The merch box fandom zine trend

17 Sep, 2023

Over the past year, a new type of fandom collaborative art project has appeared, known as the merch box. This style of project brings together a small group of talented artists to create all sorts of merchandise designs, including stickers, stationery, keychains, and other novelty items. But how and why did this trend start? In this post, let's go over merch boxes and their relationship to fandom zines!

Where did merch boxes come from?

To explain the new trend of merch boxes, we first need to talk about zines. There's a lot of online debate on the definition, but in this case, I'm talking about the collaborative art/fic projects that became common from the mid-2010s onwards. Zine projects are, of course, centered around just that: self-published books, whether physical or digital. However, they often also include a range of merchandise add-ons. Over the years, these projects have become increasingly bigger with more focus on merchandise.

For example, if we compare a 'full bundle' (set which includes the zine and all merchandise) from general Ace Attorney zines from five years ago and today...

Bee Avenue and Ace Adventurers, from 2017 and 2018

Turnabout Cinema and Where I can Follow, from 2022 and 2023

...There's clearly a lot more physical merch. Part of the reason for this increase in merchandise is thought to be because of the COVID-19 pandemic. During 2020~2021, pop culture fans couldn't attend conventions in-person. So zine projects became a convenient way for them to buy a lot of merchandise of their favorite characters from their favorite artists at once.

While digital-only zines have always existed, digital-only zines with physical merchandise also became more common. Zine booklets themselves were on the more expensive side of products to produce, so the split model release allowed creators to create long PDF zines while still providing some form of physical product. From here, we get the first use of the 'merch box' term as it's used in the context of collaborative art projects. Traveller's Delivery Service, which began in January 2022, was a Genshin Impact "digital zine and merch gift box project". It used the idea of the gift box in a storytelling sense, as the project itself was about the main character delivering a box to the customers. As far as I can tell, this is the first project of its type which makes a distinction between the zine aspect and the merch box aspect.

Following this was Ichigo Box, a My Hero Academia project which started in September 2022 and outright labeled itself solely as a 'merch box'. Since then, other 'merch box' projects have slowly started appearing, including: Pochita's Goodies, Fan Holiyay Box, Kacchako Merch Box, Hush, Sky Gift, and Gojo in the Box. While they aren't nearly as common as zines, there's increasingly more interest in them as time goes on.

What's the benefit of a merch box over a zine?

I haven't run a merch box myself, so this is purely speculation as someone who's been mildly involved in running zines behind the scenes:

• Cost benefits: Zines are expensive to produce. Merchandise usually has a better profit margin; it's easy to justify raising costs with merch, but hard to justify pricing a fanbook over $30 regardless of length. Removing the zine portion allows merch boxes to produce more goods at a similar cost.
• Product previews: Compared to page artists, the product of merch artists is the physical item itself rather than the artwork. This means that during zine pre-orders, merch artists are usually the only participants who can post their full artwork since they don't need to crop it for preview purposes. Thus, merch artists are incredibly important for promoting a zine despite making up the smallest category of participants. Running a project with solely merch, then, means that every participant can post their full artwork during pre-orders without it compromising incentive to buy the project. Full artwork encourages more people to share their posts, leading to more traffic for the zine.
• Fewer artists to compensate: Most zines have plenty of page artists participating who all must be compensated with a free copy and shipping. Again, merchandise does a lot for promotion and buying incentive. If buyers are mainly there for the merch anyway, it's easier to just run a merch box without a zine. That way, there's less people that you need to worry about compensating.
• Variety of products: Since the focus is on merchandise, there's more opportunities to create specialized items that might not be found in regular zine projects.
• More interesting: Fandom zine projects as they are in their current form have been around for over five years at this point. Some have felt that simply illustrations and writing in books have gotten repetitive and stale. Thus, merch boxes are a fresh new way to release physical collaborations between creations.

How are merch boxes run?

The process is the same as a regular zine, however the main difference is the number of participants. The standard number is 15 or less compared to a zine which may have 25 or more. There's no need to try to fill up 36+ pages of content (standard length for a 'small' zine these days) and as merch takes less time to design, most participants are able to contribute more than one product design. Furthermore, as there's no writing or PDF, there's also no need for a writing or formatting moderator. This further cuts down on the number of people involved.

Overall, the new merch box trend shows an increase in interest of physical merchandise over zines. As fans still hunger for merch of their faves, we may see more of these projects in the future!

#2023 #art #goods #reference #zine