Commentary April 14, 2025
Why Bands Should Take Their Merch Beyond T-Shirts & Posters
Bon Iver’s gigantic campaign for its new album shows the power of aligning with premium brands and tapping into unique products.
Key Takeaways
• Extensive Brand Partnerships: Bon Iver’s new album SABLE, fABLE is accompanied by a wide range of branded merchandise through partnerships with various premium consumer brands. These products span multiple categories, including apparel, food and beverage, home goods, and print products, all themed around the albums aesthetic.
• Innovative Marketing Strategies: The campaign demonstrates how musical artists can market themselves through name-brand partnerships, elevating the perceived value of their promotional products. It highlights the importance of scaling promotions to fit the client’s budget and using premium brands to enhance the campaign’s impact.
• Comprehensive Brand Story: Bon Iver’s approach goes beyond traditional music marketing methods, creating an all-encompassing brand story that captures the album’s identity and aesthetic. The use of packaging and print products, along with unique promotional items, helps to create a cohesive and immersive experience for fans.
With this many premium brand partnerships, it’s a little hard to still claim to be indie rock, huh?
Bon Iver, the much beloved indie rock band fronted by Justin Vernon, is back with a new album called SABLE, fABLE, and has a whole collection of branded merchandise through partnerships with big-name consumer brands. Each one plays into the “sable” theme using the salmon color palette, and ranges from apparel to home goods to food and beverage.
Stereogum published a full rundown of the branded products and partnerships, which makes even the Oscars and Emmys swag bags sort of look quaint. Just consider this sampling of the many, many items: a collaboration with Todd Snyder for a cashmere sweater and ribbed beanie, a special scent spray from Earl of East, a hibiscus milk tea, beers brewed with three different breweries, notebooks from Field Notes, actual salmon on a bagel from Lox In A Box and plenty more. Each piece includes the salmon, white and black branding look of the album and uses the overall “sable” theme in some way – whether through color or literal fish.
The branded products certainly use the “high perceived value” idea with big-ticket apparel items like the hoodie, which costs a reported $398.
Yes, Bon Iver is a hugely successful and lucrative artist with enough cred and money to throw around to land these high-profile branded partnerships. But if you can look past the sheer scale and excess, it’s illuminating to see how brands (in this case, a musical artist) can market themselves through name-brand partnerships. As a distributor, you can scale the next promotion to your client’s budget and work with premium brands to elevate the campaign, placing your client’s logo next to one the end-users already know and trust.
The other idea on display here is the way that a brand in the musical space goes beyond what some might think as the quintessential music marketing methods – T-shirts and posters. When was the last time you saw tinned fish at the merch table at a concert? This creates an all-encompassing brand story and completes the aesthetic of the album as Vernon wants it to be.
Speaking of aesthetic, it’s also an excellent case study in the use of packaging and print products along with promotional items.
The album cover is just a basic salmon and black design and lends itself nicely to square packaging and other print products, like journals and labels.
To pull this off well with a client of any size, you need to take into account their branding colors, whether it’s their logo, or if it’s a school, their uniform colors. Inconsistency with color can undermine the campaign’s effectiveness, and clearly Bon Iver and their various partners took great care to make sure the color for packaging and apparel was that same fishy hue used for the album cover.
Again, this campaign is mind-boggling in size and scope. It’s intimidating, to be honest. But the lessons for distributors are clear and can be applied to campaigns for any customer of any size: When appropriate, consider using a premium brand to elevate the perceived value of your promotional product, go above and beyond with your product selection to capture the identity and story of your customer and think outside of the box so to speak, and be meticulous in your product design to create a cohesive campaign that accurately uses all of its branding markers and aesthetic.
Hard to imagine the guy whose first album was all about holing up in a little Wisconsin cabin is going this big on the merchandise, but sometimes your clients can surprise you.