How to Make Band Merch (That Sells and Doesn't Sit in a Closet)

Here's the number nobody tells you before your first tour: for most independent bands, merch outearns streaming, downloads, and door splits combined. A $25 shirt at a show clears more than a hundred thousand streams. And here's the other number — the one bands learn the hard way — a garage full of 80 unsold mediums in a design you don't like anymore is a very expensive lesson in ordering too much, too soon.

Merch is a small manufacturing business bolted onto a band, and it rewards the same things every small business does: sensible quantities, honest margins, and knowing what your customer actually wants. Here's how to make band merch that sells, what it costs, and how to avoid the closet full of shirts.

Start With One Good Design, Not Five

The instinct is to launch with a full line: a shirt, a hoodie, a hat, a tote, three colorways. Resist it. Every variant multiplies your inventory risk and your setup costs, and none of it tells you anything you didn't already know.

Start with one strong design on one shirt, plus stickers. Stickers cost pennies, sell for a few dollars, and work as a free throw-in that makes every other sale feel generous. One shirt design also means one conversation with a printer, one artwork file, and one size curve to guess at. When it sells through, you'll know a lot more about what your audience buys than you would from spreading the same budget across five half-hearted items.

A note on the art: merch art is not album art. Album art works at thumbnail size on a screen; merch art has to read from across a room and survive being printed in a limited number of ink colors. The designs that sell best are usually bolder and simpler than a cover — a strong logo lockup, a single striking image, something a stranger can identify from ten feet away.

Screen Printing vs. DTG vs. Print-on-Demand

Three ways to get ink onto a shirt, and they're good at genuinely different things:

• Screen printing. Ink pushed through a stencil, one screen per color. There's a setup fee per color, so it only makes economic sense in batches — but at 24 to 100 pieces it's by far the cheapest per unit, and the print is thick, durable, and looks like real band merch. This is what you want for the merch table.
• Direct-to-garment (DTG). A printer that sprays ink directly onto the fabric. No setup fee, unlimited colors, so it handles photographic or gradient-heavy art that screen printing can't do affordably. Costs more per shirt and doesn't drop much with quantity. Good for full-color designs and very short runs.
• Print-on-demand. A service prints and ships each item only when someone orders it. Zero upfront cost, zero inventory risk, and thin margins. Slow shipping and no control over blank quality make it wrong for shows, but right for keeping back-catalog designs and odd sizes available online forever.

The setup most working bands land on: a small screen-printed run of the current design to sell at shows, and print-on-demand online for everything else. You get the margin where the volume is and the long tail without the storage unit.

What It Actually Costs

Rough numbers for a screen-printed shirt, including a mid-quality blank:

• 24 to 72 pieces, one color — usually $6 to $12 per shirt, plus a one-time screen setup fee of roughly $15 to $30 per color.
• 100+ pieces — often $5 to $8 per shirt as the setup cost spreads out.
• DTG, any quantity — typically $10 to $18 per shirt with no setup fee.

Things that move the number: extra ink colors, a back print or sleeve hit, oversized prints, and the blank itself. Don't cheap out on the blank. A stiff, boxy shirt is the single most common reason merch gets bought once and never worn, and a shirt nobody wears is a billboard you paid for and never hung up. Ask your printer which blanks they stock and feel a sample before you commit.

Price It So the Whole Run Pays for Itself

The standard independent price is $20 to $30 for a shirt, with $25 as the sweet spot — it's clean cash math in a loud, dark room and it doesn't require you to make change from a $20 bill. Aim for a 2.5x to 3x markup over your all-in per-unit cost, because you are not going to sell every piece. You'll misjudge sizes, you'll give shirts to the sound guy and the band that let you open, and a few will get damaged in a van. The markup covers all of that.

Bundles are the easiest way to raise your average sale without cutting the price of anything: shirt plus record for a small discount, two shirts for a bit off, sticker free with any purchase. And take cards. A phone card reader costs almost nothing and a meaningful share of merch sales are lost simply because someone has no cash on them.

Order Small, Reorder What Works

For a first run, 24 to 50 pieces is enough for most local bands. The per-unit price at 100 looks tempting and it's how bands end up with inventory they're still trying to move two years later. A reasonable starting size spread is about 15% small, 30% medium, 30% large, 20% XL, and a few 2XL — then let real sales correct it. Print a full range; people outside a narrow size band notice immediately when a band doesn't carry their size, and they remember it.

Track what sells out and what lingers. Reordering a proven design in the sizes you actually ran out of is the lowest-risk money you'll spend on merch, and it's a decision you can only make after a real run.

Getting the Art and the Printer

Two people to find: someone to make the design, and someone to print it.

For the art, a graphic designer who works with bands will hand you print-ready files in the formats a screen printer needs — vector art, separated colors, sized correctly — which saves you a round of back-and-forth and a possible reprint. On Bandry, designers post "offering" listings with rates and links to past work, and because design is remote by nature you're not limited to your own city. Tap 🔗 on a listing and your contact goes to them directly. Sort out usage rights in writing before money moves — if the art is going on merch you sell, you want that stated plainly.

For printing, local is usually the better call for a first run. You can see a proof, feel the blanks, and turn it around faster than an online bulk printer when there's a show in two weeks. Open Bandry's Resources tab and filter to Merch — it maps screen printing and custom apparel shops near you on the map, free to browse. Call two or three, ask about setup fees, blank options, and turnaround, and compare. Quotes for the identical job vary more than most bands expect.

Run the Merch Table Like It Matters

You can do everything above right and still sell nothing if the table is an afterthought. Light it, because dark rooms hide merch. Hang a shirt rather than stacking it flat, so people can see the design without unfolding anything. Put prices on it in a size readable from a few feet. Have someone standing there during and after your set, not just before doors — the window right after you play is when people actually buy. And say it from stage once, briefly. Most people who would have bought something simply didn't know where the table was.

Merch is one of the few parts of an independent music career where the math is fully in your control. Print one good design, order less than you think, price it honestly, and let the sell-through tell you what to make next.