This meme showed up on my timeline today, and it is the realest shit ever. I mean no disrespect to any of my actual patrons, because this usually doesn’t apply to them.
Giclee art prints are one of the few merch items that I actually do offer, but I hear this about everything ranging from t-shirts to mugs to mousepads and just about anything else you can think of. I actually used to offer most of these things, almost always at these kinds of recommendations. I had a shop on Society6 that offered pretty much all of these things.
I think I sold maybe 5 t-shirts the entire time I had them available. The problem with t-shirts in particular I think was a few layers deep: for one, the kind of people who buy t-shirts with any reliability buy them for topical reasons…to display some witticism or show that they engaged in tourism somewhere or simply just to project some aspect of their personality out into the world like and advertisement. Most of my artwork really doesn’t tick any of those boxes in an easily-consumable way.
Another problem with apparel is that those markets are soooooo fucking saturated with products that already cater more to the kinds of people who buy apparel-based merchandise that you get buried.
And of course finally I think that when you offer too many options, you inflict a kind of decision paralysis on anyone who might be browsing your shop. The service I used to fulfill any shirt orders literally didn’t cost me anything upfront to make shirts available, but I feel like it was costing me by making my shop too cluttered and too overwhelming. That’s a driving reason that I’ve started phasing out some of the older prints from the shop…the shop page was just getting too cluttered with older work.
This post isn’t meant to shame anyone for what they do or don’t buy from me, but rather this is the reason I don’t offer most of the things that are recommended to me. I feel like I’ve been doing this long enough that I know that my work does not translate well to most merchandise items.