The Merch Manager app: What is it and how can it make your business more efficient?
Managing your business' merch can be a nightmare, but thankfully there is now a much easier way to do things.
We've worked with a lot of different companies over the years. Brands of all different shapes and sizes, in just about every industry under the sun from software companies to breweries to tech start-ups.
Over the course of that time we have learned one big thing: procuring merch is straightforward enough, managing your acquisition is not. Chaos often ensues and merch can get overlooked, lost, overstocked, forgotten about and ultimately a waste of money. But think of 2023 as the year when you figure out a better way of doing things.
Before explaining what Merch Manager is and how it can help your business, let's just take a second to talk about why felt it would be a massive addition to our clients.
The problem with managing merch
New corporate merch is great. Carefully chosen, sustainably-made, beautifully designed to the company’s exact specifications - it can be an important HR tool in keeping staff motivated and fulfilled in their jobs.
But managing that merch can be a nightmare. For example, you never have the right stuff. It’s always in the wrong quantities of what you need now. You don’t know where you stored it when you need it. And you can’t get it quickly enough.
On top of all that, whose job is it to manage the company’s merch stock? Roody’s experience is that the person who takes charge of the merch procurement can be anyone from an intern to the Chief People Officer. It really is that diverse and random.
While it's understandable that businesses have other things on their mind, for many years it was mostly a case of slapping some logos on cheap pens and mass-produced t-shirts that sit in a dusty box for five years before being handed out at an event.
That kind of merch was mostly on a one-way trip to a landfill, as nobody really wanted to keep it. Modern corporate merch is thankfully much better than that, as companies around the world have seen the light and realised that sustainably-made, quality merch and branded swag is worth its weight in gold.
As is so often the case, the sustainable choice ends up being the one that is just as good for you as it is for the environment.
The creation, storage and sending of merch is frequently painful: needlessly time-consuming, unstructured and expensive.
If you want a bit of help finding the right merch that packs a punch, check out this blog).
The solution for managing merch
You have to wonder how many problems over the past ten or fifteen years have been solved by someone simply creating an app. From everyday chores to booking a family vacation, it's easy to take it for granted now how easy it has become to take care of all those little things that used to add up to a lot of time and effort. Technology often shows that there can be an easier way of doing things.
The Merch Manager app presents the single most convenient way to take care of your company's merch. Making it easier than ever before for you to keep track of your merch and get it wherever it needs to be, it was designed to save you from the unbridled chaos that used to happen to many companies in the past.
Think of Merch Manager as your new best friend when it comes to... well, managing merch. Accessed through a company portal or internal comms set-up, it makes it easier for you to create, store, re-order and send merch to your heart's content.
All of this without you having to pack and pick yourself or needing to store your own merch.
Basically, all you need to do when you need more stock is log onto your company portal. From here you can easily order new stock from existing designs and products that are saved for your convenience, with the creation and fulfilment of these orders mostly being taken care of by us.
It was designed to make it easier to ensure you are never again caught short of merch, or feel worried about starting from scratch should you need to update your stock. Be it company merch, swag for an upcoming event, a company gift, starter box or anything else, we want to make sure you have what you need, when you need it.
It also makes it easy for users to cut back on merch they don't want/need or change something that doesn't suit or fit the recipient. Rather than leaving things to chance or running the risk of stuff going to waste, you can track and order your merch right from the app.
Picture this scenario - fifty new starters in your company starting on Monday. Fifty starter boxes to be picked and packed from the storeroom (where did we put those boxes again?). Fifty different employee clothing sizes to be collected to ensure the perfect fit on hoodies/t-shirts/socks. Fifty sets of personal information to be managed to ensure GDPR compliance. Tonnes of works. Now instead shake their hand on Day1, give them a big smile and tell them there's an email in their inbox they can log into the company Merch Manager, input their own sizes on a form (which is GDPR compliant) and the boxes will be delivered direct to their home address or to the workplace. Yep, it's another big headache taken care of.
While it would be easy to assume that all of this comes with a tonne of extra cost, you'll likely be happy to learn that the Merch Manager is free and there are no upfront costs. The usual product costs apply plus a small storage charge per warehoused merch item.
One of our big goals for this year is to help the amazing companies we work with, as well as the new ones we have yet to meet, to understand this new platform. We're always happy to help and answer any questions you might have, so be sure to reach out to us so we can run you through everything in more detail.
If you want to see some examples of how our customers use our merch after we create it, check out our blog post here.