Festival merchandise gets treated as an afterthought right up until it doesn’t. On Head in the Clouds, the lift did not come from a better logo. It came from personas, vendor selection, and where the booths were standing.
“A 24% lift was not a design win. It was a hundred small decisions about where people stand.”
In 2024 we worked with 88rising on Head in the Clouds. Merchandise sales went up 24%.
The number gets quoted without the work behind it, so here is the work. Design was part of it. So were audience personas, vendor sourcing, and the physical arrangement of a booth — and it is genuinely unclear which of those mattered most.
We are a student-run Gen Z insights firm, founded in 2024. Head in the Clouds was our own audience, which is the only reason we had any business guessing at what they would want to wear.
Where the 24% actually came from
Festival merch fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the product. We were working against:
Designs made for a slide deck rather than for a body in the heat
Personas written by people who have never queued at a festival
Vendors chosen on unit price, then late on the run
Booths laid out for staff convenience instead of attendee flow
No feedback loop between what sold and what got made next
Every one of those has to be fixed before the gates open — and none of them can be fixed after.
Six things we actually did:
Built the personas first
Before any design existed we defined who was coming and what they would still want to wear a year later.
Ran the whole line in-house
Ideation, design, and manufacturing sat with one team, so there was no handoff where the intent got lost.
Sourced vendors on delivery, not price
A cheaper unit that arrives late is worth nothing at a two-day festival.
Made things people would wear again
Merch that only works inside the festival gets bought once and worn never.
Optimised the booth for flow
We arranged it around how attendees actually move, so browsing stopped blocking buying.
Treated the first hours as data
What moves early tells you where to put the stock, the signage, and the people.
The parts nobody budgets for:
Vendor sourcing — the slowest, least visible, most schedule-critical step
Booth arrangement — free to change, and it moves conversion more than another print run does
Persona work — the thing everyone claims to do and almost nobody uses once designs start
The post-event debrief — the only way any of this compounds into next year
Merch is sourcing. Merch is layout. Merch is logistics.
The 24% did not come from a better graphic. It came from refusing to treat merch as a design problem with a supply chain attached, when it is a supply chain problem with a design attached.
Personas decide what gets made
Vendors decide whether it exists on time
Layout decides whether anyone reaches it
The audience decides everything else
That is why we kept every step under one roof rather than handing pieces off. Each seam between teams is a place where the original read of the audience gets diluted.
A check you can run today:
Look at your booth plan. Does it optimise for the people working it or the people walking past it?
If you cannot answer immediately, it is the first one. It is always the first one.
Final thought
A 24% lift sounds like a creative result. It was an operational one.
Make what your audience actually wants, get it there on time, and put it where they walk — and the number follows.
Koy Strategy.
Insights team.
Branding.
Growth.
SEO.
