Creating Your Own Custom Shop

Does your campus store have extra space now that textbooks have shifted to online sales and/or digital delivery? Do student groups want their own logo products but can’t meet vendor minimums? Are you having problems with the supply chain? Are administrators pressing for more revenue and a higher profit margin? Do you want to get into custom merchandise?

“If you answered yes to any of these questions, custom production is for you,” said Amanda Brown, director, Ashland University Campus Store, Ashland, OH. In her CAMEX100 education session Transitioning GM with Custom Merchandise Production, she described the many different types of items the store is able to customize with original graphic design, apparel printing, embroidering and embroidery digitization, laser engraving, sublimation, UV printing, custom vinyl striking, custom buttons, and more.

Brown was upfront about the workload involved in custom production, the investment in machinery, and the learning curve to operate them. But the upside has been a big boost in revenue flow, impressive margins, less cash tied up in inventory, fewer markdowns, and the ability to help student organizations—all without putting a dent in sales of vendor-produced general merchandise.

“Every member of your team has to be on board. It’s a team effort,” noted Brown. Stores engaging in custom production will also need to create a workflow and processes for design, production, sales, and record-keeping, and of course, communication is key.

Her biggest piece of advice? Hire a graphic designer. “That’s the best investment,” she said. A skilled designer can come up with novel ideas, help customers formulate their own ideas, and make everything look professional.

For a store just beginning in custom products, Brown also recommended not jumping into all formats at once. Each type of custom application requires a different piece of equipment. Spread those purchases out, which not only minimizes the financial outlay, but also gives staff time to become proficient in using the machine and learning all of its capabilities.

“Embroidering and laser printing, those are good places to start, to ease into,” she said.

Embroidery is how the Campus Store got started, when it moved into a new space in 1996. “We did a little bit of tee shirt production,” Brown recalled. It blossomed from there, and now the store doesn’t hesitate to try something new and fresh. If a product idea isn’t a hit with customers, the store isn’t out much.

It’s a different story with a vendor-produced design. “To get some cost of goods from a vendor, I have to order 288 shirts,” Brown explained. With just 3,000 undergraduates on campus, “it takes two and a half years to sell 288. Also, we can’t swap out the design until we sell out the shirt. With custom, we can change as frequently as we want.”

Instead, the store can buy blank shirts—or whatever type of apparel or gift item is desired—from a vendor and customize it on their own in small batches or even one at a time on demand. “We were able to drop inventory levels in half. We don’t have tons of back stock waiting,” Brown noted. “What’s waiting are blanks.”

That enables the store to control the number of sizes on hand—and replenishment of blanks is faster—which in turn means the store doesn’t miss a sale because a style is out of a particular size. There’s no guessing how long a popular style will remain popular; how often has your store reordered a fast seller only to see the reorder languish on the shelf? In May 2021, Ashland introduced a comfort crewnecked shirt in soft butter yellow with custom purple logo, not certain how students would respond to the look. In the following 22 months, the store replenished the yellow shirts 24 times.

“The best part, none of these hit my sales table,” Brown said.

The Campus Store is able to work with student groups who want to sell merchandise as fundraisers, setting up an online store for each group and fulfilling orders as they come in. The groups receive 20% of sales, paid monthly. The store makes money and the groups make money. The store also manages swag websites for Air Force squadrons, who compete in their own games.

As of last March, “we probably have 15 separate fundraisers going, all successful,” Brown said. “I don’t have to set minimums. I can do one or 500, it doesn’t matter."

Producing custom products hasn’t chilled the store’s business with vendors. “It actually makes your vendor meetings more focused,” Brown said. “You’re not looking for basics, you’re looking for cool, unique products you can’t make.”

Here are some of the custom services offered by the Campus Store:

Embroidery

Much of the embroidery work is done for the groups who are conducting fundraisers. The store can either charge per stitch or by the amount of time involved, and there’s no fee to digitize the design.

Laser engraving

“Who does your nametags, plaques, wall plates, trophies?” Brown asked the audience. “That’s something we’ve taken over.”

The store can also engrave items such as mugs, cake pans, and glassware. “We do recipe boards,” she added. A handwritten family recipe can be scanned in and engraved on a cutting board as a gift.

Apparel printing

With a custom shop, the store can offer a wide variety of styles for individual customers. “We have a wall of bins that are all numbered and we have a lookbook,” Brown explained. When a customer comes in, “they can walk back to the graphic design area and see the lookbook and decide. It takes seven seconds to heat-press on.”

Not every design is related to the university. Garden gnomes are popular, for some reason, so the store created a gnome design that can be placed on any garment on a made-to-order basis. The store also prints a special shirt for Breast Cancer Awareness Month and donates the proceeds.

“We found we could heatpress on gift bags. Now I can make my own,” she said.

UV printing

This machine enables full-color printing on a variety of items. Yard signs for students’ homes (Home of an Eagle Football Player, for example) have been an unexpected success, often purchased by parents. “We’ve seen significant sales of this,” Brown said. “We didn’t know. We thought it was just a high school thing, but people are excited for their university athlete.”

Stickers and magnets

“Die-cut stickers are huge,” Brown said. “Students have them on laptops.” As with the garden gnomes, the store capitalized on local imagery to create special stickers with Amish buggies (the university is located within the Ohio Amish community) and Bigfoot (who has been spotted in the area from time to time).

The store uses its three-in. button maker to produce magnets, too. Magnets and stickers are on display as an impulse purchase at the cash wrap and are also popular for campus fundraisers.

Many of the custom items offered by the Campus Store are promoted on the store’s website.

The store continually experiments with new ideas for its custom merchandise. “There’s stuff we’ve tried that crashed and burned,” Brown noted, “but there have also been happy accidents.”