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Interview with Justin, Founder and CEO, and Ryan, of Homemade Merch
Join us as we sit down with Homemade Merch to talk about life on tour, the fan trends they’re seeing at the merch table, and what’s actually working for artists right now. We’ll also dig into why consistent numbers and one-click settlements make life so much easier on the road, from cleaner end-of-night reporting to getting paid faster with less back and forth.
Let's Begin!
Justin: I'm the founder and CEO of Homemade. Before Homemade, we started as a management and artist services company, doing merchandise and acting as the label, management, and tour producer all in one. Once we became Homemade, a joint venture between myself and a few partners, everyone relocated to Los Angeles in January of 2020. My goal was to grow two verticals: producing live events and merchandise. Not the best time to move across the country to build a business that depends on live events! COVID hit, but we were lucky enough to sign a couple of acts for e-commerce merchandise, which let us grow over COVID instead of shrink. As restrictions lifted, we took on a ton of touring clients. Our team was small and everyone was wearing a lot of hats, and then Ryan gave me a call right when he was looking to make a change. The timing couldn't have been better.
Ryan: I grew up in central Pennsylvania, where there's no House of Blues, so it was a lot of DIY shows in church basements and VFWs. I started booking shows in high school in 2005 and it grew from local bands to regional and national acts. I became friends with some of the bands I booked and started touring with them in 2006. When one of those bands called it a day, I bounced between merch companies, since friends who had moved into merch would call and ask if I wanted to go out on tour with this band or that one. I toured until 2020, worked at another merch company through 2021 and 2022, and in 2023 I decided I'd had enough of that and called Justin. Here we are!
Justin: The first show we ran together was Ali Wong. I feel like I threw Ryan right into it! She doesn't like touring on a bus, so she flies in and plays multiple nights in one city, and she'd rather play theaters than arenas. She did a long run at the Wiltern in LA.
Ryan: It was a smooth transition. Bouncing between merch companies on the road is basically the same job: you figure out how each company and each band work. I looked at what she was doing per head, what items were selling, sorted out the merch splits, set up some spreadsheets, and we were off to the races.
Justin: atVenu provides a high level of consistency across numbers, which lets someone like Ryan do his job that much better, as long as the road rep is using all of the atVenu capabilities. We use some of the atVenu projections, but we also run our own proprietary inventory spreadsheet, so we can compare the two side by side and make sure we're speaking the same language. If we know one date will skew heavily toward a certain item because it's going to be freezing cold out, we adjust. It's also a great standardization. Spreadsheets from different merch companies are all different, which can make them harder to use.
Ryan: I love the seamlessness of it. There's a learning curve for newer folks, but there's a learning curve with a spreadsheet too, and once you learn atVenu it's second nature. There's less margin of error, you can't break formulas, and there are visualizations of everything. For a road rep, unless the merch company requires more, you click settle at the end of the night and you're done. In the office, I can glance at the dashboard when I'm doing 500 other things and see that an artist's per head is in line with the rest. Super helpful.
Justin: The craziest show we've had recently is Forrest Frank at Bridgestone Arena, which may have been our biggest show ever. We also do some festival vending, and one of my favorites was Punk in Drublic, NOFX's final tour. Our team ran the NOFX side, and it was three nights at the San Pedro Pier with a lot of merch and a lot of cool acts in one spot. As a guy who likes punk rock, that was pretty great.
Ryan: It's a tie between the most recent Forrest Frank tour and the Seinfeld and Gaffigan dates. A trend in CCM is that even though you're in arenas, which are typically venue sell, some of these shows were contracted as artist sell, so I went out to support those guys, and that was pretty great. The Seinfeld and Gaffigan dates were also one of the very first things Justin threw me into, and I got to sit in the 10th row and watch the whole show.
Justin: NOFX has an album called Hepatitis Bathtub, and we made hepatitis bath bombs. They were just regular bath bombs, but that might be one of the weirdest things we've made. Hats off to our teammate Brian, who always comes up with the interesting products.
Ryan: I think that beats the Matt Rife pasties. Matt has pasties available with his face on them.
Justin: Stylistically a lot has changed. People are into heavier weight hoodies and boxier t-shirts. Ten years ago everyone wanted a thin, fitted tee, and that's shifted away from the tight American Apparel look. American Apparel is back, but now it's thick and boxy.
Ryan: Most of it is tried and true. Tees are still the best seller, and hoodies are not far behind. I see some folks taking risks on unique accessories, too. It's that cyclical fashion trend where boxy and oversized is in right now.
Justin: I don't know that it's different from other merch companies, but for both e-commerce and touring, we want artists to take a zoomed out look at their fans and identify who they are, then make sure every fan type is represented in the product line. If you're a more traditional band that found TikTok success with one song, you want something for the fans who've been there for five years and know the lyrics to the bridge on track 9, and something for the kid who just heard you last month and only knows your top five Spotify songs. Personally, I don't wear t-shirts, which is ironic given my profession, so when I see a dope hoodie, windbreaker, or soccer jersey at a show, I'll drop serious money on it because it's different. So you want a premium item, your regular fleece and tees, and some accessories that strike a chord with someone who doesn't want to buy clothing at all.
Justin: Space and shipping. Trends change by city, and sometimes you have a big night, can only carry ten boxes, and blow through hoodies. Then you have to decide whether to overnight more and pay an arm and a leg for shipping. If you're told you have half a truck and then production packs up after rehearsals and it disappears, you're suddenly skating by on the skin of your teeth, and rush shipping raises costs. When a tour has a whole bus trailer and only drops 15 or 20 boxes a show, we can keep them stocked all day with no issue.
Justin: Our vetting is currently more tailored to e-commerce than touring, but on touring, the biggest factor is having a reliable road rep who can be our boots on the ground, represent our goals, and report accurate numbers. If we don't get accurate information, it's hard for us to do our job. The other is travel limitations, like whether an artist is willing to pull a trailer or give us more than a couple feet of space. If we have a reliable rep and the right logistics, we can raise the profit margin as high as humanly possible and make the band the most money we can. We're lucky to work with a ton of really great people.
Justin: We had back-to-back sold-out shows at Red Rocks, with Matt Rife one night and Forrest Frank the next. I remember the first time we did Red Rocks with an act and we were so stoked, and now we have two in one weekend, both sold out. Forrest Frank also plays Dickies Arena in Fort Worth the weekend his album comes out. It was initially on sale at a lower capacity, then they opened more seats, then the top ring, and now it's sold out. One of the first acts we worked with at Homemade was Surfaces back in 2019, and Forrest was the singer before he went solo. Going from seeing them at a bar in College Station, Texas, to a sold-out arena of about 12,000 tickets is quite the journey. It's like traveling through space on a rocket ship: you can't see how fast you're actually moving.
A huge thank you to Justin, Ryan, and the whole Homemade team for taking the time to chat with us!
Published:
October 26, 2026
