I helped an amateur band "Myon-Myon" to sell their logo T-shirt at the local spring festival. From the planning of the production process to the actual sales, I led a small team to sell their product within a limited time and a limited budget.

Misaki Kuma is a Japanese designer and an artist. Her designs can be found on a huge poster of the shopping mall's roof or underground on the walls at the subway lines in Tokyo.

Luckily, she happened to be my friend and also a member of the band. She developed the logo design around the cherry and cherry-blossom motifs. Cherry-blossoms in Japan is associated with the image of spring and the start of a new life since a new semester begins in April instead of September in Japan. Blue and red colouring with a tacky and retro font carried an old school days feeling yet excitement for the new start.

Difficulties I faced in production were all about cutting costs and production time. When the design was confirmed, we had only two weeks to do everything. I did not want to carry any inventory so decided to take built-to-order (BTO) production approach which means to produce only the amount we've got the confirmed orders. This left only three days for the production.

Firstly I thought of using the service offered by some companies where we just have to choose the template T-shirt and send the design and they make the product instead of us. However, soon I learned that the whole process takes at least a week including the shipping. Besides, the biggest problem of using such service was its cost. That way, one piece of T-shirt costs about 1300 yen (about $15 CAD). Of course there was economy of scale which means if we produce more, the cost gets lower, but we were very not sure of how many we could sell during the festival and we did not want to take the risk of having a big inventory. Therefore, we have decided to print the logo by hand.

Every element of the logo was designed around the concept of a band in order to make sure that a logo strengthens the brand image of a band. The band was called ''Myon-Myon'' named after initials of each band member's first name. All the band members were working young adults who finished schooling recently. Myon-Myon's goal was to perform at the local spring festival and have fun themselves and with the audience by playing a nostalgic popular song from their school days around the early 2000s. The slogan of the band was ''Revive good old school days.'' So their logo needed to have a retro feeling and a fresh vibe together into one logo. It was a difficult order for the designer since those two elements somewhat conflict. However, our designer made it possible.

The technique is called "stenciling" which requires a template sheet. Misaki curved out the logo on a regular plastic file folder with a cutter knife, and we used a make-up sponge to apply the ink. This way the cost got reduced a lot and the handmade texture added to the retro feeling of the brand image as well. I found a store that sells colour T-shirt at the store front, so we did not have to wait for them to be shipped. Also we went to a hand-craft store and found water-proof red and blue inks that are laundry washable . All this allowed the variable cost per T-shirt to go down as low as 300 yen (approx. $3.5 CAD) and we set the price to 1000 yen per T-shirt (approx. $12 CAD).  When we had everything ready for production, it was already less than a week away from the day of the festival.

Because of the limited time left for the promotion of the product, which was only two days, I have decided to go on to the easiest and the most promising way of advertisement. Direct email marketing.

I made the template promotion email with the pictures of the T-shirt attached, and all five of the band members sent it to almost all the email addresses they had on hand including the ones actually coming to the spring festival as an audience. Email included the following things in Japanese.

''You can come and wear this T-shirt to feel like you are a part of our stage! It can also be a perfect souvenir to bring back home to remember your experience at the festival. The design is perfect as spring and summer wear."

As a result, we secured 48 orders.

Handing of the product was also low-cost. I made a checklist of the customers and Misaki and I went to walk around to find the customer and handed the product in exchange to the cash we asked to prepare in hand. Once the product was delivered, we checked the name out of the checklist. We had to make sure that every customer receives the T-shirt of the size they ordered before our stage begins, so we had to run around the venu. The next time I would set up the handing location to meet up and exchange the product...

We successfully handed all the T-shirts out and had a great moment with the audience. Some people saw those wear Myon-myon T-shirt, and we even got some additional orders in person after our performance. It was a great experience that I could try out all the marketing knowledge in a small scale, real world market environment.

**We donated the profit to the youth activity fund to support young people who is interested in similar activities.**