built the launch around our website?

Our first time selling anything on our site was with our latte art throwdown, where we sold entry tickets and raffle tickets for the event. This had a few hiccups, one was understanding how and when the money got to us, but mainly it was making sure credit card transactions went through and tracking order numbers / inventory worked appropriately. After a week we pretty much got it down.

So then we did a small shirt and tote run in August, in-store, and through that sold a handful of shirts. That taught us a bit about customer reception, like what sizes sold, what other styles people wanted, and what type of people liked those white shirts. We wanted to have a “merch store” on our site, and so we redid the look of our online shop slightly, and filled it out with merch items that responded to the gaps we saw in our original run. We really wanted more logo shirts out there, so our second design was an autumnal soft green and orange variation to contrast our stark white logo shirts. We did some prints/postcards of our cafe paintings that get a lot of compliments, and of course more circle logo stickers.

This dual launch drove traction to the online store as people checked out the new designs, and allowed us to sell that merch without over-stocking in store, by making them available online for in store pickup. We do production once a week on Monday our day off, and on that day we also restock the store with what we’re low on or out of. There’s less pressure to overstock in store every day, since we’ve outlined a restock day and have that online store.

How the reception has been, how production has been.

The reception has been slow but steady, we sell maybe 5-10 merch items per week. People are increasingly excited to pick up merch while they’re in, be it a sticker or new shirt for themself or someone else. I’ve had no negative comments on shirt quality and i’ve been washing my own without any real degradation in quality. Our first run of stickers and shirts definitely took a beating over time, but our newer shirts and stickers are much more sturdy, which again I attribute to starting with some small test runs. I’ve had maybe one or two real requests for new styles of items, which i’m considering for future drops.

Production has been alright, Since it’s on my “day off” i’m trying to minimize the time we spend on it. I try to do things like pick up blank shirts after work so i’m not also driving around. Some amount of R&D is necessary to improve, but again just minimizing that or allocating that to days “on” is ideal. Very thankful to my life partner Dakota for essentially spearheading the process as he also works on his own online store (not yet launched). The two serious pieces of equipment that everything revolves around are our high quality printer, and our cricut cutter. We’ve spent a lot of time in Michaels and Joanns haha.

Our first website sale.

With the hurricane this last week we had to close for a day and a half, to compensate we had a 20% off website sale. The previous week we had zero website sales, because it had been a couple weeks since our launch. This week we had something like ten new sales, and we also temporarily sold gift cards. This resulted in the equivalent to a slow day at the cafe, and seriously helped us out when we closed for a day right before rent was due.

Working in the industry during covid I saw a lot of cafes struggling to make sales while being closed. A lot of them launched websites for the first time, mainly for pickup or delivery but partially for things like merch. I felt that having diverse sources of income would be crucial in case of emergency, having a working website ready for whatever was key. I didn’t see the hurricane coming at all, and we’re nowhere near being fine if the cafe got wrecked, but having that site ready for a sale sure helped a lot.

All that said, we’ve done something like $1k in sales since launch, about half of that was around our throwdown, the other half was merch sales since. overall that’s like 5% of our income since opening. That may not seem like much, but it’s definitely taken less than 5% of my total time to do, my margins are solid, and I’m not holding on to a bunch of backstock. It’s been a worthwhile endeavor. I’ve got more plans for future merch and I’m excited to do more!

Thanks for reading everyone! - Elias