While you're growing your customer base and designing new merch, we've been feverishly eating Hot Cheetos and Takis and catching up on Video Game High School. Oh, and we've added a ton of new products for you to sell, too, and reswizzled our pricing plans to give you even more choices. Read on for details.
In this update:
New products: Introducing iPhone cases, tank tops, and new poster sizes.
New price plans: Three ways to Merchify - read up on our new packages.
International Shipping enhancements: Better tracking, now.
Featured Merchifier: Combat Medics don't play around. You'll see.
Who else is Merchifying? Some cool stores worth checking out.
New poster sizes, tanks, and phone cases
Effective this very instant, we’ve doubled the number of products you can design and sell to your customers. With no further ado, we give unto you:
Tank Tops
Add your designs to value (Gildan) or premium (American Apparel) tanks in a wide variety of colors. Just in time for winter!
iPhone cases (4 and 5)
You know, for iPhones. Available in white or black.
Three poster sizes to choose from
Posters have been huge sellers for many of our Merchifiers. You asked us to add bigger sizes, and we listened. Now available:
Standard - 12” x 18” (printed on 100lb matte cover, 300gsm)
Medium - 18” x 24” (printed on premium semi-gloss stock)
Large – 24” x 36" (printed on premium semi-gloss stock)
Make sure to bring your high-resolution artwork, because these beautiful new full bleed posters sizes are giant!
Learn more about our newest products
Merchify Price Plans - New Tier Available
We’re growing from two pricing plans to three, to better meet the needs of a variety of Merchifiers. Here’s the skinny:
Our Basic plan stays the way you know and love it — totally free, with access to value t-shirts, white mugs, 12” x 18” posters, and mousepads.
Our new Standard plan ($29.00 / month) replaces the former Pro plan, and is a change in name only. Same pricing and products, including all the Basic plan products, plus premium American Apparel tees, black mugs, 12" x 18" posters, and laptop skins. Current Pro subscribers will see the name change reflected automatically in your Merchify account, with no change to your monthly subscription fee or available products.
Finally, the new Pro plan ($49.00 / month) includes everything above, plus two new kinds of tank tops, iPhone cases, and two new poster sizes (18” x 24” and 24” x 36”).
Got it? Maybe? Our website has a handy side-by-side comparison, just in case.
See which plan is right for you
Introducing International Tracking
It seems like only yesterday when you'd try to track an International Shipment and get nothing useful back. Oh wait, it WAS yesterday!
That was then... But this is now! Starting immediately, packages shipped to Australia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Germany, United Kingdom, and Canada are fully trackable, complete with all the activity log updates you're used to with domestic packages.
Your customers will love it! We hope ours will, too (that's you, btw).
PROFILE:
Home of the Combat Medic, Corpsman and Pararescue
Home of the Combat Medic, Corpsman and Pararescue is currently the undisputed champion in our "Longest Merchify store name" category. They may also win for "most hardcore customer base," since the people who buy from HCMCP tend to be the types that like to run into intense combat situations and save human lives at the same time.
We think they deserve cool t-shirts, don't you?
That's exactly what founder Jason Wright creates and sells to his active community: medical-themed apparel for Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard active duty, veterans and patriotic civilians. Wright started the site as a forum for some personal veteran friends of his, and it really took off unexpectedly.
His favorite thing about running a Merchify store? "I can work my other job," Wright said. Well put, Jason, and thanks for what you do!
Check out the Combat Medic shop
Check out more amazing Merchifiers
We might be a bit biased, but we're pretty sure Merchify has the coolest shop owners and products ever.
Here are a few that caught our eye the last few weeks:
Grand Garden Records - Brooklyn record and tape label. Cassettes, yo!
When You Work at a Nonprofit - Celebrating the quirks of nonprofit life.
Barbell Buddha - Crossfit podcast host and author Chris Moore's line of merch.
be YOUmazing - Using the power of music and dance to help foster kids discover and accept themselves.
Sincerely,
Your friends at Amplifier.
Merchify Launches from Beta with HUGE Update! Keep Reading.
Our 3 Most Requested Features in 1 Update!
During our Beta period, users gave us terrific suggestions. Great minds must think alike. Most of you told us very similar things. Here's what you asked for:
Women's Tees - This was hands down the biggest request. Unisex blanks just weren't cutting it. You can now add designs using the American Apparel 2102, the most popular Women's Tee that they sell.
A "Value Tee" Option - Some of you wanted a more traditional shirt style and a less expensive shirt. You got it! Now you can create shirts on the well known, classic-fit Gildan Tee. And yes ladies, our Value Tees are available in Men's AND Women's cuts (2000 & 5000L.)
Add Multiple Colors at Once - You now can create up to 12 different colors at once! Just click to turn on/off every color swatch you want to sell. If you want to preview them, simply click the color swatch under the preview area. We'll also create thumbnails for each color and push them all to your store.
Last but not least, we lowered our prices on American Apparel tees! White Tees now start at $16 instead of $19! Color American Apparel tees are cheaper too! Hey, we did tell prices were subject to change. Every once in a while, that's a good thing! Existing Merchify users can check out the newest features here.
Don't have Merchify yet? No problem, it's free for all Shopify users to install. Not yet a Shopify user? Get a free 14-day trial here. It's the easiest way in the world to start selling made-on-demand products from your very own online store.
Merchify™ differs from most Shopify apps for a very simple reason. When used, a physical product gets made and shipped. When you think about it, that is a very powerful capability. Your artwork turns into actual goods whenever an order is placed. Merchify makes this so simple it's almost easy to forget that designing cool merch is itself often quite hard.
We get it.
Be Transparent
Bigger Isn't Always Better
Know Your Medium
Beyond Logo Gear
Adding More Thumbnails
1. Be Transparent
Most Merchify users want to sell T-Shirts. If you're one of them, then this video is for you. Transparency is the most important tool to master if you want to produce eye-catching apparel.
2. Bigger Isn't Always Better
Just because you can upload 14"x"16" artwork into Merchify doesn't mean you should. We've seen some users simply uploading the biggest artwork they can. Occasionally this looks terrific. But more often just looks like a humongous image on a shirt.
Think about your goals.
This is a shirt, not a poster. So unless you've got a very compelling design that only works large, consider making your artwork smaller. And of course when you've built an item, place an order for one. That way you can see for yourself how it looks.
3. Know Your Medium
Merchify initially offers five unique products. Each one differs greatly from the other and serves a specific function. So before you simply throwing your logo onto each unique product, ask yourself, "What reason would my customer want to buy this?" When you think about it, different products often meet dramatically different needs.
Coffee Mugs make for great icebreakers. They're inherently portable. People take them into meetings, they're often a subtle tool for self-identification in the workplace. Humor particularly sells well on mugs.
T-Shirts, while even more portable, are far from subtle. More than any other medium, people use apparel to declare their membership in a particular tribe. Sometimes this is through text, other times through symbols and artwork. Often the meaning of the shirt isn't obvious, instead it's an inside joke for an initiated audience.
Posters are static, they don't move around. So pure artwork, photography, even well designed typographic quotes are popular. If you're a webcomic with hundreds or even thousands of design in your back catalog, why not use the Poster tool to sell every comic you've ever made without producing a single wit of inventory?
Mousepads and Laptop Skins each have their own niche for office workers and designers. A little bit of forethought will go a long way towards creating products your fans genuinely want to own and display.
4. Beyond Logo Gear
Continuing a theme from #3, who are you? What is your story? What are your Merchify products telling us about you? Simply slapping logos on everything might be saying "I just wanted a corporate swag store and took the path of least resistance." But if your brand really matters to you, you probably have more than just a logo already. A mission. A cast of characters. A specialty. An insight.
Take this shirt.
No simple Apple logo here, it's a very clever depiction of their Maps application revealing the location of an Engineer, namely, IN THE SHIRT. That's funny, clever, a story.
Successful merchandising design boils down to this. Design products carefully that make us want to belong to your team, your club, your tribe. Perhaps we already DO belong. Then make us proud to show it with products that get people excited!
5. Adding More Thumbnails
Merchify generates dynamic photos of your custom products. But why not add more? In this short video, we show you how to quickly generate additional close ups using Photoshop "Slice."
Let's Rock
We're thrilled you're a Merchify customer. We hope these ideas have helped you think about new possibilites and we can't wait to see what else you produce!
Heard of Henri, the Existentialist cat? He's only the biggest French export since Freedom Fries. When filmmaker Will Braden created a short film about his cat, he never imagined he was launching a viral video star. But with "Paw De Deux," Will spawned millions of Youtube views and profiles in Huffington Post, Gawker, MSN and more.
Internet fame brought Will, er, that is, Henri, thousands of Facebook fans. And they all wanted to know one thing.
Where can I buy an Henri, Le Chat Noir shirt?
So Will did what any reasonable person in his position would do. He contacted Amplifier®. After all, we've helped some of the Internet's biggest viral phenomena to sell original swag to their fans. Once Will explained his success, we gave him early access to Merchify™ and a star was born! He went from "absolute novice" to selling thousands of dollars of merch in only a week! And the orders just keep on coming! In our next email, we'll share an exclusive video interview with Will made from his hometown of Seattle. Until then, check out his videos and of course...
Finding your artwork looks dull when uploaded to Merchify™? Perhaps it's partially transparent and you don't even realize it. No worries. Our devs updated Merchify to force semi-transparent pixels to become fully-opaque. You're now asking yourself, "Uhhhhhh, what did he just say?" Yeah. So without getting wonky, most users who encountered this problem weren't even aware they were uploading "semi-transparent" artwork to begin with. With this update, they don't have to be.
By ensuring you only use transparency to "knock out" the artwork, you'll ensure the best and brightest results every time!
So if you're like most Merchify users, you signed up first and foremost to sell T-Shirts. But your great artwork needn't be limited to apparel. Check out our Laptop Skins.
First we output a premium print on a repositionable vinyl adhesive substrate.
Then we coat it with a slick, glossy laminate.
Lastly, we die-cut the print down to one of 7 different sizes.
Space age tech makes them just sticky enough to grip your Laptop or Netbook, yet loose enough to remove and reuse. Next time you're building products, give one a try.
