- As the pandemic has hit ad budgets, direct sales have become increasingly important for influencers across platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok looking to diversify their income streams.
- Business Insider is recognizing the top companies working with influencers to create branded merchandise, which is one of the main ways creators make money directly from their fans.
- In this power list, we are highlighting the top 7 companies that are working with top creators like David Dobrik and JoJo Siwa on everything from designing to manufacturing merchandise.
- Subscribe to Business Insider’s influencer newsletter: Insider Influencers.
As brand deals and ad rates have wavered during the pandemic, direct sales have become increasingly important for influencers across platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok looking to diversify their income streams.
For instance, gamer Preston Arsement (with about 15 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel) began focusing on selling merchandise to support his digital business as ad revenue fell in response to the pandemic. Arsement told Business Insider in April that his ad rate on YouTube (CPM) had dropped by over 50% since the coronavirus outbreak began, but merchandise sales had made up for that loss in revenue, nearly tripling in that time.
Arsement is the CEO of the digital-media studio TBNR and runs his merch business in-house. He has a warehouse from which he ships T-shirts, hoodies, and other branded accessories, which he sells online through the e-commerce platform Shopify.
But influencers don’t have to run their own merch operation to take advantage of the business opportunity.
“It’s a great time for people to double down on merchandise, and if they don’t have it yet, there are plenty of great companies they can partner with,” Arsement said in April.
For creators looking to get started in merch, partnering with a company is usually the best bet, according to Reed Duchscher, the CEO of the talent management firm Night Media, which has clients including Arsement and MrBeast (45 million YouTube subscribers).
“To outsource it is probably a better business than doing it in-house,” Duchscher said. “You’ll get a higher margin without any of the headache of things like having customer service and fulfillment, or hundreds of thousands of units somewhere in a warehouse. If it becomes a big enough business and you’re really selling it a higher volume, then you can talk about what that process would look like selling in-house.”
But which companies are most prominent in the merch industry?
In this power list, Business Insider is highlighting the top 7 merch companies that have built lasting partnerships with creators on social media. To form this list of the top companies working with influencers to design, manufacture, and sell branded merchandise, we relied on a mix of our own reporting, nominations from readers, and industry experts to narrow down the finalists. We chose these companies based on factors like reach, accessibility to join, and impact on the influencer business as a whole.
The top 7 merchandise companies are listed below in alphabetical order:
For more on the influencer industry, check out these power lists on Business Insider:
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