Campaign supporters love campaign merchandise, but too often, they don’t get many options to choose from besides “the campaign logo on a t-shirt.”
Rand Paul’s campaign dared to be different. They wanted to build a merch store with a wide variety of designs that would spread their key messages in a way that their supporters would be proud to wear.
Our creative team knew the perfect tool to add more variety to Rand Paul’s merch offerings: generative AI.
How we did it
Using Midjourney, our design team created first drafts of new designs with a few keystrokes, then manually refined and embellished them to be merch-store ready.
The speed of generative AI allowed our design team to experiment with multiple variants and different illustration styles that might have otherwise been outside our wheelhouse. And we didn’t limit AI to the design piece of the process — we utilized it for brainstorming and iterating product and tagline ideas as well.
WE GOT RESULTS
Since launching this initiative, our AI-augmented merch designs generated 39.4% of our merch revenue despite being a small percentage of the items in our store.
What we learned
Pairing generative AI with human designers will maximize your effectiveness. If you want your supporters to buy your merchandise, make merchandise they will actually want to buy.