😍 Merchandising

Merchandising production is differentiated in printing on paper (producing flyers and posters) and printing on fabric or on objects (producing swag such as shirts, tote bags, or mugs).

In both cases, the steps to follow are the same.

1. Graphic(s) creation: conceiving the illustration and/or the writing to be printed on the products
2. Producers’ scouting: looking for those who could practically produce the merchandising. They can be either the same entity (e.g. a print shop that gets its own t-shirts) or separate entities:
   1. raw material: the producer of the simple material (e.g. shirt, mug, hoodie…)
   2. print shop: the store that would print the graphics on the raw material
3. Printing
4. Distributing: as an APS, we cannot print any invoice, therefore we are not allowed to sell anything. Nevertheless, in order to earn funds out of merchandising, we perform the little trick of gifting merchandise for free in exchange for donations.

Info

NOTE: steps 1 and 2 should be carried out at the same time, by the Peacocks and the Owls respectively. This is important both to be efficient in terms of timing, but above all to allow the designers to communicate with the print shop concerning peculiar intentions (e.g. printing a writing on a sleeve of hoodies, defining the kind of printing material…)

Timing

Timing is tricky for everything, but concerning merch, in particular posters and passports, it gets terribly hard. There are two opposite forces at play at the same time:

• the sooner we create something and we print it, the more relaxed we are to carry out everything else. Nevertheless, this forces us to have sure and confirmed information early, and we risk that it could change and the outdated print becomes useless.
• the later we go to print, the more sure we are that information is correct, but we risk of clamming everything in the last few days, immediately before the festival, when everything becomes crazy and we are all more prone to err. Lastly, the later we print content with publicity purposes, the smaller is their exposure timeframe; they are more effective when displayed for a long time.

Therefore, the right balance among the two has to be found. In general, it is something like this.

• Stickers are to be printed as soon as we run out of them, since they are not linked to any edition, therefore they do not contain any potentially changing information.
• Swag is to be created an printed ASAP, ideally by June. This is because the only data it contains are the date and the theme, and we know both since January at the latest.
• The only information that posters have and swag do not are sponsors’ logos. Ideally, they are to be sure by mid-July, but actually we know that sponsors are a wildcard. Hence, there are some final absolute deadlines.
  • 70x100 posters are to be delivered to Abaco approximately one week before they have to be hanged. Taking into account a few workdays for the typography to print them and considering that the exposure time we pay for is of two weeks, they have to be ready by the first week of August.
  • A3 posters are to be managed autonomously among us, therefore we can be a bit more relaxed and, if necessary, add a few more tweaks before printing them. Considering a minimum of \~10 days of exposure, they have to be ready by the second week of August.
• Passports are handed out only during the festival: they can be printed the day before the festival begins.

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Ultimo aggiornamento: 2023-01-02
Creata: 2022-10-27