0:01  
Got that seamless. Okay, so this is the one trick folks that I had to check. I'm going to attempt to leave Katie. And if I like killed the broadcast, then like, tell me by mistake,

0:13  
I will slack you and I'm watching on my other screen. So I'll be able to tell if we're still live. And I'll let you know

0:19  
We can do I'm going to do one thing to make sure that you don't have to worry about this. I want to thank Bonfire for their support of Generosity Xchange, this event would not be able to happen without your support. So Josh, thank you very much and have a great session. I'm gonna go pop on over and check things out later. But thank you, and good luck. Thank you.

0:42  
Thanks, Tim. It looks like we are still live and ready to go.

0:54  
So great. So then I will just say hello to everyone quickly. My name is Katie Albanos, some the Vice President of Marketing here at Neon One. And I get to introduce Josh, I know Tim kind of already did that. But thank you again, Josh, and Bonfire for your sponsorship of Generosity Xchange and the long standing partnership here. And I'm going to just hand it over to you to share your presentation and take us through a really exciting talk today on apparel trends in the nonprofit space. And just as soon as I can confirm that the presentation is up and looks good. I will also just hide myself so that people can focus focus on the main attraction. And so thanks again. Take it away.

1:35  
Thank you, Katie. And then if you'll let me know when presentation is up, I will get going. There we go. Awesome. Thank you so much. Cool. Hello, everyone. As Katie said, I'm here to talk to you about apparel trends. This is called What do supporters wear. I am the PR manager of a company called Bonfire. And normally PR managers are not out here speaking and kind of talking about things. We're talking to the media. But I'm also lucky enough to work here at Bonfire to promote the great work of our nonprofits and other users like that. Before we kind of jump into the presentation, I just wanted to give a little bit of a background on what we do. So you can understand why we're giving this presentation and why we might be a little biased, obviously being in the apparel space for why you as a nonprofit should care about apparel. So we've been around since 2012. And we're a free online platform where anyone can design sell, fundraise with, and buy custom product products. And we've worked with I want to say it's over 10,000 nonprofits at this point, as well as a bunch of individuals, creators and all kinds of other people to raise money for the causes they care about. So through that we learned a lot about apparel, and specifically about apparel in the nonprofit space. So for this discussion, it's about 30 minutes, and then some time for q&a, probably, we're going to review the last time we looked at our apparel trends, which was way back in 2018, which I think is also very interesting, because it was the quote unquote, pre pandemic era at that point, then we'll look at the kind of the 2022 trends that we're looking at. And then I did want to kind of finish off with a little bit of a case study, just so you have an idea of how some of these trends might play into an actual apparel fundraiser of some kind or even, you know, go against some of those trends so that we can have a bit of a different picture. At the end of this, I hope that you kind of walk away with some learnings. And those learnings are is the race day T shirts still around, you know, we read articles, I feel like every year at this point that says you know, no one wants any t shirts anymore, and you know, stop doing swag and stuff like that. And again, obviously, we're a little biased, but you know, want to be honest there about things, the a little bit about the most popular items. And we're going to break that down by state to make it a little more geographically interesting to you. If you're in Canada, I do apologize in advance. But if you want that data, you can definitely email me after the fact. And I will try my best to pull it for you because we do have some data there too. And then ideally, you can walk away understanding the apparel products that you should maybe be focusing on if you're doing a fundraiser, incentive program, Team T shirts or whatever, whatever else it might be. So we got to go way back to 2018. Back when we weren't wearing masks everywhere. Times were very different. Kind of put yourself in that mindset and imagine what you were wearing at that time, what your nonprofit might have been seeing your supporters wearing. And the surprising answer is going to be black T shirts. The most popular item by far back in 2018 was people wearing black T shirts on the nonprofit level and the supporter level and all kinds of other campaigns. And we're talking about it is anywhere from two to three times more popular as an apparel item compared to everything else a hoodie or beanies or anything else. And five times more popular as a as a Product choice as well, too. And you can kind of see why that is, is it works with so many different designs, even when you're adding color, or you're just doing the white and you're kind of mixing things. So I can end the presentation here and say, if this was the year 2018, you should definitely have black T shirts, congratulations, we've done our work, let's all go home. But that doesn't really help you very much, especially because there's a lot more data behind this. So what we did is we kind of said, alright, we know T shirts are popular, everyone's wearing them. Despite what we hear. Sometimes it's the most popular thing. So if we took that away, what we what we kind of start to see instead. And if we look at it by a state by state breakdown, we get a map that looks like this with some of the top apparel items basically being pullover hoodies, long sleeve tees, tank tops, crewneck sweatshirts, V necks in some cases, and even baseball tees, kind of a little bit randomly, with obviously most states seeing the pullover hoodie, and long sleeve T shirts as their most popular alternative pick to a T shirt being available for their apparel fundraiser or their item.

And I want to dig into this because also great, interesting, cool. But there's some kind of more interesting things. Obviously, the pullover hoodie is the most popular choice by far 26 out of 50 states are choosing this item as their most popular alternative. So when in doubt, basically always include a pullover hoodie option for your supporters is kind of the way to go. And when we look at the colors of these things, it's still leaning a lot of those dark colors, you know, black sports, gray, dark Heather. There are some outliers, though. Very interestingly, in Alaska, specifically, we see it's the only state that doesn't have a black hoodie as like a top three choice. I guess, if I was there, and it was the dark time of year and it's really cold out. The last thing I'd want to do is wear black. And then in Rhode Island, they interestingly pick pink as their top color. So no idea why there either, but just kind of these interesting things that come out to kind of consider Phoenix are weirdly popular, and specifically Mississippi and Florida. And if anyone remembers this skit, from way way back in SNL, or you know, even grew up a little bit in the 2000s, there was kind of this long running attempt of having a deeper and deeper V neck everywhere in the states kind of never let that go to some degree. And interestingly, even though the states are still geographically, you know, a little bit far apart, they have the same kind of color choices and palettes that they're going with when they pick this item with midnight navy. So like a dark kind of blue color, a dark heather gray, and then they have a lighter color and the turquoise kind of there. And then Kansas is the one that stands out is very, very interesting, because they were the only state that chose a baseball tee out of all items, which is not something that we normally see people picking as a first choice, it's definitely a great option. But we think this probably has something to do with baseball, they have a lot of loyalty to their baseball team over there. The Royals and the most popular colors to when people are selecting these baseball tees in Kansas is a vintage Navy, and royal blue, which lineup really, really, really close to the colors for the the team there. And then the last thing is, we saw tank tops were kind of an option only in two states. It was Arizona and then Hawaii, interestingly enough. And that isn't surprising. They're hot states. But it's kind of interesting that it's only those two states, but we kind of dig a little deeper because tank top sales were actually pretty high overall, and a lot of states. So we were kind of interested to see if there's a correlation with temperature at all. And we did digging into it. And there's kind of like these weird cases where certain states like Nevada and New York, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Colorado, still had an above average number of tank tops being ordered as an option. And there was no seasonal effect on this. It could have been cold, it could have been the dead of winter and they said I don't care if it's snowing, I'm wearing a tank top. And then when we look at places like Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi and Kentucky, they would rather actually take a long sleeve t shirt instead of a tank top. So I'm guessing they're all working in AC or they're going for more of a I'm gonna sweat out the heat to feel a little bit better. So at the end of 2018, if we looked at it, what are kind of some of the key takeaways here? In general, dark colors, right? It's black T shirts that are super, super popular here. But even when we look at the pullover, hoodies and stuff like that it's still leaning towards those dark Gray's those dark blues and black colors and the most popular alternatives overall across the board. We are having some type of pullover hoodie or a long sleeve shirt. And then we had a couple of states that that did buck the trends, which was kind of very interesting because there's no rhyme or reason why they just kind of had that as their their choice.

So now let's move into 2022. It's three years later, we're not quite in the post pandemic era at this point, but we're a little bit of in the passive pandemic, where things kind of continue on and people are trying their best as things still continue. So Has anything changed after what is essentially four years which is kind of insane to think about? The black T shirt is still by far the most popular choice above and beyond. Still, basically, black is more likely to be a color picked two times than any other color. And T shirts are five to almost six times more popular than any other apparel item. So again, if you're reading the stories that say people don't order swag, or, you know, no more T shirts, for your events or your offerings. I'm sure there's people that don't want them. But overall, the data is saying that that is people's first choice and every every case, but what we are seeing is people adding additional colors, when they are doing these fundraisers, so that they'll have this one design like this. And it looks really great on black, but they might even add, you know, something crazier, like a tie dye t shirt where that same design still works. So you're kind of fulfilling the needs of that popular pick, but you're also offering something that's a little more interesting for people that are looking to kind of stand out and offer something different. So because the t shirt again, was the most popular, it's great, I can walk away and say make sure you have t shirts, but still not super, super interesting, as far as helping you kind of inform the strategy of what happens to what happens when you want to get something instead of a T shirt or off or something else. So we're going to look at 2022, I'm going to bring up the 2018 map first. And then now I'm going to click and we're going to see what it changes into. And we'll see this very interesting trend happens here, where a lot of the things that we're taking over the state previously have only continued to grow. And we've even seen a lot more transitions towards consolidation of a lot of these different kinds of apparel alternative choices here. So I do want to dig into this a little bit. So pullover hoodies, we went from 26 states to now 31 of the 50 States choose this as their most popular option. And we're still actually having our most popular colors, be those dark ones, where it's black, sport gray or dark Heather Blue has taken a little bit of a turn down and it's definitely leaning more gray. But you know, it's still on the table. So a really big option. One that's not on the map that it's very interesting is Alabama specifically is very interested in comfort colors, T shirts, specifically the only one and this item was almost their most popular item overall. Even getting close to approaching T shirts, Alabama is actually pretty interesting. And where t shirts and hoodies are it's crewneck sweaters for them are pretty close together. And then it's also the only state where the the top choice of color is actually white. So bucks a lot of trends in that respect. And the only thing I can think of is, college is a big influence here. If anyone was in a fraternity sorority, I'm sure you've heard of comfort colors, and it's very much part of that kind of Southern College experience choice. So just an interesting thing to note, if you are fundraising with a college focused group or kind of people like that, or you're in one of those states where colleges are a big, big thing, comfort colors is really something to think about as a specific apparel option to add in the cold trend, all these states we're seeing that previously had crewneck kind of sweaters are now moving over to pull over hoodie sweaters and now kind of having even a warmer apparel item. And then people that were doing long sleeve tees now are even taking those and turning those into a crewneck sweater for something kind of thicker. And then we've also seen tank tops and V necks from 2018 are not really even on this list as much the only state that still even has tank tops listed is Hawaii. And interestingly enough Hawaii, the top tank top selling items in Hawaii are more women's apparel options so we're that gendered clothing kind of option doesn't mean that you know people other than women aren't ordering it but it does show that it's a more popular category among women in general.

And then it's very interesting to me because this is all lining up when I think a lot of us are working from home. And you know typically we're going out and about you know a sweater was not necessarily your first pick, especially if you're in a more southern state or a warm Your area. But now with a lot of people working from home, we've kind of seen this shift towards thicker items. If you're like me, I'm sure you always have your kind of sweater on for your at home office setup where you're like, I'm not going to, you know, turn up the heat or anything like that. But I'll add on a little bit of a second layer to kind of keep warm. So it's very, very interesting. I did look at nonprofits to specifically. So our data does include people they're doing like personal kind of more GoFundMe style fundraisers, as well as individuals that have launched a fundraiser and then designated a nonprofit to receive all the fundraising dollars from that, whether it's associated with like a peer to peer event where they're doing a team shirt and remembrance of something, or they just want to do a fundraiser for whatever reason to support y'all is awesome work. But I wanted to look at nonprofits specifically. And when we look at them, you guys are basically on trend with everything else. Which is a great thing. Because if we were way out of line and our supporters were picking one thing and choosing to do all these other things, then we've missed out on this huge opportunity to kind of work and identify with them, and ask them and be in line with what they're doing. But even so, I do want to highlight, you know, I say black T shirts, but we still have nonprofits that do offer alternatives, some of the designs here, so not everything has to be a black T shirt, there are people that are bucking the trends and still having wonderful, wonderful success. I do want to make this a little bit interactive. If any of you want to drop your state in the chat, I have a computer over here to my side. And I will give you a couple more of your top products at least for your state. If one wants to drop them in the comments. I can start with my state of Virginia

and for Virginia, again, the second most popular item there is interestingly a pullover hoodie and then followed by the long sleeve t shirt. So we're basically seeing the same things and then crewneck as the third item. So again still very much leaning into the kind of more long sleeve items there All right, let's see who I got first. Everyone's pouring in. Let me be nice and get it to the first person All right, I got Becky's, Virginia All right Lucy Minnesota.

Minnesota we have the pullover hoodie. It's the crewneck classic. And then interestingly, you're tied in in that third slot for V neck T shirts as well as like a women's racerback tank top. So a very interesting one where Minnesota decides to say we don't care about the cold. We're gonna wear tank tops anyway. Which I believe because I have my nieces and nephews come to Virginia from Minnesota, and it's 20 degrees here and they take off their sweaters because they think it's so hot Massachusetts from Massachusetts, we also have crewneck below the pullover hoodie. And then we have a long window we have a women's slim fit t so basically again one more general kind of gendered clothing item choice there, which is very interesting.

And then I can do one more and we got New York which of course is a huge dataset after the pullover, hoodie crewneck sweatshirt, another classic very popular again.

And then interestingly, your last one is a baseball team. So I guess maybe baseball being big in New York also plays into that a lot. If I did not get to your state because I know a bunch of you are in here. Please come visit me at the Bonfire booth or you can email me at josh.kelly@bonfire.com and I will more than happy to look up your things for you. I have Maggie in the chat for me if she wants to drop my email in there, and then we can at least make sure that you get that answered for you. So review, black T shirts still really popular. Actually, white is the second most popular color too, I did forget to mention that my apologies. But we didn't see that kind of change, where even though these darker colors are still populating White has actually kind of shot up as a more popular color again. And then people are leaning more towards that cold weather apparel. So for this last section, I just want to give you a case study of someone that we worked with, at one point to do a fundraiser with, which is the American childhood cancer organization. And they are the oldest and largest grassroot childhood cancer organization in the US. And during September for childhood cancer awareness month, they wanted to work with us on a fundraiser. This design that you see up here is actually one they did with someone else before us. And they were looking to kind of simplify this design and kind of offer a new experience. So originally, when they would do this, they took every name of children that are either still fighting or sadly passed, and lost their battle. And they would put it in a design for people to purchase as kind of a remembrance item. And they only offered one or two colors. So there was this or there was a blue one as well. And they did that as a fundraiser, and they generated around 12 to $14,000. And it was a lot a lot, a lot of work for them. So we worked with them to actually create these templatized designs, where their supporters could come to our site and select this template. And then they could customize the team name with the name of either their child or the child of family member friend who they're supporting. And they could launch that fundraiser in for that specific child and have all the funds go directly back to the American childhood cancer organization. And along with this, they worked with us to kind of get samples of a bunch of different products. And instead of just offering those two colors and the one t shirt, they ended up expanding this to nine different apparel offerings, with around four different colors. It's the first time they've ever done this. And the really interesting thing with this is that this isn't just the nonprofit that saying, you know, we're going to do all these apparel items, but it's giving the supporters the opportunity to say you make your own customized design that's on brand with what we've decided to do for this month, you select these apparel items that we think are great, the colors are going to work with that design. And you pick the ones that you want to offer to your network and your community of people that are supporting you. And it was a smashing success, they raised almost $70,000 It's actually more than that. Now, this is the original number when we kind of first ended it. And then they also got additional donations as well. And they reached over 7000 Different kinds of supporters. So they actually generated the shipping information and all the details for that organization. And they had 873 Different people launch their own fundraisers. And the big anecdotal evidence that they got here was that people love this opportunity to have all of these different apparel designs and options to kind of choose and customize and make to their own, which I find really interesting because of course, I just told you, it's all black T shirts. And here's a case where the nonprofit had a really strong vision of what they wanted to do, what the design kind of direction they wanted to go in was, and how on brand they wanted their colors to be. And they didn't pick any colors that would actually end up showing up in kind of the top thing. But they still had really, really good success because they were kind of listened to what their supporters were asking of them to kind of improve upon this experience where everything was more personalized to them, and their children and the people that they're basically supporting there.

So final takeaways that I kind of have for you is the t shirt reigns. Like we've seen that all the way back to 2018. Even in that American Cancer childhood organization fundraiser, the t shirt was still an option, it was still a top seller. But you know, people are then looking to support that with it a long sleeve item. Where whether that be the pullover hoodie that we see is really popular the crewneck sweater or the long sleeve T with a couple of exceptions if you're in a warmer state. For the most part, definitely you should offer kind of some shorter sleeve apparel option. Or if you're in Minnesota, apparently you should offer a tank top so exceptions to the rule as always of what you'd expect. Another part of this is just because these are the trends across the board. It doesn't mean that your supporters have their own wants and desires to be part of that process. One that we see very commonly with animal rescues, for example, is people asking for doggie T's right so that their dog can wear the same kind of T shirt or apparel item that they're wearing. And that may not show up as one of the most popular items overall. But it doesn't mean there aren't people out there looking for it and hoping for it and wanting you to provide it as a way to support you. And then last, keep your brand in mind again, because these are trends, it doesn't mean that your brand and your experience fits into that. If you're running a cancer organization, and you're doing a breast cancer awareness month, and pink is the most popular color, and that's part of the brand image, make it pink if your child had cancer, again, because I know the color is going to be yellow with that one. If you want to have a yellow T shirt, because that's part of the brand image, you should do that you shouldn't. You shouldn't steer away from that one. That's part of what makes your mission and your organization important. And it should always be first and foremost. So with that, I'm here and happy to answer some questions. If Katie comes back, I don't know how we're doing that. But thank you all for taking the time to listen to me.

25:53  
Hey, Josh, that was great. Thank you. Thank you. I especially as a dog lover, love the point about apparel for for dogs.

26:03  
Yeah, it's really popular. The other one that we see weirdly with them is I've seen a couple of animal rescues, doing Tie Dye as a more popular option as well. It's very funny.

26:14  
I love that. Well, for anyone who's with us. Please, we've got some time, please feel free to leave any questions for Josh. And we can get into any specific questions that you guys might have. 

26:27  
Oh, I do see one here from Lauren says Do you ever see scoopneck I have a lot of female guests who don't want typical T but aren't sure if they want scooper V. Is there a better choice if we wanted something to add? Yeah, it really depends. Again, I would ask them, we have a huge product catalog. But I also don't want to you know stick it to just our catalog because you know we are but one apparel provider in the world. But V necks are popular we see they're typically described as women's slim fit tees is another really popular option. They do tend to run like smaller and they have that kind of like more hourglass cut compared to like the boxier cuts that you see with unisex. So that's usually a really popular alternative option. But I will always caution when you're adding those things. We're seeing a lot more kind of discourse and understanding around the gendering of clothing. So some people can kind of see those things being launched. And you might have supporters who are saying, you know, why is this you know, women's product, you know, anyone else can order it. So, I will say, you know, those are the names sometimes and there's kind of a bit unfortunate in some sense. So it's something to kind of be prepared for and ready to talk to your supporters about if you kind of do have those questions coming in. So touching on a little bit out of the scope, but I always feel like that's an important part of the discussion there. Any other items for volunteers besides T shirts and hoodies? Yes, T shirts is the easy one hoodies is the easy second for sure. I personally think that beanies is always another good option or like a kind of trucker hats are really really popular. Now, if you're looking for a wearable item, water bottles are sometimes a good pick, it just depends because you might have you know, those kinds of volunteers that have their now jeans and kind of like other or like a yeti of some kind that they've already invested in and that's part of their experience. So in those cases, you know, stickers are another great option right? Because you can just kind of give those and they can slap them on whatever they want. And the other one too is kind of some stationery of some kind can also be a good one. You know do like a nice notebook with your branding on it because then it's something that they're using in their kind of everyday life. If you're looking for those non apparel based items, I would say what about sizes what is the best range or ones to skip? Sizing sizing is always a very interesting one. Smalls and mediums typically tend to be the most common sizing you're going to see across the board. The nice thing, shameless platform plug here is if you work with someone like us, you're basically setting up a campaign page so everyone's directly ordering from us. And then we ship and print everything to them directly. You never have to touch it or order like worry about ordering a box of T shirts and then having a bunch of stuff leftover or size guessing. So you can sidestep that stuff a lot nowadays and not have to kind of worry about that. But if you are still kind of wanting to do a bulk order thing, you small and medium are the most common large and then you always will want some XL and double XL. On occasion I do see things go all the way up to five XL but those are more difficult to source sometimes just because they are a special kind of like size requirement. But you can you can get away with kind of some of the the typical small to XL range typically

30:03  
I don't see any additional questions here. But Josh, I have a question for you, which is just to ask. I know you already shared some examples but what is like one of the things that a customer has done with you that is just really stood out as being really interesting or unique?

30:19  
Um, that's really good question. I'm always I'm always really impressed when the apparel is integrated into kind of the larger story piece or the mission that's going on typically, you see that more commonly with political fundraisers, one that comes to mind very vividly is there's a woman who did don't mess with trans kids t shirt during the kind of Texas bills that were happening down there. And it was just a white t shirt with you know, said don't mess with trans kids the Texas flag kind of taking on the don't the the Texas kind of flag and imagery and she raised $150,000 for a quality Texas with that one t shirt and ended up on the time red carpet. Beta work was wearing it at one point so it's I'm always really fascinated when someone make something that just kind of hits the right moment. And it really speaks to people beyond who you would kind of ever expect to see it with Yeah, I guess it's a little bit of off topic but no, I I think it's always better to ask yourself what mission or message are you trying to get out? Versus I need a t shirt? You know, make make the apparel item fit your story? Not fit the apparel item into I just need this.

31:41  
Yeah, and capitalize on the moment, I suppose.

31:44  
Yeah, definitely capitalize on the moment. animal rescues of course, are very good nonprofit about doing that anytime they have an animal that needs very specific or special needs that's been brought in they we typically see them launching a t shirt that's immortalizing that animal and basically saying you know it goes to this fund that helps us take care of animals and like big need. And then those are the story is of course you see over BuzzFeed and all these other places. Suzanne, what other items besides T shirts? I'm guessing you're asking what other items was his T shirts do we sell? Um, and I cannot remember everything off the top of my head. T shirts is a big one obviously as the most popular item. There's water bottles. We had flip flops at one point joggers, stationery items like notebooks I would say go if you go to Bonfire's website that would be your best bet to look at everything we have. Because I'm not going to remember everything. I'm so sorry

Oh most popular. Okay. Most Popular it's again it's interestingly, it's the hoodies and the crewneck sweaters in the long sleeve T shirts. Because that's what people wear. You know I think we always want it to be something fancier cool and you know I'm one for loving to put together like a nice swag box that has like this like super fancy mug with a design on it or adding some socks in there or like some other kind of really special item to stand out. And those are great I think for marketing campaigns are like special kind of things you're doing for like a limited duration, short time kind of thing. But it the day to day bread, his T shirts and hoodies basically

33:32  
just simple. Yep.

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