Producing sustainable fan merchandise from old club materials

Upcycling products in the fan shop are not a sustainability sideline in the range, they are a product category of their own. Set up properly, you get items with a margin and with an origin that no bought-in merchandise item has.

Why one-off pieces sell differently from standard merchandise

Classic merchandise is available at any time. Anyone who does not buy the scarf today buys it next week.

With upcycling products that does not hold. The starting material is finite, every piece looks different, and once a motif is sold out it does not come back. That creates an urgency that otherwise only arises with artificially limited editions.

Then there is the origin. To a fan, a bag made from the banner that hung in the stadium means something different from a bag with a printed logo.

Which material is suitable for sale

Material with a recognisable link to the club works best: stadium banners and perimeter advertising, because they visibly hung in the stadium. Jerseys with a number or a player name. Tifo tarpaulins and flags from the terraces. How many products are made from a stock of jerseys is set out in the calculation on what becomes of a single garment.

Neutral material with nothing recognisable on it works less well. Good products can be made from it, but the story is missing, and with it the reason why someone pays more for it than for a standard product.

How the run is planned

The quantity follows from the material, not from what you would like. Anyone who wants a larger run needs more material or a smaller product.

A tiered range usually makes sense: a high-priced piece such as a Messenger Bag, a mid-range one such as a belt bag and a low-cost entry point such as a keyring. That covers different budgets and uses the material fully, because the small offcuts go into a product as well. The list of twenty product ideas from old advertising banners shows which products are an option here, and the area calculation behind it is in bags from 100 square metres of banner fabric.

What is known from sales

At Hertha BSC, bags made from lorry tarpaulins are sold in the official club shop. For the DFB, stadium banners from Cologne became bags and organisers for the DFB fan shop. The Frankfurter Verkehrsgesellschaft sold its products made from old uniforms in a pop-up store at the Hauptwache.

At DHL the proceeds from the fan shop now cover the running costs of the project. Why this adds up outside the club environment as well is set out in Waste becomes revenue.