GUY SEBASTIAN
‘100 TIMES AROUND THE SUN’ TOUR RANGE
the brief
Guy Sebastian’s team reached out and asked to work together on a merchandise range for his upcoming Australia tour in support of his latest album, 100 Times Around The Sun.
They wanted a range that highlighted the identity & soul of his new album, while embarking on a fashion forward approach that would ideally create merchandise that his fans could wear time after time. This album was a step forward for Guy visually, so his team wanted this range to have a fresh approach & design style.
The PROBLEM
Historically, Pop music fans aren’t a traditional merchandise purchasing crowd, so in order for them to be persuaded - they need to be wowed with the products.
While Guy Sebastian is a household name to most Australians, his previous ranges of merchandise have underperformed because this connection between design strategy and products hasn’t been realised to the best of its ability. He’s able to sell out arenas, so he definitely has the ability to sell out a merchandise range.
DESIGN INTENT
Thankfully his team had crafted a beautiful visual style for the album, which incorporated a gorgeous pastel like colour scheme, alongside a lot of great photography and a key narrow serif font. This key typeface being paired with the rest of the album elements gave me the perfect springboard to nail the fashion forward brief.
To push this idea of the fashion forward perspective, I thought two great ways to emphasise this range being more elevated than simple pop-star merch, would be to tinker with scale and lockups. Being able to use this narrow typeface meant we could really create unique text layouts to emphasise certain points, but we could also tinker with different styles of lockups across the garments to keep them visually distinct.
The INSIGHT
As Guy’s key audience segment has a lot of generational overlap with the 90s, it felt like a great starting point to anchor the ‘fashion forward’ range to a lot of the 90s design styles and trends that are currently popular.
This meant opting for big bold colour schemes, while choosing blanks that had an oversized & vintage feel to them. Not to mention this also gave the key narrow serif font another reason to be the king of the range.
THE OUTCOME
The final range was a huge hit with fans, as the range toured some of the biggest arenas in Australia across Guy’s 16 date tour. The scarf and hoodie became the highlight of the range for fans, as we actually had to amend the hoodie halfway through the tour as we sold out the entire AS Colour Australian inventory for the Clay colour Relax hoodies.
