The Tournament Merch Playbook: Our lessons at the WILLI Tournament

Great merchandising is crucial for enhancing sports events, creating memorable experiences, and building strong brand connections. By partnering with Team Illinois Lacrosse at the Wisconsin-Illinois Spring Lacrosse Invitational, also known as the WILLI, we used our combined expertise to launch a highly successful merchandising campaign featuring apparel and accessories. Below, we share the key strategies that contributed to our success—including increased fan engagement and sales—and how you can apply them to make your event’s merchandising equally effective.

Start with Your Brand Identity

Advice:

• Focus on creating strong, appealing visual elements like banners, signage, and merchandise designs that resonate with the event's theme and appeal to the target audience.
• Incorporate recognizable icons and brand colors in all promotional materials and merchandise to improve visibility and reinforce brand identity.

Example:

• Using Team Illinois’ friendly whale mascot and a vibrant colorway of bright blue, navy, and white caught the eye and culturally connected with lacrosse’s East Coast traditions.

Understand Your Audience: Product Choice

Advice:

• Select merchandise that aligns with the lifestyle and interests of your audience to ensure the products are not only valued but also used well beyond the event.

Example:

• Because lacrosse communities overlap in hockey and golf lifestyle wear, we chose functional and stylish activewear. 
• The short-sleeved t-shirts overwhelmingly outperformed long sleeves, indicating an opportunity to streamline and simplify our ordering process for future events.
• Additionally, we included rope hats in our product lineup. 
• These one-size-fits-all options matched attendees' lifestyles and proved popular, minimizing risks associated with sizing and effectively attracting customers.

Understand Your Audience: Sizing

Advice:

• Include a wide range of sizes catering to youth and adults to ensure all attendees can find merchandise that fits them properly. 
• Remember, it’s important to accommodate everyone attending the event!

Example:

• Although primarily aimed at youth, the event unexpectedly attracted significant interest from adults and coaches, showing the need for more inclusive sizing in our merchandise.
• While our focus would still have been on youth sizes, in response to the unexpected interest, we would have included a broader range of larger sizes than originally planned.

Understand Your Audience: Pricing Strategies

Advice:

• Align your pricing strategy to support your event goals—maximizing revenue, increasing brand visibility, or enhancing the attendee experience. 
• Choose a pricing model that helps achieve these objectives effectively.
• Implement simple markup strategies for pricing your merchandise. 
• For instance, add a flat $10 to your cost price, or use a standard retail markup to determine t to determine the selling price, such as doubling the cost.

Example:

• Merchandise should be priced to balance affordability with profitability.
• Items purchased for $15 each are typically sold for $30.

Inventory and Supply Chain Management

Advice:

• Forecast initial stock levels conservatively at about 35% of anticipated attendee numbers to prevent overstocking.
• Analyze past sales data to make informed decisions about future inventory levels, ensuring your stock aligns with actual demand.

Example:

• Our conservative stocking approach minimized the risk of excess inventory and resulted in selling out, thereby generating pent-up demand for future events.
• We managed immediate demand with a pop-up preorder link.

Marketing and Promotion

Advice:

• Use pre-event social media teasers to build excitement and inform attendees about the merchandise.
• Provide real-time updates on product availability and special offers during the event through social media or in-person to help drive sales.

Example:

• Teasing merchandise on social media a week before the event and tagging participants effectively increased booth traffic and sales.

Logistics Checklist

Advice:

• Design a sales area for quick and efficient service to accommodate high traffic. 
• Organize merchandise by size in separate boxes and consider pre-packaging items for speed.
• Set up your layout in a parking lot a week before the event, especially if it’s your first time. 
• This practice run will help you identify and resolve any layout issues beforehand.

Example:

• Our setup featured organized displays and mobile payment options, ensuring smooth customer flow and quick transactions.
• Two 6-foot folding tables
• Two 6-foot table wraps
• One 10'x10' canopy for branding and shelter
• Goal netting with clips (to display merchandise securely)
• Zip ties
• Organize merchandise by size into separate boxes for quick access
• Pre-fold and bag merchandise for faster transactions and protection
• Shopify POS or Square for credit card transactions (70% of our sales!)

Post-Event Engagement

Advice:

• Set up a system for quick online pre-orders to capture sales when items sell out at the event, ensuring interested customers can still purchase the products they want.
• Implement pricing strategies to reduce prices on remaining stock towards the event's conclusion, helping to clear out inventory efficiently.

Example:

• We launched a pre-order link to an online store during the event to capitalize on high demand and offered last-hour discounts to clear any remaining stock.

Conclusion

• Building Lasting Connections Through Merchandise:
• Strategic Insights: Implement strategic insights and real-world examples to enhance your event's merchandising, boosting revenue and significantly improving the overall experience.
• Commitment to Excellence: At Clubhouse Athletic, we are committed to delivering thoughtful and effective merchandising solutions.
• Memorable and Profitable Events: Our approach ensures that each event is memorable and profitable, creating lasting connections with attendees.