Festival T-Shirts: Merch for Organisers, Crews and Groups
By The Velocity Wear Team
The UK has hundreds of festivals, from huge greenfield events to tiny village weekenders. Almost all of them sell or hand out t-shirts. Organisers want merch that funds next year, crews need to be spotted in a crowd, and groups of friends want matching camp shirts. Here's how each works.
Official festival merch
The classic is the line-up shirt: the festival name on the front, the bill on the back. It sells because it's a souvenir. A few tips:
- Order after the line-up is final. Reprinting for a late cancellation is painful.
- Check artist names can be used on merch. Contracts sometimes restrict it.
- Offer one or two colours, not five.
- Heavier, better tees sell at higher prices and people wear them for years.
- Keep a small stock of popular sizes to sell online afterwards.
Crew, steward and volunteer shirts
These are about visibility and clarity. Use distinct colours for each role so the public and other staff can tell security from bar crew from first aid at a glance. Put the role in big letters on the back. Stewarding roles often need hi-vis on top for safety, so the tee is the layer underneath, not a replacement.
Group and camp shirts
Groups of friends love a matching shirt for a festival weekend, often with a camp name or an in-joke. Our minimum is 20 per design, so it suits bigger groups, but for a gang of six, a local shop is the better bet.
Choose shirts for the weather
British festival weather is a coin toss. A midweight tee around 180 GSM is comfortable on hot days and layers under a hoodie at night. Dark colours hide mud. For merch, a hoodie or a long sleeve tee sells very well once the sun goes down.
Design tips
- Keep line-up text readable. Tiny names in a massive list are a design fail.
- Use two or three colours, which keeps screen printing costs reasonable at volume.
- Put the year somewhere. People collect them.
- Test on the design studio at actual size.
Quantities and sizes
For merch, base quantities on past sales and ticket numbers, not optimism. Leftover festival shirts are hard to sell once the event is over. For crew shirts, collect sizes from your staffing list and add a buffer for late sign-ups.
Selling merch on site
Put the merch stall somewhere people pass twice: near the main stage exit or the food area. Hang every design on a board with sizes and prices big enough to read from a distance. Take card payments, since signal can be patchy, so test your card reader's offline mode before gates open. And count stock at the end of each day, so day two isn't a surprise.
Late on the last day, some festivals discount remaining merch. Decide your policy before the weekend rather than improvising in a muddy tent at midnight.
Selling online after the festival
Post-festival nostalgia is real. List remaining merch online the week after the event while memories are fresh.
Pricing merch
Round prices make card and cash sales quick at busy festival stalls, and keep queues moving.
Lead times
Production takes 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, plus delivery. Festival season is the busiest time of year for printers. For summer events, finalise designs by spring.
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