It’s no secret that we think print on demand (PoD) is the best thing to happen to merch since Ace Frehley drew the first KISS logo over a rival band’s fly poster. It lets designs live in the cloud until they’re needed – costing a creator absolutely nothing. And with zero minimum orders and countless types of blank garments to explore, you could argue that every piece of PoD merch is one-of-a-kind.

At the recent opening of the new Monki Flagship Store in Stockholm, a queue of feverish merch fans were waiting to grab a set of AR goggles and enter a new merch dimension. By turbocharging the power of PoD using Augmented Reality (AR), Monki’s community was brought within touching distance of creator Vanja Ivarsson’s recent work for the brand’s From King to Queen campaign.

“The AR project was the first project for our new community area in the Drottninggatan store and our first collaboration with Creator Studio. It's an activity and experience that really tied into our world. The Augmented Reality integrated perfectly with our From King to Queen concept that we’re working with and also Vanja’s own creative world. The tech ties the physical campaign to a digital sphere – one in which Ivarsson’s digital and 3D focussed artwork is the perfect creative vehicle,” explains Monki’s B&M director Simone van Starkenburg.

At the opening, each visitor was hooked up and immersed in a specially-coded platform where they could manipulate the graphical elements of the From King to Queen pieces and create their own unique T’s and sweatshirts. From beginning to end, the process took a handful of days to bring Monki’s community their new garments, printed on demand on our own True Blanks merch apparel.

“These kinds of initiatives are super interesting – both in terms of the sustainability of printing on demand, and giving people the chance to make something unique and personal,” notes van Starkenburg.

Is it the future of merch? Augmented Reality is certainly a concept creeping into our society more and more as retail evolves into experience-driven spaces that nurture community interaction, and our lives become more integrated with the metaverse. Future digital native generations are already customising avatar skins as easily as Generation X would scribble a post-it. For the Gen Zs and Alphas, individual expression is almost a prerequisite of all facets of life. So, perhaps it’s more a question of when the merch future will be our merch present.

As with all tech, today’s early stages of AR merch do come at a cost that not all brands can justify yet, and the ambition at the Creator Studio experience is to continue to explore its potential while also making it more accessible.

“Right now, Create:AR supports one of the most powerful AR head-mounted displays on the market: Magic Leap 2. The software is built by us from scratch, and we’ve options to roll it out in other ways too. For example, if AR setup is not possible, a brand can have a touchscreen kiosk (Create:Kiosk) or make it available on mobile phones (Create:Web), which would require less maintenance and man-power,” explains Emma Raventos, part of the team behind Creator Studio’s new experiences group.

If you want to connect your brand with the future of merch and engage your fans in a new way, get in touch.

The future (of merch) is in your hands

“Ignore the books behind me, I’ve just moved into a new place and haven’t really sorted anything out yet,” begins Vanja Ivarsson with an easy enthusiasm. The 25-year-old has already chalked up an impressive portfolio of work that spans multiple genres and fields, with a style that’s bright, expressive and feels like a slice into the heart of today’s zeitgeist. Her recent collaboration with Monki, entitled From King to Queen, has opened up fashion, merch and augmented reality as new artistic platforms to explore.

Although still very much in the early stages of her career, Ivarsson’s path is already dotted with accomplishments that established artists would be hard-pressed to list. “I make a comic zine that is published once a year with ten different artists who all interpret the same theme. We print it on a Japanese Riso print press, which only prints one colour at a time,” she says. We discuss that this, combined with her love of 3D design, could be one of the reasons why her work translates so easily to merch, a medium in which layers of a design are separated for print and slowly resolved as a singular design.

“During the prep for my graduation, I was contacted on Instagram by Monki. They knew about my art and were fans themselves – really nice people and it immediately felt like we were a good match. I felt safe and secure;” explains Ivarsson. “They asked me to make a pitch for its feminist campaign, From King to Queen, and they said not to be afraid to be bold and provocative, which was great.”

Ivarsson began the work as she often does, with pencil or pen sketches that she later brings into digital 2D format but, on the suggestion of Monki’s team, she began to extend the initial designs into the third dimension.

“Vanja shares our values of female empowerment and that’s important for us. As a brand we want to support the creative community where we are present, and for this project we wanted to work with a local illustrator – someone we feel is a queen in their own right. We encouraged Vanja to go bold and she did, and we are very happy with the result, explains Simone van Starkenburg, B&M director at Monki.

Looking back, Ivarsson states without hesitation that the whole process and collaboration “Felt really free.” Casting one’s eye over the bold prints and motifs, with layers of pastels and glossy bold characters, the collection feels very unrestricted. And the results shine bright.

As a project, From King to Queen is uncharted territory for Vanja – a new medium and audience to engage with. Was this something she considered before putting pencil to paper? “I was thinking that it would be fun if my friends would wear it. Monki as a brand has a pretty young demographic, but still, it would be cool if other creative people would want to wear the pieces,” notes Vanja, adding that there are lots of elements of her comic influences that crept into the capsule collection. From flowers with sharpened teeth to demonic-eyed demons and contorted monsters, there’s an aesthetic softness that reveals a harder stronger edge. A strength within every ‘Queen’.

For Monki’s opening of its newest flagship in Stockholm, it was Ivarsson’s work that played an integral part in the store’s customer experience. Facilitated by CREATOR STUDIO’s print on demand and Augmented Reality tech, customers manipulated layers of her artwork to create their own one-off merch. As pairings go, it was a no-brainer – the future of merch meets a progressive artist and empowers its fans in the process.

With our time with Vanja drawing to a close, and the arrival of her buddy to install her bathtub, we finish by asking what advice she’d give to emerging artists. She pauses and explains that, during her education, one of her lecturers was keen for students to try to draw artworks by creators they admired. “So you’d take an illustration from someone you like and copy it to understand their techniques, shapes and processes. What you realise is that you’re not actually copying but developing your own style. You begin to understand that you should also rely on your intuition and not be caged in. You have to be free within the systems.”

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