When you’re a fitness business owner, there are plenty of potential profit engines for generating revenue. One one hand, you can reply solely on your monthly membership dues. If you’ve got a nice membership base and monthly automated-billing, you’re in good shape. However, if you’re dealing with a fluctuating membership volume or you have to deal with credit cards being declined(which every gym owner can relate to), you might want to find another revenue engine. Enter gym merchandise into the picture. Selling “merch”(or even giving it away) can be a nice boost to your bottom line, if you do it correctly. This can mean ordering in bulk and/or selling a variety of items. If you’re thinking about adding gym merchandise to your fitness studio’s business plan, then here are three questions that you need to ask yourself.

What Types of Gym Merchandise Are You Going to Sell?

First thing first, what types of merchandise to you want to sell at your fitness business? Bench shirts, yoga pants, headbands, wrist wraps? The sheer quantity of items is staggering, but you’ll need to sit down with your team to figure out which items will sell the best at your business. Work out how much you’re willing to invest and what kind of margins you will make from selling each item before making the purchase. If you make $2 per wrist wrap and can sell 20 per week, well then you’re adding $150/month in revenue. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but that pays one trainer’s classes for a week. It all adds up.

How Much Merchandise Until You Break Even?

Break even point is one of the most basic accounting principals out there. How much product do you need to sell to cover your costs of “producing” the goods. This is where you want to start thinking about purchasing in bulk. If you’re going to offer lifting shirts, how many are you going to buy for your initial order? If less than 10 per order costs $10 per shirt and over 50 costs $5 per shirt, maybe it’s the smart move to make an initial purchase of 20 shirts at $5 each instead of 10 shirts at $10 each.

Where Are You Going to Source Your Fitness Merchandise?

So you’re figured out what you want to sell and you’ve figured out how much you need to sell to break even. Now you need to find the best supplier. There are plenty of them out there. You can go the route of Dicks Sporting Goods or you can do the more indie route like FringeSport. It’s totally up to you. If you’re going to be making a decent-sized purchase, make sure you get on the phone and negotiate the best price for the apparel. You’re a customer and if you’re going to spend $500 or more, you should be able to negotiate a significant discount. If they don’t offer a discount, let them know you’ll shop around. They’ll drop their price before you can even hang up.

Best of luck selling merch! If you do it right, you’ll have a nice boost to your bottom line.

Image Credits:
Inzernet
UK USN Sport