Why we make merch nobody asked for
Hoodies, lighters, stickers. No strategy deck, no target audience, no ROI. That's the point.
Somewhere in our office right now there is a box of lighters that says “Every good idea starts with a spark.” Nobody commissioned them. No client asked. There was no brief, no kickoff call, no measurement framework. Someone thought of the line, someone else laughed, and a few weeks later, lighters.
This is a recurring condition around here. The current inventory of things we made because we felt like it includes:
- Hoodies, black on black, because the site is monochrome and we practice what we preach even when getting dressed.
- The aforementioned lighters.
- Stickers galore, which have a way of migrating onto ours and client’s laptops, water bottles, and at least one guitar case that we know of.
A reasonable person might ask why a client services business spends real time and money making objects with no client and no service attached. We’ve asked ourselves the same thing, usually while unboxing more stickers. We have answers now.
The first one is simple: merch is the only project where we’re the client, and being the client is educational. Suddenly we’re the ones saying “can the owl be bigger” and arguing about thread color, and every round of that builds a little more patience for the people who sit on the other side of our own process. Empathy through role reversal. Cheaper than therapy, comes with hoodies.
The second answer matters more. Client work, done right, is disciplined. Every choice defended, every direction tied to a goal, every instinct made to show its work. That discipline is the job and we love the job. But a muscle that only ever contracts under supervision gets strange. You start designing for the approval meeting instead of the idea, and you stop noticing what you’d make when nobody’s grading it.
Merch is where nobody’s grading it.
A lighter with a pun on it answers to no KPI. A sticker doesn’t need a strategy. So the weirder instincts get some exercise, the ones that don’t fit neatly into a scope of work, and they come back to the client projects noticeably stronger. Some of our favorite client moments started life as an unsupervised experiment that had no business existing. The merch table is basically a farm league for ideas.
There’s a quieter third reason, too. A team that only produces on demand eventually forgets it can produce without one. Making things we just felt like making is how we remind ourselves the engine runs on its own fuel. The client doesn’t start the fire. The client hires people who are already burning.
Which, come to think of it, may be why the lighters felt so right.
We’re aware none of this survives contact with a spreadsheet. The merch program’s business case is that it doesn’t have one and never will. It’s a standing bet that the sharpest client work comes from people who still make things for the joy of it, and fourteen years in, the bet keeps paying.
Anyhow… If you ever meet one of us and admire the hoodie, ask nicely. There’s probably a lighter in the pocket, and every good idea starts with a spark.
