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Builds a lifestyle and community, beyond the product or service.
For Jenna Owens, founder of skincare and wellness brand Fitish, it’s about creating a universe for your community: “When you're mainly a D2C brand, it's a no-brainer to offer more items that fit into your customer's lifestyle. If you fill your customer's life with more than just your hero product, they will think of you more often when they are working out with your jump rope, drinking out of your branded coffee mug or throwing on your sweatshirt to run errands. Merch also creates a dialogue between customers. We've heard so many stories of customers spotting one another because of merch and they start talking because they feel this sense of family and commonality they never would have known otherwise! Wearing is caring, after all.” pg gaming
“People want to be part of something bigger than themselves,” Warsh of Wave asserts. “If something relates to you and has an impact on you, you naturally want to share that thing with others. It could be a big idea or a movement, or it could be something that simply makes you smile. I think there is something comforting and also powerful about feeling like you have shared beliefs, shared values or a shared vision with others, which should be a brand’s ultimate goal — to connect with an audience that believes, values or sees the world the way they do.”
Lexi Aiassa, integrative health coach, and CEO and founder of The Confidence Co, sees merch as an opportunity for connecting customers with a brand’s mission and ethos: “Successful brands today do a great job of not just selling their product, but also selling the why of their product’s or brand’s existence. Once a customer connects with a brand’s ethos, you have that customer for life.” |