Solutions / Music and tours
A tour is not one drop.
It is a supply chain with a schedule.
Multiple cities, fixed dates, stock that has to be in the right place on the right night, and an audience that will buy at the show or not at all. The product is the easy part; the allocation is where tour merch is won or lost.
What makes touring different
Allocation is the hard problem. The same range across twelve cities does not sell evenly, and getting the split wrong means selling out in one city while the same sizes sit unsold in another. Reallocation mid-tour is expensive and slow.
Sizes break before styles do. You will run out of medium and large in the third city and still be carrying small and 2XL at the end. Sizing curves need to reflect the actual audience rather than a standard split, and QR ordering needs to cover the gap.
City-specific product is the highest-margin idea in touring and the riskiest to execute. A date-and-city print is worth more to the audience and worthless the day after — so quantities have to be conservative and the artwork pipeline has to be genuinely repeatable.
The audience is captured once. Thousands of people who paid to be in the room, and most tour merch converts them into cash at a table. Even partial consented capture changes what the next tour, the next release and the next city are worth.
The offer
What we run.
Tour range and sizing curve
A range built for the audience, with a sizing split based on reality rather than a distributor default.
City and date capsules
Location-specific product with a repeatable artwork pipeline, sized conservatively because it does not travel.
Pre-order by city
Sell before the date and get a real demand signal per city to allocate against.
Allocation and routing
Stock split per date, with a plan for reallocation and for what happens when a city sells through early.
On-site retail
Stand setup, staffing guidance, payment that degrades gracefully, and a real count at the end of each night.
QR ordering
Sold out of a size is no longer a lost sale. Order at the stand, ship home, capture the customer properly.
VIP and artist kits
Kitted product for VIP tiers, guests, crew and press, delivered against venue access windows.
Post-show retargeting
The consented audience from the tour becomes the launch list for the next release.
Settlement-ready reporting
Reconciled counts and revenue per date, in a form that stands up in a settlement conversation.
Constraints worth knowing
The honest limitations.
Venue rules vary and they matter
Some venues take a percentage of merch, some restrict what you can sell and where, some control the stand entirely. This affects the economics substantially and needs to be on the table at planning rather than discovered at load-in.
Rights on a tour involve several parties
Artist, label, management, support acts, venue and any licensed imagery. Clearance on a tour programme routinely needs more signatures than people expect, and it is the most common cause of a missed date.
Reallocation is slower than you want
Moving stock between cities mid-tour is possible but costs freight and time. Better forecasting up front is cheaper than agile logistics later.
We are not a tour manager
We handle product, allocation, commerce and fulfilment. Stand staffing, load-in and the on-site operation sit with your team, and we plan against their constraints rather than replacing them.
Questions tour teams ask
How far out do you need to start?
Earlier than a single-city event, because the range is larger and the allocation needs a demand signal to work from. Bring us the routing as soon as it firms up — even before the creative direction exists — and we can build a backward plan with real decision deadlines.
Can we do city-specific product?
Yes, and it is usually worth doing. The requirement is a repeatable artwork pipeline and conservative quantities, because a date-and-city print has no value the day after that show. We would rather sell out of it and take QR orders than carry it to the next city.
What about support acts and openers?
Workable, and it needs its own rights clearance and its own commercial arrangement. Raise it at planning rather than in week ten.
Who handles the merch stand on the night?
Your team or the venue's, depending on the deal. We provide the commerce setup, the stock, the allocation, QR ordering and the reconciliation, and we plan against whatever the venue arrangement actually is.
How do we handle a venue that takes a cut?
It goes into the price architecture and the margin model from the start, per venue if the rates differ. What we will not do is model the tour on a single blended assumption and let the variation show up as a shortfall at settlement.
Send us the routing.
Cities, dates and expected capacity. That is enough for us to tell you whether the window works and what the allocation looks like.