WHO MAKES THE WORST YOUTUBER MERCH?

what is March and why should you care who's doing it the best now and could you or someone you know do it better let's find out welcome to try hearts a series where we examine a trend on the internet and figure out what it would take to copy anyone who builds an audience becomes a brand that includes youtubers musicians eSports teams hotdog stands twitch streamers living memes Instagram models anyone with a fan base can create branded merchandise and their fans can show support by wearing it for some creators this becomes a passion project and for others a cash grab and a way to shovel junk at their fans it's very bad I don't know why you'd even want to put that around your neck the options for merged are endless and commonly include hats hoodies stickers mugs pop sockets cassettes panties and makeup but most merch balls down to a niche t-shirt business so why are graphic tees becoming so important getting boring you're losing your audience in the same way that buying a t-shirt at a concert from a merch table has always been a way to support a musician who might be getting screwed over from every other possible direction from the record company by their manager by Ticketmaster buying a t-shirt from a youtuber or a streamer is a way to support them directly and then as fans we get something tangible in return for a full-time youtuber to never have any merch is kind of irresponsible we've taken so long to put up any merch because we wanted to look into all the best ways to do it and then share that information with the public like the first try hards experiment about self promotion and Instagram butts this experiment will be a three-part maybe four-part series where we take you along with us from start to finish as we try to figure out how to make the best merch that we can these experiments are a process we don't know everything and we never will but we're going to do our best to figure things out as we go and share that information so that you can benefit from it and part of that is going to be figuring out who does know what they're talking about and picking their brains and not just those ecommerce gurus that are all over the Google search results for related terms who are trying to sell you what little they do know no a lot of them are trying to sell what information they too have in like a PDF or a course we did listen to a few of them as well so we're gonna ask around a lot and I'm gonna abuse my access to fellow youtubers and other times we're gonna look at what people who I don't know are doing and try to reverse-engineer it so what do you think before I dive into the research some of the questions that I asked myself where am I gonna be stockpiling boxes of March around my house and sending the stuff out by hand like my buddy rusty cage he's a million sub youtuber and he's sending his CDs out by hand sending things by hand kids mailing out your own merch sucks don't row up to be like me I want to keep working on content full-time so whatever the setup turns out to be it can't overtake the content and it needs to work in a trustworthy way there's a couple things like the goggles the neon glasses that people have been asking about where do I get those so we figured oh maybe we could sell these maybe the neon light I've bought some merch from internet celebrities before and it stays in my closet this is a Gildan 100% cotton unisex shirt and I never wear it look at the sleeve this is a medium and look how big the sleeve is that's a sleeve that's enormous they're huge roomy fit is not what we want a copy this is tricky stuff to figure out but there's no shortage of people who will offer to figure it out for you if you sign with an MCN they're gonna want a piece of your merch if you sign a 360 contract with a manager they're gonna want a piece of your merch if you make a deal with the devil he's gonna want to be a part of your merch give me a minute I like making money but more important to me is influence and Murchie doesn't get Warren doesn't influence anybody it just sits in the closet so when nerd City starts offering merch I wanted to do three things first when you wear it and you look in the mirror the gym crowd and the way you look and second when it touches your bare skin that it feels good and lastly maybe most importantly that afterwards you live life with no regrets and you're willing to repeat the process over and over again when you're in a mortal being you tend to look at things a little bit more long-term so I want you to think of me as nerd city's ultimate quality control we can talk a little bit more later [Music] so we need to understand the market and the competition who has the best March operation and what makes it the best what are people getting their hands on and then liking I started a Twitter thread to find out 217 people responded and the results look like this but these results might be skewed by our mutual followers so I divided these numbers by our fan base overlap to devalue that and then the results look like this with the numbers he got in the poll Elvis must be doing something remarkable with this merch now there's only so much you can learn from a mock-up of a t-shirt on a website so I sank a few thousand dollars into YouTube's March economy and the packages from youtubers started to roll in youtuber merchandise yeah this is what I want and where is what everyone wants to wear jacksFilms has maintained stores with two different companies that partner with him on print on demand graphic tees most of the youtuber merch you'll encounter are fulfilled by print on demand companies also called p OD print on demand is like it sounds it means that the shirts are printed to order in batches as small as a single shirt we'll go through a lot more of the print on demand companies later when we talk about vendors when we ordered from Jack most of the shirts available were references to inside jokes in his content since then he's launched Klondike which is a sub-brand using the likeness of his dog the Klondike line is all about not being terrible don't be savage don't be obnoxious it's clearly a little tongue-in-cheek but Jax approached the Murch got us thinking about the first big decision that any internet personality needs to make if they decide to get into apparel do you want to create a fashion line ultimately or are you just offering channel merch comedians like idubbbz and Chris Raygun and drew Gooden and Shane Dawson have all put their catchphrases onto shirts that's become the standard approach for making marchin it definitely works but I'm not convinced yet that it's always ideal like if I had to pull funny slogans out of our videos I would really be forcing it no big bonus no sponsor hummus the upside to putting a joke on your merch is that your fans will probably think it's funny the downside is that if you're wearing one of those shirts and you're spending time around people who don't watch a lot of YouTube you might have to explain what the shirt beans I relate to pigs some larger creators like Ethan and ela and PewDiePie and jacksepticeye and markiplier have all deviated from merch and have launched fashion lines Teddy fresh Suki and cloak Myanmar's a large our own clothing brand which is not merch it's all ethically made and it's all designed by us we even have a beret that's right although their fans understand the connection to the Creator to the outside person it looks like an independent fashion line a sub brand might be a perfect fit for a certain type of creator but not for everyone this is our clothing brand this is your clothing wrap take ela Klein for example she has artistic chops to start with she sold hand-drawn art in the past she's developed a recognizable aesthetic and she has ambitions as a designer so Teddy fresh does reflect that positively the teddy fresh winter coat we ordered was very unique looking the quality is through the roof the price was reasonable sourcing a jacket like this for a beginner is not easy I've never seen this jacket anywhere else the teddy fresh project as a whole is very impressive and it ranked highly in the pole this jacket itself illustrates why a sub-brand is a huge project h3h3 does offer channel merch as well and built that store first the same with PewDiePie and markiplier and jacksepticeye so we decided focus on channel March for now it might be fun to tackle a project as big as Teddy Fresh eventually but too aggressive as a first step oopsy doopsy oopsy doopsy an oopsie doops z if you bought a brofist from PewDiePie a few years ago I've got some good news for you he isn't selling it anymore you made a fantastic investment I can't even find them being resold on eBay I guess it's a collector's item in fact the same could be said for every t-shirt that pewdiepie has ever sold because Felix has moved away from print-on-demand merch as of late and is now selling exclusively selling limited edition merch you'll see this being called limited time only or limited run merch in contrast to print on demand a limited run creates a window of time where orders can be placed and then at the end of that time the total order is locked in and then the entire order is printed and shipped after that the shirt is unavailable the scarcity becomes a potential selling point to a fan because if you have that fear of missing out then you might not wait to order a shirt you only gotta wake the downside is that as a creator we have to aggressively market a piece of March when this fidget spinner stops spinning you won't be able to buy the shirt limited time only March is something that we've mulled over quite a bit because it seems that there are serious drawbacks as well as advantages to it ok so let's start with the idea that your fan base is not a static group people are constantly flowing in and out of it so if a channel is doing only limited-edition merch then a new fan that's just found you today has missed every single March drop you've ever done and watching through the back catalogue all of the integrated merch is now outdated so like in PewDiePie's case unless the merch is in the very latest it's not for sale March mean review official merch everybody it doesn't get any better than this no one can buy any of the merch they see in that content and you would think that would cost sales because some of those old designs are going to jump out at people as the shirt that they want to buy you can tell them that the ordering window is over but there's gonna be people who want that one and only that one and you know too bad also an ordering window for a limited run has its own quirks the obvious upside is that if every order is taken from the public at once then an exact order can be placed with a manufacturer for how many blank shirts are needed then you print designs on only what you need and there's no concerns about sitting on unsold inventory ever on the fulfillment side every product in hand is already sold pretty clean way to do things you'd eliminate inventory manager but some of the downsides of that might be felt on the consumer end we'll use the scenario of a 10-day order window so if production doesn't start until that order window closes if you don't at least stagger it out then a buyer who bought this shirt on day one of the 10 day order window is waiting 9 days longer than someone who bought it on day 10 and that wait only compounds if the blank shirts that are going to be printed on haven't been purchased from the manufacturer until they've been bought by the viewer this is getting so complicated across the board most of the merch we ordered from youtubers showed up in about a week and a half about 10-12 days but we observed far longer fulfillment times from the limited time only merch represent makes it clear on the ordering page that there's a three and a half week wait time from day one of the ordering window until shipping begins and in the era of Amazon Prime we're now things will show up at your door in like two days three days because their warehouse locally I have some serious doubts that anyone would be willing to wait a month for a t-shirt from us I ordered one of Felix's limited-run hoodies and I like it I do wear it a lot at work but it does have a meme on the front the pewds had retired before I got the shirt can you do this merch that's right you want some dead means on your face on your shirt yes I do want to for an outdated meme Felix thank you finally for answering now it would seem that the list of disadvantages to limited time only merch are starting to pile up but from what I've learned from creators who've sold merch in both ways scarcity and FOMO are such strong sales drivers that it wipes those concerns away so what are we gonna do with our merch well I hate the idea of retiring every design we get right out of the gate since we don't have any March yet at all the idea that all of our first shirts will become immediately obsolete it kind of bugs me I suspect that churning through that many designs will become too much for me to keep up with so I'm leaning towards not doing limited edition apparel at least not all of it there might be a sweet spot between sub brand and channel March that Elvis has found with alien clothing alien clothing carries the name very close to Elvis the aliens channel so it's semi branded to him but also stands alone the website is phenomenal compared to the plain barely customized stores that you see from collections on fan joy where everyone from kotico to Jake Paul has exactly the same template alien looks the part Elvis curates designs without jokes and without catchphrases and each one stands alone as a cool shirt alien clothing is a great example for how to do a march line I really wanted to make sure that this clothing line wasn't something that was you know like a generic thing where where we have like just a logo and that's it let me just put on a bunch of stuff you should know that by buying these clothes you're not just supporting me you're also supporting the whole alien team which includes a bunch of artists some video editors promotional guys [Music] the Maverick hoody I bought I gotta say is pretty good for a light sweatshirt it feels nice to wear and it's soft on the inside and the fabric pattern is customized that's something that we learned is called cut and so if a large amount of orders are expected to sell like with a maverick March drop then we can have the manufacturer make the clothing design to our specifications instead of just printing on the more commonly available blank shirts cut and sew would also require warehousing of our stock which we'll explain later when we explore drop shipping since cut and sew operations entail more upfront cost and risk we decided it would be unwise for a channel of our size to do cutting so Logan Paul's packaging is also customized which looks really sharp it features its logo and it presents nicely out of the mailbox we learned that this is called a custom poly mailer Internet comment etiquette also has custom packaging and it looks even better than Logan's Eric common etiquette does not use a typical print-on-demand company his friend Uncle Dave runs their merch company called neon grizzly which features Eric's March as one of several collections Uncle Dave told me that it's set up this way because they may expand who they offer merch for in the future he silkscreens all the designs himself in batches and manages their stock and he somehow does it all despite having the disability of a lobster claw for a hand mousepad I can't remember oh it's a magnet that's an enormous bag we don't have room on the fridge yeah like what would that it wouldn't hold Nicki not a fan of Internet comment [Laughter] $109 back there [Music] everybody knows how we feel about Jake Paul we've addressed it but he sells a lot of merch so we wanted something to compare being completely unbiased totally objective this stuff is total [ __ ] everything about this shirt screams low quality from the printed label lack of a woven tag to the fact that it's a hundred percent cotton and not a blend all of these things are cheaper and cheaper shirts are really just a cash grab by a content creator we want our shirts to be wearable I mean you buy a shirt like this you wear it once you never wear it again how likely are you to buy another one I'm sure like this is well suited to Jake's channel where the fan base is really young and highly likely to outgrow the shirt and probably the content in just a few months the physical quality of Jake Paul's shirts is not the only thing about them that's subpar what he's putting on the clothing is unbelievably cheap the level of cost-cutting or theft or negligence whatever it is that's going on is astounding for a guy who bragged about making fifty million dollars last year from an empire based around merch sales there's no good reason no ethical reason not to pay for some original artwork for merch you guys as fans I want you guys go out right now and play this game in addition to being a blight on the YouTube community Jake Paul is selling clip art on his merch if you don't know what I mean by clip art it's kind of a catch-all phrase that means premade art made available oftentimes for personal use or educational use or non-commercial use like a teacher putting a music note in a syllabus or a janitor that wants to let you know that the hallways slippery not a way to harvest art for a brand you intend to sell there are libraries of clipart a lot of them searchable through Google images that store free art donated by artists or taken from something else that exists and you might NAB from there when you need a basic visual for something that isn't a product they're not for some famous rich kid to come along and his name on it and act like it's his own iconography with no compensation for the artist clipart libraries even the creative commons one are not open season for some smash-and-grab on copyright in our parent's worst nightmare video doctor downvote rattled off a handful of examples of stolen images in jake paul's merch this wave design this lamborghini this goat these boxing gloves the logo for his entire line the God Church even all clipart there's more this one hasn't been mentioned before and might be the ultimate example of how thievery based Jake Paul's marches the team 10 logo now you would think this would be an important logo to jake paul right it's it's the logo for his company jake how easy would it have been for you to make hash marks you could have borrowed a Crayola from one of your fans made 10 scribbly lines on a napkin taking a picture of it and the job would have been nearly done and even that level of laziness would have been more effort than what was put into this design and unlike this design the napkin would have actually belonged to jake paul so no not designed in los angeles california maybe googled in los angeles california we got in touch with the artist who made this design he verified that he was not paid for this by Jake Paul that was stolen from work he did for another client and that he intended to complain jake is also now selling socks with the flame emoji obviously that is not his original art but the latest trend in Jake's March is for Jake to get a tattoo have someone traced that tattoo and then make March out of it you might be thinking and maybe even Jake thinks that if it's on his body he owns the art no actually no the tattoo artist owns the copyright on their tattoos we reached out to the tattoo artists who inked the Tyrannosaurus on Jake's arm John was very surprised to find out that his art was being sold on merchandise he confirmed that he did not license it that way and he asked for URLs for where we found it Jake's rib tattoo which of course is now being sold as a merge design as well came from a shoe the special edition converse off-white collab designed by Virgil hablo jake has modified it to say Jack Paul for loyalty in Chinese loyalty pledge is also a big part of his March now by the way just in case it wasn't clear that Jake is big on brainwashing his young fans this shirt is a full parade of clipart plus the precise coordinates to a shed in Ohio maybe that's where Jake is hiding all the original art for his march empire you may remember because of the chorus of boos that followed that jake used his victory speech at the manchester fight to launch an upscale fashion line called our n bo which stands for rise and be original so originality is in the name this time gotta be original designs right no still clipart clipart rainbow a design so simple that a child could have drawn it on a napkin once again stolen this is the logo for a fashion line and it wasn't even adjusted from the free fonts default settings the four letters are n bo are in a flame font called char BB which can be downloaded by anyone including you free for personal use as is the custom now he also got an RN vo related tattoo so when we say the Jake Paul is making the worst march in the game he's permanently committed to it if you're considering making any March either now or in the future please don't let Jake Paul give you any bad ideas you can easily hire an artist to make your March and we're gonna talk about how on the next episode of try hearts will Commission art from the lunatic artists on Twitter we'll show you how to be a good client and we'll share a few artists you could hire if you're making merch then for this t-shirt printing Gold Rush will show you who's making the best shuffle by quality testing several printing companies and will determine once and for all who makes the best blank shirts to ruin with doodles of our faces so we have our resolutions for nerd city merch good art comfortable fit happy customers and twitter is gonna be a big part of that from finding the art to marketing the gear so as we begin the new year we've respectfully asked the devil to chillie get good at twitter and since Skillshare is sponsoring this video the devil is gonna watch a Skillshare course and get up to speed on that forsaken platform Skillshare features of course by Matt Bell aside a former bureau chief at BuzzFeed of cute animal clickbait that was a real title that I got paid for and I can't believe it either and someone who's written single tweets that have gotten retweeted more than 50,000 times we're gonna watch his popular course on creating for the viral internet let's see if this old snake can learn new tricks BuzzFeed prepared this guy to work for you this video of a cat saving a turtle is so adorable you burst into flames don't tell people how to feel relatability the biggest tool there is identity and the biggest tool for originality is having an opinion and having a point of view I'm going to express my opinion as an uncertainty so I'm gonna change that too I'm going out on a limb here Will Smith does not care about fortnight this guy practically wrote your tweet if your new year's resolution is to gain some knowledge and maybe some skills in any particular topic click on the link in the description for two three months of skill share now that's a lot easier than getting off your lazy butt in the cold weather to go to the gym and no one will say anything to you if you do with a beverage in your hand [Music]

Channel: Nerd City

Views: 2,097,458

Rating: 4.9427819 out of 5

Keywords: Merch, T-shirts, Print-on-demand, apparel, cut and sew, represent, Nerd City, Pewdiepie, Jake Paul, Logan Paul, Maverick, Teddy Fresh, Suki, Cloak, Ayylien, Elvis the Alien, Internet Comment Etiquette, Jacksfilms, klndk, youtuber merchandise, custom, tees

Id: Cv1DwplFHwk

Length: 24min 17sec (1457 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RyanKinder]

I love new episodes. I don’t like who made this reddit post.

[u/anghus]

Dear God his girlfriend is perfect

[u/Roo1406]

Yo, u/pagingdoctordownvote I'm gonna buy some of your merch I live outside the US so if you want some of the stats of delivery outside the US shoot me up and I'll tell you as much as you wanna know

[u/yumitsu]

Nerd City is one of the few I'm subbed to where I stop everything I'm doing to watch it

[u/Roshlev]

The gap in videos is explained by the fact that WE'RE GETTING A 4 PARTER BOYS!

[u/Sad_Broccoli]

Ever since the Jake Paul video, everytime someone says "merch" it's all I hear.

[u/kirakazumi]

When you think you're just watching an insightful video but a big part of it is a roast on the worst scumbag on the face of the earth

Also definitely agree with u/yumitsu, I literally dropped everything I was doing to watch this end to end. Another great vid doc.

[u/MattBinYYC]

I honestly could say similar things about band merch/wrestling merch.

I hate how band shirts just start to crack within a few washes. Terrible at the price they sell shirts for.

[u/kiz_123]

Absolutely loved this video and once the merch (hopefully) hits, I'm going to have to make a purchase.

Not only do I love the fact that everything nerd does he puts stacks of research and consideration into, he's also one of the only big YouTubers I know who reaches out to their fans when he can. So I know I'm not only buying a quality product, I'm supporting a quality dude.