The Art of Branded Merchandise Collections
Branded merchandise is an important piece of any promotion, and if done right, you’ll be sure to leave a lasting impression on your audience. To make the most of your marketing budget ensure your branded merchandise is a core part of your overall marketing strategy.
Amplify your marketing campaigns by creating a well curated collection of products that will set you apart from your competitors, keeping you differentiated in a sea of sameness. Custom merchandise that is crafted to support your company’s mission or your campaign goals will help make you and your strategy memorable.
Merchandise collections are made up of a handful of products that work together cohesively and are also impactful on their own.
The best collections are made from a variety of useful and tastefully branded products, with a key theme and colour palette tying each piece together. Each product should be strategically distributed throughout the life of your campaign or client journey to ensure your brand stays top of mind.
We recommend creating your merchandise collection using a tiered approach. By including products at various price points, you can leverage your promotional merchandise to share your message with different segments of your client base. For example, while you want to show all your clients that you care, some clients deserve more than others. If you incorporate a range of low cost and valuable products in your merchandise collection, you can touch every segment and provide your audience with something tangible they can connect with and relate to. Custom branded merchandise collections allow you to mix and match products to make sure the right selection for right recipient.
FAIRWARE COLLECTIONS
At Fairware, we created four merchandise collections, each touching on our values and origins as a company. We want to share the story behind each collection, to inspire you to build your own merchandise collections to celebrate your own values and campaign goals.
Our collections are built to support our own marketing efforts at Fairware. They showcase our capabilities and our values, and we hope they’re loved and used by our clients and prospects. We distribute our own ‘self-promo’ merchandise as a way to thank our core clients and to introduce ourselves to top prospects and brands we’d like to work with.
THE CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL COLLECTION
Our Climate Change is Real Collection was inspired by our belief that businesses have an important role to play in addressing the issue. This theme is part of our roots, as a company that was created with a mission to source sustainable and ethically made products, always keeping planetary health top of mind.
We urge our clients to carefully consider what products they choose and how they’re transported. But most of all, we aim to sell products that will create behavioral changes so that our clients have the tools they need to lighten their footprint.
At Fairware, we measure our carbon footprint bi-annually and work to reduce our environmental footprint because it’s part of our DNA as a brand. In working on our own in-house programs, we gain valuable insight on what our clients are going through in implementing their own sustainability programs.
THE FEMINIST COLLECTION
The idea for The Feminist Collection came from our work with the Women Deliver 2019 Conference in Vancouver, where we produced a collection of products and ran a pop up shop for conference attendees to purchase their own Women Deliver merchandise. We created a variety of products, from jewelry and pins to tote bags and t-shirts, and we found the most coveted piece was a simple t-shirt with the word féministe printed on the front. We sold through it so quickly that we had to run an emergency order during the event to double our inventory.
It was thrilling to see a #fairwaremade piece so well received, and we wanted to create our own version to share with our colleagues, friends, and clients. We’re passionate advocates for diversity and inclusion, and as a women and LGBTQ-owned company, the word feminist has always resonated with us.
THE LUCKY CAT COLLECTION
The Lucky Cat or Maneki Neko Collection was born from a colleague’s passion for cats and her Chinese and Japanese heritage. She first introduced us to Maneki Neko upon return from a trip to Japan, when she brought one into our office. Slowly the collection of lucky cats has grown at Fairware, and it’s a constant nod to our own staff diversity.
To highlight our diversity, we included the word LUCKY in the artwork, represented in each of the languages spoken by Fairware staff: English (lucky), French (chanceux or porte-bonheur), Spanish (suerte), Vietnamese (may mắn or phát tài), Dutch (gelukkige), German (glückliche), Traditional Chinese (幸運),Simplified Chinese (幸运), Tagalog (swerte), and Ilokano (nagasat).
THE ZERO WASTE COLLECTION
The Zero Waste collection is an extension of our Climate Change is Real Collection. It was inspired by our drive to push our clients to make behavioural changes to do better for the world, reusing products to create zero waste. The products chosen for this collection are tried and true staff favourites and some of our top selling products.
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