I rode the MAX home from a client meeting last Thursday and counted logos. Not ads: logos people had paid for and then put on their own bodies. A Salt & Straw hoodie. Two Stumptown totes. A water bottle under a decade of stickers. One guy in a Powell's shirt faded to the color of weak tea, worn with the specific pride of a man who has owned it longer than he has owned his car.
Nobody paid those people to advertise. They paid the brand for the privilege.
I have a drawer at home full of the other kind. Conference half-zips, pitch-win water bottles, a fleece vest from a client whose logo I could not identify without reading it. All free. All unworn. Somebody expensed every single one and wrote the word awareness on the line item.
Which is the whole diagnostic, and it costs nothing to run.
If people will not spend their own money to wear your logo, you do not have a brand yet, you have a supplier relationship with a font.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where merch gets treated as a tactic to be scheduled somewhere between the holiday campaign and the trade show. It is not a tactic. It is a scoreboard. Patagonia sells fleece with a mountain range on it and people wear it to weddings. Supreme sold a brick a couple of summers ago, an actual clay brick, and it resold for more than a thousand dollars. That tells you nothing about bricks and everything about what the box logo has come to mean to the people carrying it.
Three things separate merch people buy from merch people leave in a hotel room. One, the logo has to say something about the wearer rather than the company: taste, values, membership, a joke they are in on. Two, the object has to be good on its own terms, because nobody wants a bad shirt with a great logo on it. Three, it has to be at least a little scarce. Free and infinite is the definition of worthless.
The uncomfortable part is that most brands would rather not take the test. Selling merch means finding out in public whether anyone likes you enough to hand over twenty-eight dollars and a shipping address. Giving away stress balls at a conference means never finding out at all, and you can still report the impressions.
Free and infinite is the definition of worthless.
Truffles has claimed the unworn client fleece as a bed and sleeps on the logo with her back turned to it, which is the most honest engagement metric that vest will ever generate. Barnaby prefers the Powell's tote. Even the cats have a shortlist.