How to start a merch store for your sports club!
You know how to spot a successful sports club? When the games are full of fans proudly repping the colors, creating an atmosphere full of team spirit. Inspiring the fans to come out making signs, painting faces and ultimately wearing your gear, shows the strength of the community.
Now that the sports world is moving online, its time to upgrade the clothing tent, and lucky for you creating an online store with zero upfront costs has never been easier.
All you need is your brands digital assets and this guide!
On-demand printing
Traditionally merch stores require upfront capital but if you're ballin on a budget, you can use a new online print-on-demand shop to "stock the shelves" on various website and social selling platforms with no upfront costs.
Print-on-demand stores provide all you to design products and add them to your store, printing nothing until a customer purchases the item. Shipping times can be 7+ days, but once volume increases there are options for batch printing and next day delivery.
There are quite a few options for manufacturers with the most popular being Printful and Printify. They both have hundreds of product options, simple design tools and integrate with popular selling platforms.
When comparing we discovered that Printful was slightly more expensive but provided more products, integrations and features.
Our recommendation: Printful
Selling online
Once your manufacturing and drop shipping is setup, you need to connect to a store with an integrated point of sale system and your website. If you're looking for super simple, some on-demand printing platforms offer custom storefronts so no other platform is needed.
Most of the time there is an existing website or social platform where clubs would want to showcase products. The most popular online stores double as website builders, like Shopify, Squarespace and Wix.
For establishing your online presences we highly recommend using Shopify to manage your site. It has a web builder and integrates with nearly everything. Also there is a great developer community with useful add-ons for things like selling tickets to events!
Our recommendation: Shopify
Promotions
Setting up manufacturing and distribution is only half of whats require to sell merch online, the last part is promotions. The best promotors for your sports club are the members of your sports club, their family and alumni.
Ideally you can purchase a batch of fits to give away to the team and conduct a little photo shoot that can go on social media. If thats not an option, you can use the design files generated by the photos to run a purely digital campaign just to get started.
Also, before game days remind your fans to come out dressed in your colors! Remember the goal of having large section of the audience full of fans repping your gear giving athletes the motivation to win for their community!
Our experience
Here at THE SHO we like to eat our own dogfood, and this month we followed these steps to launch our own store!
We took a serious look at Printful and Printify, and were driven to choose Printful since it was the only one that offered a Squarespace integration, which is where we host our website. We were shocked at how simple this process was, in under 2 hours our store was live and a few samples were en route at a 30% discount.
One interesting learning was how billing happens via two transactions. When someone orders a product we receive their payment through our POS platform (Squarespace) and Printful automatically places a drop-ship order for that customer with our card on file.