Merchandise

For our band's website we created a selection of merchandise for fans to "buy".
First of all we designed women's t-shirts, taking inspiration from other bands' merchandise and creating clothing that we ourselves would like to wear. We looked at several artists' clothing stores popular with young women:

We started with basic t-shirts with our logo on, creating a clear brand image - people would recognise the logo. We then created a 'Stripper tour' t-shirt, a souvenir appealing to those who will go on our tour and want to remember the day. The next was a t-shirt with a black and white photo of us, as people often like to see the band they are a fan of. We also created some lyrics t-shirts with lines from our song that we thought sound good on a t-shirt - "I am a voyeur" and "Don't touch the girls". Our personal favourites are the more creative 'XYZ' t-shirts, with the gold writing and and pink and black alphabet versions, as they are nice even as standard t-shirts that you might find in any shop, but they also represent our band.

Not wanting to discriminate, we also decided to create a smaller range of men's t-shirts. As our band is quite girly, we wanted cool, masculine t-shirts that males wouldn't be embarrassed to wear. The top-selling music shirts and hoodies on play.com were in fact Men's, mainly rock bands, proving that men do wear band merchandise, not just teenage girls (though One Direction were unsurprisingly close behind!)

We took inspiration from band merchandise like Kings of Leon and Coldplay, bands popular with men as well as women.

T-shirts were prominently black or grey with dark, simple designs. We liked the idea of lyrics in a subtle font, like Coldplay's, and a sepia print of the band. Basing our designs on these ideas, a black and white version of our classic logo tee, we created our men's range:

From experience and looking at other bands' websites we came up with the price of £15 for t-shirts, as our site is the only place for new, official merchandise, so if a fan really wants one, they have no choice but to buy it from there so they will. After Christmas we would probably have a January sale, slashing the price of some of the lowest-selling t-shirts in order to make room for new designs which would coincide with our next singles.

Finally we came up with some accessories. We knew that calendars were popular with teenagers around Christmas time, favouring ones of their favourite celebrities and bands.

Some of the most popular calendars on play.com at the moment are One Direction, Olly Murs and JLS, all artists with mainly young female fans, plus Breaking Dawn which also has the same core market, suggesting that teenage girls are large calendar buyers/receivers as gifts.

 We also designed some posters, as we know from experience that teenagers love to cover their walls in posters of their favourite artists. Yet again the top selling posters online include One Direction, JLS and The Wanted, re-iterating this fact.

 Some other merchandise included bags and a wristband, a great souvenir for a fan who has attended one of our concerts.