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So who am I?

I’m Daniel Sohlman, a 33-year old Graphic Designer/Marketing guy from Finland. Now also a solo game developer. I am working on my debut video game Witchen! (unannounced) and that got me into making my own merch (merchandising came up while making the business plan). 

To my considerable surprise, that worked out way better than I expected and I decided to lean on the crafting aspect a bit more. Etsy worked well for me as a proof of concept and gave me confidence that my products are something people are willing to pay for and leave positive feedback. The end goal was always to find and partner up with other indie devs to enable more games to merchandise their games.

If you’ve read this far, thank you for your time. Don’t hesitate to shoot me a message if you have any questions or comments. 

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Product showcase

Wide variety of product types from one workflow – you can do a lot with a 3D printer and a plotter machine!

The production – What I can and can’t do

The Good

Producing items by hand and at home makes it possible for me to make a competitive offer for smaller inventories. As I don’t require moulds and I’ve perfected the workflow from “2D design into a physical flat product”, small quantities of custom products can be made in a very efficient manner. It’s cheap for small scale and since it’s handmade and unique, it sells for more too!

The Bad

It does also offer some production bottlenecks that make mass-production slower than a Chinese factory might be able to output. 3D printing takes time and with only 1 printer, it is the biggest production bottleneck. This means that if 3D printed products will be mass-produced, the production will take some time. I could possibly promise an average of 5-10 items a day production rate quite feasibly. In the case of a larger production amount, ordering well in advance of sales or Patreon reward drop is recommended.

For items that won’t need 3D printing, my production capacity is significantly higher. Depending on the type of product, I can easily produce between 20-50 a day without the 3D printer bottlenecking me.

The Design

Whether you want to design the merch yourself or work together with me on the design is up to you. If you’d prefer to have an experienced Graphic Designer help you with merch ideas, I’m at your disposal. If you prefer to just provide me the design files (2D image or a vector file), the process of turning that into a physical product is fairly straightforward.

The product can be art that will be printed or if it’s just a shape, a vector shape works best. I can easily walk you through these processes if needed.

What costs are involved in the process?

As much as I hate not giving a straight fixed price as an answer, the costs are heavily dependent on what you would like me to handle in the process and what you are willing to handle yourself (or outsource to someone else). I can, however, outline some basic costs. In the Selling & Shipping section I will also explain how those 2 aspects will affect pricing, depending on what type of production we end up going for.

Pre-production costs

Pre-production costs would only consist of design process and initial material costs. If you provide me with the design files/art to work on, this will usually only take 1 hour of manual labour on average. Which I bill at 25£/h (+ taxes). If you also wish to take advantage of my product design services and work with you on coming up with merch, that design work goes for 40£/hour (+ taxes). Alternatively we can partner up for the design work and I’ll just increase my cut from the sales instead of charging for the design.

The material costs are not terribly huge per product. My Etsy store’s material costs averages at around 0.55£ (+taxes) per product. There is significant variation between the products though.

Production costs

This varies between different kinds of products but the basic formula is material costs + manual labour. This will be cheap enough that your profit margin would stay significant. When mass producing the same product, the amount of manual labour is minimized.

Packaging and shipping

I will package the smaller products inside individual Minigrip packages (and sometimes with added cardboard packaging for added protection). Custom branded packaging and envelopes is an option if you want to wow the customer or your Patreon donor a bit. As for pricing, standard packaging will only costs packaging material (cheap) and manual labour involved. Packaging items to be “ready to ship” will not take a long time labour-wise.

Which way we agree to go with the shipping affects the pricing. If I will only produce and package the products to be shipped to you as a bulk shipment, that will cost about 19£ for up to 10kg per shipment. You will most likely have to pay VAT to the Customs as well (which is tax deductible). Despite those costs, this would still be a really cheap option and you would reap highest profit margins. The drawback being that you would need to handle the shipping to your customers (or find someone to do it for you nearby you).

If you’d rather not handle any order/reward fulfillment such as selling and shipping, I can also offer to fulfill the orders and ship them to the customers directly. This would mean cheap shipping for your customers/donors but less profits for you. Personally I would like to handle just the production but since I don’t want shipping to become a dealbreaker, I am willing to negotiate a deal for the fulfillment.

How would selling these work?

For just Patreon rewards you don’t need to think about sales and setting up a shop, but if you do wish to expand to merch at any point, you could either use something like Shopify or just build your own simple shop that you self host. Since you might want to explore the option to offer physical collectors editions for The Pale Beyond at some point, setting up some manner of way to buy those from your own site would be the most straightforward method.

I also have several different sales methods I’d like to suggest for consideration that affect your upfront costs as well as what type of production method we should use.

1. The Pre-order Method

This is what even bigger game corporations use for their merch because it’s the most risk-free. Basically you would put merch up for pre-order for a certain period of time. Then once the deadline for pre-orders has expired, you will know exactly the right amount to produce. The downside is that your customers will have to wait for their products. However, people generally seem to be ok with that as far as I’ve observed. This is what I would personally recommend.

2. The “Drop” Method

You order a one-time limited quantity stock of a product and “drop” it for sale. Sell until stock has sold out completely. Adds the dreaded FOMO (fear of missing out) into the sales process, which you may or may not want to utilize depending on your moral compass when it comes to sales tactics. Limited time items have a higher chance of selling out so there is less risk involved when stocking in advance. Get the cost savings of stocking up in advance but with an increased sale potential.

3. The Normal Method

You order an X amount of stock and restock when stock is low. This one lowers production costs and works best if you want to handle the store operating and shipping. It’s the most risky as you will have to stock up in advance. Best solution for Loot Tier rewards.

4. The On-Demand Method

I would produce the item(s) after an order comes through. Has a production time of several days but cheap to ship and order fulfillment would be handled by me. Very risk-free for you but would mean a significant reduction of your profit margins.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you draw?

I wish I could but I cannot 🙁 Based on what I’ve seen of your new game project, your artists are really talented and can produce quality art for any merch!

What kind of product quality can we expect?

With handmade products and 3D printing the result will always have slight blips and variations. The bar for what I consider A Grade quality is rather high though so any products that are being sold will all have gone through quality inspections before packaging.

I’ve sold these types of products on Etsy and received universally positive feedback on the products so I’m confident they will meet your expectations.