Hi swag lover,

Australian founders/investors/business owners collectively lost their minds this week with budget & tax changes tabled, so that happened, and now no-one wants to live in AU anymore it seems.

But, the merch news must roll on! Why fight city hall as they say, as we point our eyes over the ditch to Aotearoa/NZ to profile some great merch in the wild, since a number of very loud voices on linkedin say they might move across the ditch to The Land of the Long White Cloud. We’ll help them with a soft landing on where the good merch exists.

Gaz is doing that piece of curatorial work, and Kayla is focused on popcorn buckets and being named a Linkedin Top Voice (for marketing opinions, and also for advocating for great merch)!

(Don’t make the mistake that Gaz did and accidentally show his 11 year-old daughter the *Wolverine popcorn bucket.* It’s just uncomfortable!)

Onwards to the Merch!

Cinema chains and theme parks have been going hard at popcorn buckets the past couple of years, and there’s no reason you can’t too! Digging into this, I actually found there’s a whole internet rabbit hole on popcorn buckets.

There’s a dedicated subreddit for them, as well as one user who is running a comprehensive (and incredibly organised) Google Sheet of movie popcorn buckets.

More rabbit hole links in the get into it section!

You don’t need film franchise IP to make a bucket to put snacks in. A fun night in with a popcorn bucket, a couple of popcorn flavours provided, and maybe an Uber Eats voucher or really splash out with a portable projector to ensure a complete at-home experience for higher ticket ABM or influencer campaigns.

DRIP DROP’s growing fast! And that means more overseas (not Aus) subscribers to our company merch ramblings, and that means we’ll make sure we’re covering more drops from outside our Melbourne/Sydney bubbles.

We’ll dip in and out of covering various aspects of culture influencing merch, but I thought it right today to cover some brands that I have taken note of that have done extremely well with their brand-building c/o merch, and for some reason, I couldn’t stray too far from shouting out some NZ brands that have done this deliciously well.

Yeah that’s right, I’m not afraid to point the crosshairs locally at a number of Aus brands, to tell them to point their gaze over the ditch to NZ, and not-too-subtlety shake them out of their stupor, loudly exclaiming: “DO BETTER.”

Here’s New + Improved Ventures, Tracksuit, Ideally & Aether.

New + Improved Ventures are partnership from the team behind Aether, Ideally and Tracksuit. They’re venture builders, and bloody good at building what look very much like iconic brands, most certainly in terms of ones expanding from their NZ origins. They’ll continue creating more B2B SaaS Marketing tech companies, but what those do in the N+I do, is do great merch.

Tracksuit is an easy one. They do brand-tracking, and make fucking tracksuits for their crew for christ’s sake. And they look damn good in them, committing to the cause and repping their brand very well. I was fortunate to see Tracksuit launch their ‘Entertain or Die’ entertainment-first brand-building-trends report with Small World when at SXSW Austin 2025: high recommend having a read of their latest report HERE

Ideally represent extremely well; they’re a research platform purpose-built for innovation, and when they run their events on research etc, they put on a classy, thoughtful and considered activation. I have no affiliation with them, but did attend one of their first ones in Melbourne after announcing their $2million seed fundraise announcement, and I was suitably impressed by how they branded the experience. Many VC-backed Aus companies could learn a million things about what a good experience - and merch - make from them.

And they make Jenga to giveaway, and that is an inspired choice of merch-making in my books. (also, their founders have been known to wear chore jackets, so we are kindred spirits in that way as to ideal day-to-day wear repping your brand)

Aether I haven’t been as exposed to (in terms of attending events and seeing them present) but what I do know is that they’re focused on being an AI presentation builder helping teams turn their strategies into slides in seconds, and they have leant into a colour palette of HEX code #ccc9c1 (Granite?) and HEX code #f8ff14 (Yellow) and it pleases me. (Also, Aether was just acquired by Ideally, so there ya go)

What does all this mean? The exact opposite of the proverb “A Fish Rots From The Head Down.” Most of what N+I Ventures are involved in, including these companies as part of their stable, have a large level of thoughtfulness applied to their brand-building and representation in market, and that is well worth keeping one’s eyes akimbo, over the ditch, in the pursuit of being more inspired to design more thoughtfully.

(Shout out to Jon Thom of Printroom merch makers who makes Ideally merch a reality, whom I spent a bit of time with at the recent Sunrise conference, as well as James Hurman of N+I Ventures who I had a chinwag with at Sunrise a couple of years ago, and have a lot of time for, as well as his N+I colleague Simon Pound - legend)

Jenga sets are highly achievable, but if thats not your flavour (or doesn’t make sense), then go check out BuildaMOC - custom Lego Kits in whatever physical design you want, over in Spain. Mike Langford who leads Google Cloud in APAC gave me something from them a little while back - very good!

Check out the DRIP DROP Sublime for more merch inspo