When is comes to merchandising, Gen Z lead the way - Kevin Buckle
I was surprised at the interest in last week’s column in which I said we would start doing mail outs tailored to people’s interests.
It seemed like a fairly obvious thing to do but it appears that most shop mail outs go down the obvious route of telling fans when an artist has a new release out or maybe an old album reissued or just sending out a more general email with a list of new releases each week.
As an alternative I think we will concentrate on letting people know when we get in hard-to-find imports and second-hand items that can no longer be bought new.
We will also certainly let fans know what merchandise we have, be that T-shirts, hoodies, cards, prints, stickers, patches, badges or indeed keyrings.
I never understood how it was we sold so many keyrings, sometimes several at a time, as it was obvious they were not being attached to keys. The answer was actually staring me in the face all the time when these customers came to the counter as they would often have a bag which had a variety of keyrings attached!
These days there is no end to the types of merchandise we are offered and one of our most popular sales is a set of four pint glasses by either Pink Floyd or AC/DC.
What makes these particularly good value is that individually they sell for £10 each but in a presentation box they are only £25. It is very rare for somebody to see them in the window or on display and not buy after they have asked the price.
We also sell shot glasses, lunch boxes, slip mats, jigsaws, water bottles coasters, caps and beanies, though I have so far drawn the line at aprons and socks.
Other items that are particularly popular are goblets, especially by the band Ghost, and playing cards, with again Pink Floyd and AC/DC leading the way closely followed by David Bowie, Kiss, Guns N’ Roses, Elvis, The Grateful Dead and Johnny Cash.
One of the many advantages of the new larger shop is we have two very large windows we can display all these things in and many of our sales come from people asking for something they have seen in the window.
While there seems little need for incentives I think when we launch the lists we might offer a prize draw for each list for people who sign up in the first two weeks giving them a chance to win a Taylor Swift print, a Mitski graphic novel, a Butcher Billy Cure T-shirt or maybe an Oasis box set of badges with a keyring!
The one non-artist related listing that we will definitely add will be for Scottish music as I’m not overly keen of defining music by genres, though I suspect there would be a big demand for dream pop and shoegaze, which are big with Gen Z these days.
I’ve never paid much attention to these categories before like Baby Boomers and Millennials, but often when I look into the popularity of something that I don’t understand the influence of Gen Z is claimed to be behind it.
It would appear that the once all powerful and influential Millennials have been superseded by Gen Z.