Seven Tips to Make Your Brand Merchandise More Sustainable
Brand merchandise is big business. Brands use branded promo items like pens, hoodies, bags and water bottles to get their name in front of their audience and to keep them top of mind. Research shows that it’s incredibly wasteful and polluting. Luckily, sustainable merch is a win-win. If you want your brand merch to serve its purpose (ie: create brand awareness and recall with your audience), you want it to stay with your audience for as long as possible.
Why do we love brand merchandise?
As brand builders for change, we need our brands to be seen. Whether you are in climate tech, women’s empowerment, fair wages, or mental health: you want people to remember your product, service or cause.
Brand merch is a great way to get your brand name out there and keep it in people’s sight and minds. On the surface, it seems like a cost-effective way of growing brand awareness and recall.
Because it’s known to be efficient, we produce branded t-shirts, notebooks, key cords, keychains or pens with our logos. Your fans get a free item, you get brand exposure.
It seems like a win-win right?
It’s a little more complicated than that. The hidden cost of brand merch on the environment is huge.
is brand merchandise bad?
Research shows that only 21% of branded and promotional items are kept for a significant amount of time (up to one year). More than half is given away, and 23% is immediately thrown away. That makes it far less effective than estimated. It’s also an incredibly wasteful industry with a huge impact on the environment.
It is estimated that in the UK alone, 1.69 billion GBP is spent annually on brand merch. And because brand merch is often given away for free, it is produced as cheaply as possible. This means the products are often made under poor working conditions with cheap synthetic materials.
Tshirts and hoodies make up a huge percentage of brand merch.
There is a vast global market of discarded textile that few in the West are aware of.
Our home base Kenya is one of those countries. Of all the textile waste that comes in, 20-50% has to be immediately discarded because it is not wearable. It sits in landfills and ends up in rivers and oceans.
The sliver of promotional t-shirts that survive the cull end up at second-hand markets called ‘mtumba’.
Here, promotional t-shirts are the lowest category of goods sold, at somewhere between 20-70 cents (USD). Many are never sold at these markets either and also end up in landfills, rivers, and oceans.
Mtumbas are well-loved here in Kenya for two reasons:
They provide people on small incomes an affordable source of clothes.
They also create a lively trade that allows lots of micro-entrepreneurs a way of generating income.
On a larger scale, the import of second-hand clothing undermines the local clothing industry. Many African governments have already implemented a ban, or are considering it.
In a fair global economy, each country should take care of its own waste and overflow, and each country should have its own marketplace for secondhand clothing.
Of course, it is a good thing that a small percentage of clothes does get re-used. But let’s not use this remote chance as an excuse to produce more merch.
Sustainable merch is a win-win.
If you want your brand merch to serve its purpose (ie: create brand awareness and recall with your audience), you want it to stay in the hands of your audience for as long as possible.
how can you create more sustainable merchandise?
Here are seven tips to create more ethical and sustainable merchandise, and end promotional waste.
1. refuse: just don’t create any merch
We cannot state this enough! The most sustainable merchandise option is NO merchandise. Even the most eco-friendly or 'sustainable' products have an impact.
We need to question our 'culture of stuff' on every level. Do your customers need another keychain? Do they need another pen? Water bottle? It has been done and overdone. I have about half a dozen branded water bottles in my possession and have lost or broken a dozen more.
Saskia de Feijter, slow fashion evangelist, suggests that we all go through a checklist before creating any type of merch.
What are your goals for this merch?
Do you actually need merch? Can the goal be achieved another way?
How can you achieve your goal with minimal damage to man/animal/environment?
How can you make sure the merch will be useful and not wasted after the event?
And we have to ask ourselves, what are the alternatives? Is there such a thing as non-material merch?
Instead of handing out stuff, we can gift experiences that are memorable and have a smaller footprint. In order to give it the same effect as physical merch, you want to give an experience that reminds people of you on a regular basis.
Instead of gifting branded merch, gift a (virtual) experience such as yoga class or a gathering.
Gifting subscriptions that repeat regularly keep you top of mind. For instance, if you want to give your fans the gift of health and time for themselves, you could give a series of online yoga or workout sessions.
You can also make charitable donations in your customers’ names to organizations that are aligned with your values and theirs. Oxfam for instance has great charity gifts.
2. switch from virgin and single-use materials to recycled, sustainable and long lasting materials
If you do produce merch, make sure they’re made of the right stuff.
By opting for products made from materials like recycled paper, bamboo, or organic cotton, which are environmentally friendly, you are helping reduce the use of harmful non-renewable resources and eventual waste in the environment.
Biodegradable promotional products won't end up in landfills or oceans like traditional single-use items.
Or, opt for long-lasting materials.
One example is stonepaper notebook brand MOYU. Stone paper is a re-writable, sustainable alternative to tree paper.
You can customize MOYU notebooks and give them away as brand merch. 1 MOYU replaces 15 regular notebooks.
A stone paper notebook is not just more environmentally friendly, it lasts longer and is more noticeable than regular notebooks. People love that it can be erased and re-used hundreds of times.
Merch that surprises people and that people will cherish is what you’re looking for.
Not sure what the right materials are?
If you work with a B-corp certified brand merchandise producer, they will guide you in the right direction.
For instance, Project Merchandise or Fluid in the UK, or Fairware in Canada.
3. make it re-usable: NEVER timestamp your merch
We all think it’s cool when people can show they were part of your conference or event this year.
“Women in Tech Conference 2023” or “The Big Johson Family Reunion of 2019” are just some of the shirts we find here at the local second-hand market.
Judging by the sheer number of shirts with dates on them, few people want to be seen with last year’s stuff (let alone, the year before, or the year before that).
That outdated event t-shirt from a marathon 2 years ago will not likely be sold vintage or second-hand. By adding the event date or year, you’re creating an additional incentive to toss the item.
Do you want to create a more sustainable event? Don’t add the event year to your brand merchandise. Photo by Nqobile Vundla on Unsplash
At our local second-hand market in Kenya, event merch is by far the largest category. Sports events easily lead the pack. It is also one of the least appealing to customers visiting the market. Discarded promo shirts go for about 30 cents (USD), one of the lowest prices for items at the market. Many shirts will never get sold.
And… if you have any merchandise left, you can’t re-use it the next year!
Take the dates off, so you can extend the shelf life of your shirts.
4. gift merch that people will cherish
Pens are the #1 promotional item. It’s estimated that about 10 billion pens per year are thrown away in the United States, and 1.6 billion pens in the UK. How many pens have you lost or tossed this year?
If you’re going to give away merchandise, make sure it’s something your audience will cherish and they will love to be seen with it.
Tote bags by the New Yorker magazine
“Emotional baggage” tote bags from The School of Life
“In the land of getting my money right” tote bag by The Finance Bar.
Don’t just plaster your logo all over it, but play around with messaging. Unless it’s done gorgeously, like the New Yorker tote above.
The totes by the School of Life and the Finance Bar put a smile on our faces. Bags are great for virtue signaling, so if you are a brand for change, a tote is a great way for people to show off their values.
But…
When reusable bags hit the mainstream in the 2010s, they were successful at reducing the amount of plastic bags shoppers were using. The number of bags bought in the U.K. dropped from 10 billion to about six billion by 2010, according to the British Retail Consortium.
But by 2024, many people own dozens of reusable bags. Totes have gone from solution to problem, as the New York Times reports.
Choose recycled plastic instead of virgin organic cotton.
If you want to use the bag as a giveaway for carrying out products, consider that not every product needs a bag.
A bag is almost asking to be filled with more stuff. It has become standard practice at events to hand out totes filled to the brim with promo items.
Instead of choosing a bag that you will most likely end up filling with more promo stuff, could one high-quality treasured item make a bigger splash?
5. make it fair
You can’t work to promote social justice with promotional t-shirts that were sewn together by a (wo)man working for less than a dollar a day.
Studio Jux makes ethical, sustainable clothing and promotes its brand accordingly.
As brands for good, we need to walk the talk when it comes to our values.
Switch to using fair trade, eco-cotton shirts as your promotional merchandise. Now that is something you want your tribe to be seen in!
6. give away objects that support more sustainable behavior
Give people objects that encourage sustainable behavior and spread awareness about the impact of single-use plastics materials on the environment.
By giving promotional merchandise such as reusable coffee cups, you not only help reduce plastic and paper waste but also encourage a sustainable lifestyle.
With beautifully designed reusable coffee cups available from companies like KeepCup or Circular&Co. you can offer your target audience a durable and reusable alternative to plastic throw-away cups that will last for years. And they’re more reliable than disposable cups too! A win for them and a win for the environment.
Reusable coffee cup from Australian company KeepCup.
You not only save money in the long run, but you'll also create an army of brand ambassadors who will help spread your message of sustainability to a wider audience.
7. support local producers
Conferences and events are notorious for producing significant amounts of waste, with thousands of lanyards and key cords being discarded within 24 hours of use.
Event hosts can drop the plastic name badges and opt for wooden cards with laser prints and lanyards made by local artisans. The wooden name badges at Playing for the Planet 2024 in Nairobi had smaller plastic name labels on top.
At impact events like Sankalp Africa and the Green Game Jam we spotted something different. Participants’ name tags were made from wood and hung from beautifully crafted necklaces made by local artisans.
It's time to embrace ethical brand swag, without any excuses. Let’s walk our talk!