Hi Merchies,

We’re getting close to the end of the year, if you haven’t organised your customer gifts, seasonal merch (summer or winter, take your pick!) or simple things like branded tissue paper, thank you cards, and other bits and pieces, now’s the time!

Make sure to give your merch providers the gift of time instead of rushing them to production because you procrastinated this.

Yours in Great Merch 🙏

Gaz & Kayla

Tasmania-based artist Christian Watson, possibly best known for his character Mr Skelly and his animations (seriously, check it out) recently revealed he’s been getting throttled by social media labelling his hand-drawn animations as AI and has seen an increase in comments accusing him of using AI.

With lush backgrounds, a wistful tone, and existential it’ll-all-be-ok messages, I was planning on buying a print or something, only to discover 1924us — which is actually a branding and design studio — has great merch too.

If you’re into the antique-cool vibe, I highly recommend checking the store out and supporting an Australian artist! Some faves:

Several of these items also fall into the category of “would have multiple of this item, even if it was ugly” such as the lens cloths, shop rags, and lighters.

This is merch so good it could be a gift, the receipient could never know it’s merch, and it would still be one of the best gifts they’ve ever received.

The commitment to the aesthetic and the strength of the brand comes through in each individual item as well as collectively, making it easy to think “so-and-so would love this.”

A little veering away from the norm of just featuring a piece of merch at a time, I was particularly transfixed by the company Clay recently, delivering their mega-conference ‘SCULPT’ in San Francisco at the start of October, which was most definitely an ‘all-in’ exercise by them to craft a pretty spectacular looking conference for what is essentially go-to-market and sales nerds

I’d not really needed to use Clay myself in the past for building lists of email contacts and spamming the hell out of them. But they did have a competition to adjudge the ‘Clay World Cup Champion’ - a bunch of individuals who competed on a series of challenges over a few months, eventually competing in the final in SF, and an Aussie took home 1st prize. I saw him showcase some of what he did last night at a meetup in Melbourne actually, it was pretty impressive!

I’ll cover Ben very shortly, but as a long-time event organiser myself - and merch aficionado - I couldn’t help but look on with interest at the design of this conference, and how playful it was in every sense. Extremely impressive atmosphere they curated, very colourful, and the merch was quite top-notch.

Yes I’m aware they are a mega-cashed up company. Doesn’t mean inspiration can’t be taken from the exercise. You can read a great post they did about curating SCULPT right HERE

Back to Ben Broadley, who’s building out his company BamLabs with his brother Sam Broadley: it’s one thing to hear about using AI and even knowing where to get started with a lot of the technical stuff, but to then see it live is another, so I was suitably impressed from seeing how a World Cup Champion uses the technology in an extremely novel way (TL:DR - worked out a way to connect API’s to contact lists and auto-order literal cakes to send to prospects in 20 minutes. Extremely creative)

I summarise that because at the end of the talk when I was chatting to Sam, y’know what he did?
He gave me a BamLabs hat. I didn’t even tell him I write DRIP DROP yet!

And you know what that hat had on it? You wanna know what it has in the details?

It had EMBROIDERY. That’s right, embroidery, something I equate to a bit more effort, a bit more care, and a bit more thought when it comes to merch, than….ah shit, there I go again. On and on and on about doing embroidery.

Inspo literally everywhere i that post I linked to above in regards to teh design of their conference. What I most like, is that they lean heavily into colour, into fun, into expression, into something that sets them apart in the market. Maybe, they even employ designers to curate that taste, Im just speculating. But you can of course ‘make it your own’ by doing one simple things as a starting point: Go Extra.