"Club Merchandise
MERCHANDISE – out with the old, in with the new
It is now over a year since the club Merchandise Secretary resigned and we have been unable to recruit a full replacement. We are however very grateful to Ross Andrews who kindly volunteered to fulfil website orders for a limited range of items. He doesn’t have a lot of storage space, hence the limited range but hopefully you’ll agree he has been providing a great service. The rest of our merchandise stock is in temporary storage with Dougy Beardsall, but not surprisingly after a year Dougy wants his garage back!
Aside from trying to recruit a new Merchandise Secretary, we’ve been looking into outsourcing the production of merchandise and the fulfilment of orders to a third party specialist provider. There are a few firms willing to do this but we found they either had limited capabilities or very high prices. So although this initially looked to be the long term answer, we were disappointed.
Over the years, the club’s product range has expanded greatly with t-shirts of various types, sweatshirts, hoodies, polo shirts, caps, beanies, snoods, badges, mugs and many more. Most clothing is stocked in five different sizes, plus male and female variants, so you can start to see that we hold a mountain of stock! In the past year we have managed to almost halve the stock by selling at sale prices at events. But even so we realised we need to take a fresh look at our merchandise for the future.
So the committee met on 20th May 2018 to decide what we should do. The plan that emerged is:
- To continue to dispose of existing stock at sale prices and to write-off stuff that just won’t sell.
- To rationalise the range for the future to one club t-shirt, sweatshirt and hoodie, the engine drawings, service notes in A4 and CD formats, TE binders and raygun logo stickers. All these will be sold via the website and at major events
- To continue producing on-off special items such as Beezumph t-shirts and badges as required.
So the good news is we will have some new clothing designs and all you will have to do is choose the size. Some of you may be disappointed but we hope you can appreciate that the current situation is just not sustainable and we have to change. We may be able to add more items to the range if there is a clear demand, but we will be pretty ruthless in our decision making as we have to keep the whole thing easily manageable. We will reveal the new designs in the coming months!
