Trying to figure out what to order for merch has always been one of the hardest parts of planning a tour. Each decision you make on items can be the difference between coming back in the green, or having everyone in the band pitching in for gas to get you to the next stop. You don’t want to over order and be left with a ton of leftovers (especially if you do show/tour exclusive pieces), and you don’t want to run out after a few days and leave money on the table. I’ve been there and it hurts to have to keep telling someone that you don’t have their size left for each design that they pick out. There are so many factors that go into planning merch that it's difficult to even know where to start.
A couple of us at Merchcast came from a nationally touring band and worked at a print shop, so we had seen the merch world from both sides.
The print shop started getting bands and organizations coming to us and asking what quantities they should order, and at first our answer was something along the lines of “shouldn’t you know?”. The truth of the matter is that they didn't, we didn't, and it was clear that we needed to figure something out. Our first attempt was going off of vibes, which honestly with enough background could do okay. If they already knew what sizes sold, what designs did well, what cities they sold the best in, and how their sales numbers may have grown from the last tour, we could make a pretty good prediction. The problem was that most people had an idea of only a couple of those factors, so we set out to work with actual data.
What eventually became Merchcast started as a Google Sheet with some pretty complicated tour equations.
We compared weekday and weekend sales, venue capacities, Spotify numbers, simple and complex designs, and any other variables we could reasonably track. Slowly, the picture started becoming clearer. We were seeing easily what the best selling designs looked like, what sizes were going faster and how that correlated to genres and shirt colors.
Going in we definitely had some assumptions on how things would look. We’d expect a 10-20% increase in sales on weekend dates. Immediately we were proven wrong on that. If a band is playing a smaller city on a Saturday night the Wednesday night show in a bigger city would out perform most of the time. If a band is playing with a larger band on that weekday show, you could also expect that to outsell the weekend show.
We also assumed that heavier bands wouldn’t do as well with lighter colored shirts, but many heavy bands were only ordering black shirts, so how could you know in that genre that lighter colors could sell just as much if not more? Then, we had a heavier band on the road that had all black shirts and a single off white shirt. The off white shirt outsold every other shirt they took with them by a wide margin.
Every time we had an assumption we could test it with real data, and keep on refining our forecasting abilities.
In time, the forecast for the initial order became something that we could have quite a bit more confidence in. Even with bands that we had no background on, we could start planning to help make a tour as profitable on the merch end as it could be. The problem was that there were new variables popping up every show, and we needed to be able to keep track of them and make them accessible for anyone who wanted to plan a tour. So we kept building.
We wanted all of this info to be able to help more people than just who we were ordering from the print shop, so we decided to separate it and Merchcast was created.
Now that the platform is built and running, we are taking all of those trends that we’ve seen and are putting them into action. When you create a Merchcast account, the platform will automatically look up your Spotify page if available and start figuring out what pieces of info are relevant.
We’ve seen the same venues pop up time and time again and have seen bands of hugely different sizes play them on different nights. This gives the baseline that we can see, for example how a band with roughly 50,000 monthly listeners on a Thursday night playing at The Rino may do on merch sales, and use that in the planning of merch.
With our automated forecasting, before you even have any data in the system, you can plug in what dates and where you’re playing (or import the information in moments from Bandsintown), what items you will be bringing along, and our system will build out an order sheet of what it thinks may sell.This gets even more accurate in time as it starts to see the trends that are directly tied to your merch. You can even make adjustments by shows if you know one is going to wildly outperform the others, or adjust the sales rates of items that outsell the others.
Forecasting Will Never Be Perfect
Every tour is different. A viral moment, a weather delay, a small attended show where everyone buys $100+, or a surprise sellout can change everything. No forecasting system will ever predict every variable, but it doesn't have to.
The goal is to stop making one of the biggest financial decisions of your tour with nothing more than a guess or vibes.That's what we've been chasing since those first Google Sheets, and it's still what drives everything we build today.
If you're tired of planning your next tour on instinct alone, we'd love for you to give Merchcast a try. Click below to create an account and see what your next run could look like before you ever hit the road.
Happy touring y’all!