Hi Merchies,

It’s been another month, which means it’s time to forecast the future of merch with theme suggestions for three months from now, to give you time to plan and order merch that turns heads and gets results.

October is the beginning of the last quarter of the year, so your last big chance to use merch to close sales before 2027, line up with the biggest shopping time of the year, or use end of year celebrations as a touchpoint with existing customers.

Here are the October novelty days and events to use as an excuse to reach out:

A little piece of Australian history for you: In the 1950s it was a trend to send new parents home from the hospital with their baby and a jacaranda seedling, leading to the South African tree becoming extremely common in many areas of Aus.

As a Sydney born and raised, I didn’t realise this extended to Queensland. Both the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales have iconic jacarandas with superstitions like “if you haven’t started studying by the time the jacarandas are blooming, you’ll fail.” I don’t know if UQ says the same thing, but apparently they’re so attached to their jacarandas on campus they built an entire merch range around them!

My favourite is absolutely the plush keychain. It’s subtle, cute, trendy, and builds real loyalty and affinity with UQ. They also have your standard university merch with hoodies, jackets, drink bottles, etc.

There’s a lot of love for hometown icons (even when other hometowns also have them!)

Take some inspiration from your local environment, history, or traditions to really build positive brand sentiment. A lot of the October novelty days are also well aligned to “sharing just because”, so even if you’re sending these out to people all around the world, having some hometown pride is quite endearing!

I’ll admit it point blank.
I’m not ‘savvy with the suite’ when it comes to the full array of developer tools available for product engineers.
I’m a marketer, and probably barely a good one.

BUT, I have done plenty of working alongside engineers and product nerds, have dabbled in plenty of startup experiments and can appreciate a good stack when I see it. (Or appreciate a product enthusiast obsessing over a particular new release).

Anyhoo, kept hearing about this dev tooling company Posthog, or more specifically, about their merch game.

Paid them no respect and no mind. “Yeah righty-o” I answered back, not giving it a seconds thought. Someone insufferable I know kept mentioning them over and over again, gnawing at my prefrontal cortex, demanding I understand how damn good their merch is.

“Fine” I snorted as I begrudgingly acquiesced and logged on to posthog dot com to see what this particular person (with terrible fashion sense mind you) was recommending me.

I’ll keep them anonymous but let’s just say that W.D… was a million percent correct.

I have located the motherload. I have arrived at utopia. I have achieved a sense of merch enlightenment you could only dream of and there is no turning back now, there is no way I can continue to tolerate mediocre branded gildan t-shirts from the latest funded company of tech bros, and I shall henceforth speak the name of Posthog in revered tones thanks to the pushiness of one Warwick D.

Let’s dive in:

I really liked this as a starting point. A blog from 2024 from Co-CEO James Hawkins, writing about his philosophy of brand and what it is in his mind that Posthog need to be, in the pursuit of rejecting homogeneity. You can read that HERE and that ties in very nicely to add some context on Why their merch is so damn eye opening.

“Do Things That Don’t Scale” says James in the blog. You’re damn right James.

Initially: emailed users asking for their merch sizes // posted it internationally to them // Shopify storefront // custom integrated into website // booked models for photo shoots wearing the merch // limited editions of certain sets of merch…. I could go on and on and on. Super impressed.

A quick glance at the merch at the moment will show you some pretty unique things going on: 💧

💧 Home AND Away branded football jerseys (1000% tick)

💧 Beautifully unique ceramic mugs (yesssss)

💧 Custom painted shoes for a recent conference (super ltd edn.)

💧 A hedgehog mascot plushie (his name is Max)

💧 Some great sticker sets, very good t-shirt game with puns galore, backpacks, and some caps I would even wear, and I don’t wear caps.

But then most amusingly for display is a number of easter eggs and things planted throughout the merch store: dolls of James himself, ’NFT’s’, Onboarding calls ($80), candles, lawnmowers, installation disks, a book of all their lines of code (haha) and honestly just a whole lot more bizarre stuff that puts them somewhere in the ‘Tim & Eric’ corner of startup internet.

Just really enjoyed that they had some fun including some non-purchasable stuff, that I actually want tbh.

Super impressed. W Donaldson was right, they do have the best merch, and now a new bar has been set for us all.

Check it out for yourself here: https://posthog.com/merch

Have a sense of humour with this. Do things that don’t scale. Have people see the personality behind the brand. Whilst there is plenty of absurdisms going on here that some will dig/ others won’t, it’s undeniable that Posthog stick out, which would be heavily due to their single-mindedness pursuit of simply doing things their way.

People keep referencing in an AI-era that ‘taste’ will be the differentiator. It’s also true, that some people have shit taste, so something thats different and unique and taking risks is worthwhile taking at least a few notes from.

Check out the DRIP DROP Sublime for more merch inspo