Hi Merchies,

We have a public holiday in Melbourne today, and then in Sydney next Monday. (One which is due to sport). Change the newsletter send time? No. DRIP DROP adjusts it’s merch goodness send time for no sports holiday.

Speaking of days, we’ve mentioned a few times that Days of the Year is a great site to reference, and potentially build a merch campaign around a specific date.

Like today - World Dream Day, September 25th - and we took the liberty of adjusting some of the copy related to WDD, just to give you some inspo:

It does not matter where you come from (in your merch journey), where you live (in proximity to merch suppliers), or how much money you have (to buy in small quantities or large), one thing that we all have in common is dreams (of better merch)!

We all have (merch) aspirations and (merch) goals for a better (merch) tomorrow. The trouble is that there are a lot of hurdles and barriers that stand in the way (people who don’t understand merch quality) when it comes to making our (hell yeah merch) dreams a reality (having something that’s not a shit t-shirt).

Christmas around the corner. Better get crackling on getting those gifts ready to show you care.

Gaz & Kayla

P.S.

I (Kayla) ran into a merchie last night at an event! Please, if you enjoy the newsletter you can just reply to it right in your inbox and it comes to us. And we welcome all kinds of replies, ones that just say “I love this”, ones that say “here’s some merch I love” and ones that say “this has inspired my merch game” are our favourites.

HubSpot’s UNBOUND conference was this week over in the US, and the swag was all over my LinkedIn.

I’ll keep my DRIP short this week because it’s basically a roundup of other roundups:

The themes I was seeing across the items that caught my eye were they were:

A certain something caught thy eye this past week. I was in ‘metal mode’ you see - playing a gig with my metal band for the first time in 10 years on the Friday night, attending another mates metal gig on the Saturday night, saw one of my favourite bands of all-time (HEALTH) who play <redacted> metal on the Sunday night, and then - you guessed it - was attending a gig by another favourite metal act on the Monday: King Yosef, from Portland.

Now, I ended up being a bit too ambitious as my weary bones with its various aches and pains struck me out of a couple of these shows, but I did play the gig and I did attend the HEALTH show.

Anyhoo, I got myself pumped up in the usual way to enter a weekend of metal: scrolling through LinkedIn. Nothing brings out the pure, primal, feral rage in me quite like reading LinkedIn posts and absorbing the comments. I. DONT. GIVE. A. FRIG. that you’re humbled to be volunteering at the new AI startups mixer to attract volunteer talent.

I want you to share a funny meme with me, tell me you love HEALTH too, and even write something actually provocative for once on that website.

So imagine my GLEE when I stumbled upon a post by Buildkite - a super well-known company globally for their DevOps tool work - who had created a BLACK METAL inspired tee amongst some other choice pieces of merch.

They started in my home town Melbourne, and though their VP of Marketing Mitch James may have thought initially when I bounced into his inbox that I was there to ask about their recent $21million fundraise announcement, no… that wasn’t why ‘ol Gaz was in touch. He had a DRIP DROP sickness, and the only prescription, was finding out more about this sick merch.

I just asked for a small photo suite (of the metal shirt) if Mitch had some on hand, but in a really cool moment (which I wasn’t expecting) Mitch went the extra step to proudly summarise a bunch of the merch they produced for their recent 140+ people offsite. I enjoy this, because this is obviously someone who appreciates good merch, and who thinks black metal font rocks.

Have a look at this list that Mitch sent through of various bits and pieces produced for their team, hoo boy, it’s impressive. (Mitch wrote it out, I added a few notes. Extremely blown away)

“We produced…”

- “Japanese milk mugs through Tsunagu Craft”
(old milk glasses made in Japan, hell yeah, actually incredible)

- “Black Levis denim trucker jackets”
(yep, would wear, love this as a staple)

- “Iron on patches with 16x designs for people to make their jacket their own. Company patches with logo treatments inc. a ‘Severance’ style one, some internal in-jokes - we call AI output slopcannoned, so there is a slop cannon -  UI elements, previous offsite logos, etc”
(I LOVE patches, making DRIP DROP ones as we speak actually)

- “tees, including the black metal logo, created in tandem with UK illustrator Lloyd Stratton”
(Bloody good, you can find him on IG @lloydstratton, and also in a nice coincidence, repped by Jacky Winter, who we’ve featured a few times prev in DRIP DROP HERE and HERE)

- “embroidered cap”
(Uh-huh)

- “plushie 'build buddies', representing our build state icons from the UI (build pass, build fail, build running, block step)”
(give the person who thought of this a raise, or yourself if that is you Mitch)

- “croc jibbitz with UI elements and others (slop cannon again, a 'sassy yak' for our IAC... saas-iac...), buildsworth our PR-approval clanker)”
(IAC stands for Infrastructure as Code. This is crazy clever)

So there ya go. That is a little visual showcase and a proud marketer who gets it, explaining a bit more about how they think about brand-building via merch, how they think about creating pieces that their team are highly motivated to want let alone rep, and how they think about elevating the experience of a team building exercise with some incredible merch/gift-giving.

Hopefully whoever is responsible, likes HEALTH too. We’d become firm friends. Probably best friends.