How Drag Merch keeps customers engaged
Inside the success of this colourful, creative business.
Drag culture is big business. Just ask the tens of millions of people worldwide who have turned into reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race. Or Andrew Hoyle who runs one of the UK’s biggest drag event companies in the UK, Klub Kids, alongside sister company Drag Merch UK, which sells drag queen merchandise.
Hoyle’s career in drag events began well before the rise of RuPaul’s Drag Race, when he was still at university in Newcastle. He started running a regular drag club night by roping in fellow students to dress up and dance at shows.
Within a few years, his shows were touring nationwide, and not only had Klub Kids grown to become one of the biggest drag event organisers in Britain, it had started managing the careers of its star performers. The next logical step? Producing and selling drag queen merchandise.
“Because we manage [the talent], we also create merchandise for them. Drag Merch UK is a platform for the queens to have their merchandise all in one place. It came from the artists wanting to do it, which then gave me the kick to go, 'OK, there's a market here'."
Today, Drag Merch UK produces between 400,000 and 500,000 products a year, from graphic T-shirts and hoodies to signed prints and key rings. Hoyle, who runs the company with his brother, says that offering products to fans made sense in the rapidly growing drag industry.
"If you go to a Lady Gaga concert, you'll see a merchandise stand selling T-shirts and key rings. The fans, [especially] super fans, want to buy all this memorabilia stuff," he explains, adding that it’s exactly the same with the UK drag scene.
Identify your audience
Drag Merch UK might have a niche audience, but it knows exactly where to find them, says Hoyle.
"Know your customer base and reach out to them in the correct ways to get the best footfall to your website," he explains. "Our target audience is drag fans, people who love Drag Race and the LGBTQI community."
Not only does Drag Merch sell products at events (and leave leaflets on seats directing customers to the website) but Hoyle uses social media to target followers of drag-queen pages. After all, some Ru Paul drag queens have up to one million followers.
Plus, Klub Kids also collects customer contact details when it sells tickets to gigs. "We also have a big customer database from our events so when we release new products, we send an email to previous customers."
Track sales and be ruthless with stocktaking
Just as fashion trends come and go, the popularity of types of fan merchandise waxes and wanes. So, for a company like Drag Merch UK, it's imperative to keep an eye on what is selling, and what isn't, and to tweak accordingly.
"We tend to have regular meetings with the drag queens to find out what new products they want," explains Hoyle. "If anything is not selling, we put it on offer [reducing the price] and get rid of it and don't make it again. With anything popular we try to do similar styles."
Keep customers engaged
The annual launch of a new season of RuPaul's Drag Race (season four airs on BBC3 on 22 September) always means an influx of traffic to the website.
In order to keep customers coming back to the site, Hoyle says it’s vital to keep products – and the website – fresh and updated.
"We bring in fresh talent every year, so we make sure that when we release products for them, they're not the same as last year’s products," says Hoyle. "We also update the website regularly and do fun gimmicks to keep things interesting like putting a wheel on the homepage - you spin the wheel for a chance of free delivery."
Keep products accessible
It was the cost-of-living crisis in the UK that inspired Drag Merch UK to take on Clearpay. Allowing split payments has resulted in happier customers – and therefore a happier business. "We would 100 per cent recommend Clearpay to anyone," says Hoyle. "Everything is changing, and people's circumstances have changed. This gives people the opportunity to keep their customers."
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