Tuesday, September 17, 2019

"Making [Selling and Shipping] Merch For Your Indie Game"

Really detailed breakdown by Grace Bruxner:
Should you make merch for your indie game?

Probably not! I really want to be clear about the work that’s involved with this. It’s an enormous investment of time and money. Because I really, really, really wanted to make merch, the time investment wasn’t so much of a problem for me, but the physical labour and logistics of doing inventory, shipping out orders, and communicating with customers was very draining. If you can, get a distributor.

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If you’re doing this purely for profit and not marketing, it’s probably not a great use of your time.

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Shirts are a really great starting point to test the waters with your merch. They’re relatively cheap to produce, you can price them however you want, and they work even with just your game’s logo. I’m not great at graphic design or illustration so I contacted 3 artists that had cool and varied styles and asked them if they’d be interested. I gave them the following brief:

Maximum of 8 colours
Colours are up to you
Should not be themed on a specific frog detective game
Needs to include the detective + magnifying glass
Optional “frog detective” text

I also linked specific pieces of their work that I really liked. For payment, I asked them all for their rates and just agreed with whatever they said. One artist quoted a higher price than the rest, so I ended up paying everyone that higher rate. I also made sure that they were comfortable with the quantities I was printing, and promised to ask permission and pay them more if I ended up reprinting any designs.

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Tote Bags? 👜
EVERYONE SHOULD MAKE TOTE BAGS.