BLIVITS! Post NINE

Merchandising is a pretty important stream of revenue for me.  I've thought of some unconventional things to sell, which will come much later, but I wanted to talk about a hook that is specific to my movie.  I'm going to donate 20% of the film's merchandising revenues to the nonprofit charity that puts on the Randolph Association's events.  This is my way of thanking the guys that shared their stories with me, financially.

The things that I believe I will have the most success with are DVD/Blurays, T shirts, and posters.

There are three different strategies that I have for selling this merchandise, each with significant lists of pros and cons:

Self Distribution - Hard Copies
In this strategy, I will be selling my merchandise through my film's website.  Over many years of making promotional videos and music videos, I have built up a cache of favors.  I have worked with the owner of a T shirt company for the past 5 years.  He has supplied many of my music videos with clothes from his label in exchange for the free press and introductions to the artists management.  Perez and I have talked about doing a run of T shirts for my label, and the costs have been quoted as low as 5% above cost.  This pricing would beat all of the other T shirt makers' prices significantly.  Customink and hittinskins would each have to lower their prices by $2-$4 per shirt in order to compete with Social Menaces pricing.  The fees for these shirts would only be the costs of the shirts, ink and the one time cost of the screen.  I have heard personal testimonials about Social Menace and also had first hand experience of their work. Its always been on time and well made.  Customink and hittinskins have very good reputations, but the pricing puts them far behind.  Making posters is a headache for almost all independent filmmakers, but I have fortunately had a long standing professional relationship with Keith Mackenzie, the owner of i11eleven music and the sales manager of M13 Graphics in Chicago.  I have done work for Keith at reduced costs with the understanding that he would reciprocate the discount as my film needed to have promotional materials printed.  Here too the personal discounts trump anything that uprinting or shortrunposters can offer.  Both of the online poster printers seem to have highly reputable businesses, and shortrunposters in particular seems to be the best fit for most independent filmmakers, but M13 Graphics is the supplier of many of the world's biggest music festivals promotional materials, including Burning Man, Ultra, and Lollapaloosa.  The only area where I have not found made a partnership is in the production and distribution of the DVDs themselves.  For this I will likely, be using a company called Diskfaktory.  A company that I have been following for the past couple of years is Rocket Indie, their business model seemed too good to be true, and it seems like that might have been the case after all.  Diskfaktory's prices are the cheapest I have been able to find for DVDs that are pressed (as opposed to burned).  My original budget for my film has the cost of marketing and distribution set to around $2000, which would accommodate enough copies of the film being printed to let the film break even.  The only costs yet to be made explicit are the $8 per year in web hosting and the shipping costs of each individual order.

This is the strategy that I expect will stick for my film.  It will require face to face sales at screenings, like a band offers after their shows.  My hope is that the intention of my film festival strategy, will pay dividends here. If I play festivals where the friends and family of the castmates will attend, I should have the chance to sell my film to a larger audience.

PROS
The revenue is the least fractured here, and I still own all of the film.
Hard copies are likely to be the only form of media that my audience will want to buy.

CONS
Requires most cash to create inventory.
Doubles risk if the film is a flop.

Self Distribution - Online
This strategy is mostly the same as the one above, with Perez and Keith handling much of the merchandise, but instead of have DVDs pressed, we will explore the possibility of utilizing online distribution.  In this field the best option seems to be Distrify. A company that allows you to monetize the downloading of your film directly.  This service has made waves in the United Kingdom and India, but hasn't caught on here just yet.  There are plenty of testimonials about how much money Distrify has made the films that are its service. However all of these examples are from films that already had some sort of heat when they were put on the distribution site, so it is safe to say that while Distrify is a good service, its not magic.  Distribber might be the service that would be the most beneficial for a filmmaker to be on, but it is selective, so counting on distribution from them does not seem to be the most sound position to take.  Distribber has connections with itunes, amazon, hulu, directv, AT&T Uverse, and others that would make the filmmakers thousands of dollars, but it requires to much faith or luck to be picked up.  Indieflix is a better idea than it is a business. The website is clunky to get through, and to watch the movies without ads, you have to pay for a membership.  All of that being said, it also has a huge audience base, and they are the people that would mostly want to see a microbudget documentary about an aircraft carrier that no one's ever heard of before.

PROS
Probably the situation with the broadest reach.
Instantaneous.

CONS
Core audience not likely to see the film here.

Assisted Distribution
Should it become clear to me that is too hard for me to run a website that sells the merchandise of my film (despite my nearly 20 years of experience in retail), another option would be the cafepress route.  Cafe Press is a company that allows you to design merchandise and then they sell it for you.  You basically load a graphic, and then your customers can choose what they want to put it on, and you get a percentage of the proceeds without ever having to take part in the individual orders.  Because the burden of fulfilling the order lies with someone else, the percentage that is returned to the filmmaker is very low, but so is the time invested into working on selling the product.  This option could be paired with either of the methods above, but if the time of selling the movie has become such a concern that we are no longer able to run the business, it is likely that we would have to go purely with the digital service.

PROS
Much less of a time commitment.

CONS
Much less money goes to me.

Special Merch Ideas...
Lesson Plans
I've long believed that there is an educational market for this project, so I will create a series of lesson plans for grades 5-12, so that a teacher might be able to purchase a lesson plan to use in conjunction with my film.  This would be important for a teacher that was going on a vacation and didn't want to leave the substitute with something that they might not understand. These lesson plans would be for sale through my website, and any of the above methods of distribution could still work. The Corporation has been very successful with a version of this.

Models
There are already models of the USS Randolph, or this much less expensive one, so this would just be my reselling something.  But after my movie, someone might want to build their own version of the ship, and I'd like to give them that chance. Again this could be sold through the film's website, the same as the lesson plans.