by Serguey Shinder
In 2014 we spent six hundred pounds on merchandise, which at the time was most of the money the band had. Two hundred shirts, one design, black, and every single one of them a medium.
Nobody decided that. It was four of us in a room agreeing quickly, and the four of us wore mediums, and black is what we wore on stage, so the form filled itself in. We felt organised. We had a box in the van, a tablecloth, and a float of ten pound notes.
In fourteen months we sold thirty one. I can tell you the exact number because I found the notebook. What I remember more clearly than the number is the shape of the conversations at the table, which I heard perhaps two hundred times and never once processed. Have you got a large. Have you got anything for my daughter. Have you got one that is not black. My wife would wear that. I would say no, sorry, and I would say it in a friendly way, and then I would look at the box and think that people were not buying shirts.
The remaining hundred and sixty nine sat in my father's loft for four years and went out with the rest of it when he moved.
In 2018 we tried again with a budget of about a hundred and eighty pounds, printed sixty, in five sizes, half of them in a grey that somebody's sister suggested, and sold forty four in two months at the same venues, playing the same songs to the same sort of people. The difference was not the design and it certainly was not the band. It was that we had finally asked.
What we had done in 2014 was design for ourselves and call it taste. The audience we imagined was four men in their late twenties who owned no clothes with colours in them, because that was the audience standing in the room where the decision was made. The actual audience included that person and also his partner who had been dragged along and liked us, and somebody's mother, and a fifty year old man built nothing like any of us who came to everything we played within thirty miles.
I have made the same error since, at work, with real money, and it has never looked like this one because it never arrives wearing a box of unsold shirts. It arrives as a default setting, or a form ordered to suit us, or a price that four people who all earn the same thought was fine. The cheapest research available to anybody is the question you can ask the person already standing in front of you, and the reason we do not ask it is not cost. It is that we do not yet know we have assumed anything.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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