Design Custom Merch with the Product Design Studio

How to Design Your Own Corporate Gifts and Merch

After the last few years, we all recognize that life is different than before. We’ve been through a period of unprecedented circumstances that brought significant change to every facet of our lives. This of course includes our work lives and our relationships with coworkers, bosses, and clients. With these cultural shifts many people find their outlook changed compared to before the pandemic. 

With our work lives totally different, our corporate gifting should be different, too. Employees and clients are less interested in the typical corporate gifts and promotional giveaways — they’re looking for employers to be intentional with their company gift-giving and corporate apparel. Employees want branded gifts that reflect their values in 2023: sustainability, ethical sourcing, health & wellness, advanced technology, and overall quality. 

At Merchology, we have the perfect solution to thoughtful, ethically-made gifts that fit your team members' lifestyles: Merchology’s Product Design Studio! With the Merchology Product Design Studio, you can design your own custom shirts, jackets, hats, bags, and much more! With custom-designed company gifts, your team members, clients, and business partners will see just how much you appreciate them. Below is a guide to help you get started creating fully customized merch!

Merchology Product Design Studio

With the Product Design Studio, you can create custom apparel and gifts with the exact colorways, paneling, trim, logo design, zippers, pockets, and straps that you need! By following the steps below with us, we’ll work together to create something totally unique for your brand!

Step 1: Visualize Ideas for Custom Apparel

Fully customized apparel and merch begins with your unique ideas! Whether you’re designing on your own or collaborating with your team to create your custom gifts, you have the freedom to truly make these products your own. To come up with a concept for your custom merch design, you collect reference photos, samples of other products, or sketches of your ideas, and we’ll work together to finalize them!

Step 2: Develop a Custom Product Tech Pack

Now, we’ll start getting into the details. We’ll take the ideas you’ve come up with and create a tech pack. A tech pack is a set of documents that our product designers will give to the product manufacturers. It shows specifications of the fabrics, colors, trims, and accessories that will be used for your uniquely designed product! Tech packs help our manufacturers understand the concept and aesthetic we’re going for with your custom products and offer specific information about how the product should be constructed.

 

Step 3: Getting Samples of Your Customized Products

After our manufacturer receives the tech pack for your product, they’ll create samples of your custom merch! These samples will be sent to you to make sure the final product is exactly what you wanted. The initial sample we’ll send will be modeled after the tech pack, and its purpose is to make sure it’s what you envisioned. The second sample we’ll send is the fit sample, which will help us ensure the fit of custom clothing pieces is correct. The final sample is called the Pre-Production sample, and it’s the last one you’ll see and approve before your customized product goes into production! This sample will be made from the actual fabrics, trims, and add-ons to make sure your product holds up to the design you envisioned.

Step 4: Manufacturing Your Custom Corporate Gifts

After the Pre-Production sample is approved, including the colors, fabric choices, trim, accessories, and fit, we’ll begin production on your customized corporate gifts! The products will be constructed based on the finalized tech packs, pressed, packaged, and shipped. Throughout the process of manufacturing your custom products, there will be several quality control checks to make sure the final product exactly matches the sample you’ve approved. 

Step 5: How Does Quality Control Work for Custom Corporate Gifts?

There are quality control checks in place during each step of production to ensure that every piece is consistent with the approved sample design. Additionally, your products must pass a final inspection before they’re shipped out. We’ll pull random samples from production and audit them against the tech pack and the approved Pre-Production sample to guarantee the quality of your customized products.

Examples of Merchology Product Design Studio Merch

Not sure what fully customized products might look like? Here are a few examples of products we’ve created with brands!

Our friends at Polaris created their own custom jerseys for their team! They brainstormed unique colorways, patterns, and logo placements to create three unique designs. Here are tech packs for their jersey design:

 

From these tech packs, our manufacturer produced these amazing pieces! The Polaris team added the fully customized jerseys to their team’s MerchStore, so employees were able to order whichever design they liked best. Learn more about how you can create your own company merch storefront—it’s a great option if your team wants to create multiple custom products in the Merchology Product Design Studio!

Here are some products we designed with branding from some of our partners! Note the customized trim, unique logo placements, colored zippers, and colored accessories!

Contact Us

Looking to design fully customized products for corporate gifts or merch? Contact us at Merchology today! We’ll help you get started with the Merchology Product Design Studio to bring your ideas to life!