How to Tell Whether a Merch Programme Worked
By The Velocity Wear Team
Merch programmes are usually evaluated on units sold and margin, because those numbers exist. If the programme was intended to produce revenue, that is right. Most merch is not intended to produce revenue, and measuring it that way concludes that it failed when it may have worked.
Decide the purpose first
There are four common purposes and they have different measures. Programmes get judged badly because nobody stated which one applied.
- 1**Revenue.** Measured on margin and sell-through. The only case where the standard metrics are the right ones.
- 2**Visibility.** Measured on wear frequency and impressions, not units. A garment worn weekly for two years is the outcome.
- 3**Affiliation.** Measured on whether owners behave differently — buy more, stay longer, advocate more.
- 4**Retention or recruitment,** for staff programmes. Measured on the thing it was supposed to affect, however indirectly.
Measuring visibility honestly
You cannot count impressions on a hoodie. You can ask, and the proxies are reasonable: how often do recipients report wearing it, how often does it appear in photographs unprompted, and how often do people mention having seen it.
A short survey of recipients three months later answers more than any dashboard. "Have you worn it in the last week" is a question with a useful answer, and almost nobody asks it.
Measuring affiliation
Compare the behaviour of people who own merch against those who do not: repeat purchase rate, time as a customer, referral behaviour. The comparison is imperfect — people who buy merch were probably more engaged already — but the direction is informative, and it is the right question.
The metric that matters most
Wear rate. Everything merch is supposed to do depends on the garment being worn, and a garment in a drawer produces nothing regardless of how well it sold.
It is also the most actionable, because the causes of a low wear rate are known and fixable: wrong size, poor fabric, branding too heavy, dated design. Every one of those is a specification decision you can change next time.
What not to measure
Do not count social impressions on your own posts about merch. That measures your content, not the merch. And do not invent numbers to justify the programme — publishing fabricated engagement or popularity claims is unlawful in the UK and, more practically, it means the next decision is made on fiction.
An honest "we do not know whether this worked, here is what we will measure next time" is a better position than a confident wrong number.
