A few things I wish more touring artists knew about merch before hitting the road
I work on the manufacturing/merch side of the music industry and have spent a lot of time dealing with tour merch — forecasting, manufacturing, inventory, venue settlements, logistics, reorders, etc.
One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of artists treat merch like:
make some cool shirts → bring them on tour → sell them
But once you're playing decent-sized rooms, merch really becomes its own little business traveling alongside the tour.
A few things I think artists should be thinking about:
1. Don't manufacture based purely on venue capacity.
A 1,500-cap room doesn't mean 1,500 merch customers.
Look at expected attendance, historical spend per head if you have it, your audience demographic, ticket price, city, and what you're actually selling.
If you've toured before, your previous sales data is incredibly valuable. Use it.
2. Don't have 15 products just because you can.
More SKUs aren't necessarily more sales.
I'd rather see an artist have 4-6 strong products with clear price points than a merch booth filled with random stuff.
Have an accessible item, your core tee(s), something premium, and maybe an accessory/collectible.
Make the buying decision easy.
3. Your size breakdown matters almost as much as your total quantity.
Ordering 1,000 shirts correctly but getting the size curve wrong can still leave you with hundreds of units nobody wants.
Your Shopify/e-commerce sales can be a great starting point for figuring out your audience's actual sizing.
Then adjust as you collect tour data.
4. Build your pricing backwards from the economics.
Don't just say, "Other bands charge $40, so we'll charge $40."
You need to understand:
sale price
minus manufacturing
minus venue merch cut
minus card/payment fees
minus freight/logistics
minus merch staffing/commissions
minus other direct costs
= what you're actually making.
A $50 shirt is not $50 of revenue in your pocket.
5. Venue merch cuts need to be accounted for BEFORE the tour.
This one catches people off guard.
Depending on your deal/venues, you're potentially giving up a percentage of merchandise sales before you've even considered your COGS.
Know your venue deals and build them into your forecast.
6. Keep inventory counts religiously.
Count in.
Sell.
Count out.
Settle.
Repeat.
If you're moving thousands of units across dozens of cities, tiny discrepancies become very expensive by the end of the tour.
You should know what you started with, what sold, what's damaged/missing, and what physically leaves every venue.
7. Plan replenishment before you need replenishment.
The worst time to figure out how you're going to manufacture another 500 shirts is when you have 80 left.
Know your manufacturing lead times and identify the products that can realistically be replenished mid-tour.
If something starts outperforming your forecast, reorder early.
8. Don't underestimate logistics.
Making the merchandise is only half the battle. UPS/FEDEX/Local Trucking always has issues.
It has to get to the first show, move between cities, get into venues, get counted, get displayed, get sold, get counted again, and potentially get replenished from another facility while the tour keeps moving.
That becomes increasingly complicated as the tour gets bigger.
9. Track sales by show and SKU.
After every show, you should eventually have enough data to know:
attendance
gross merch sales
spend per head
units sold
best-selling SKU
size distribution
venue percentage
net proceeds
After 5-10 shows, your own data starts becoming much more valuable than whatever assumptions you made before the tour.
10. Treat merch like a business, not a souvenir table.
For the right artist, merchandise can become a meaningful revenue stream.
But the artists who do it really well tend to have systems behind it: forecasting, manufacturing, logistics, inventory management, reporting and someone actually accountable for the operation.
That's ultimately why we built TourMerch.co through Limitless MFG. We were already handling manufacturing and tour operations for artists and realized there should be a dedicated side of the company focused specifically on touring.
Not trying to turn this into a sales pitch though, genuinely happy to answer questions in here about manufacturing, margins, forecasting, venue cuts, inventory, staffing, POS, or tour merch logistics if it's useful.