Festival merch for Jazz Yerevan artists, crews and volunteers

What a multi-venue city festival changes about the brief

Programme

An annual multi-day jazz festival in Yerevan, programmed across several city venues over consecutive nights, with an artist roster that changes from night to night. The organiser publishes the confirmed dates, the venue allocation per night, the programme slots, the load-in windows and the curfews in its official festival documentation. Production windows here are worked backwards from that publication.

Venues

Yerevan, Armenia. The venue allocation per night, the capacity of each room, the loading access, the backstage access rules and the neighbourhood noise conditions are set by the organiser and by each venue. Venue names, addresses and stage dimensions are not reproduced on this page.

Who it is for

Performing artists and their touring crews, local festival crew, volunteer and front-of-house teams, hospitality and guest-list guests, press, photographers and the city audience moving between venues with a city pass.

Working calendar

Artist roster and venue allocation locked six to eight weeks out. Apparel samples and poster proofs approved three to four weeks out. Production closed two to three weeks out. Delivery scheduled inside the published daylight load-in windows. Count and reconciliation after the final night.

Artist apparel is a working garment rather than a souvenir. Artists play two or three sets a night, sometimes with an instrument change and a change of stage in between, often in a room with a hard lighting rig and no wardrobe space. What works is a layer that can come off and go back on quickly, in a dark colour that does not glare under stage light, in a fabric that does not read as costume, and in a size that fits that particular artist because there is no time to sort it out backstage. Where a tour line is involved, the decoration has to come from approved tour artwork, and where the artist has a personal mark preference it is followed rather than substituted with the festival mark.

Crew apparel solves a different problem. Load-in, backline, front-of-house and the road team between venues all need to be identifiable by a member of the public in a way that a generic cotton tee does not achieve in a dark corridor or a crowded bar. That pushes toward high-visibility decorative garments for crew, a pass or lanyard system sized for a night event, and a small torch or light strip per crew member for the walk between venues after close. Those garments are event apparel for identification; they are not protective equipment, are not tested to any protective standard, and should not be relied on as personal protective clothing on any site.

Poster and programme print is where a festival spends its visible print budget, and it is unusually print-intensive for a small organisation. A poster is a large-format piece judged from across a street, printed in an edition of a few hundred at most, sometimes in numbered sets for the venue rather than a general run. A programme booklet is the festival’s reference document for the whole run, and a per-venue day sheet is the thing a regular actually carries. All three have different formats, and the print specification has to treat them as print products rather than as pages printed on office stock.

Volunteer logistics are a shift problem. A volunteer working the afternoon load-in is not the same person as a volunteer on the late bar shift, and a single pooled shirt count produces a shortage exactly where the cover is thinnest. The count is built per shift from the festival’s own rota, sizes are confirmed against the names on each shift list, and passes are printed with the volunteer’s name and shift rather than handed out from a stack at the door. Replacements matter over a multi-night run: a shirt lost on night two is replaced on night three, which is easy when the stock is held locally and awkward when it has to come back through a supplier.

Posters, programmes and the print specification

A large-format poster is a different process from everything else on this page. Ink coverage is heavy, the substrate is heavy, and a digital press handling a saturated full-bleed image over an uncoated sheet needs the file prepared for that press rather than exported at screen settings. Paper choice follows the mounting method: pasted to a wall or window, a poster wants a stock with enough body to hold its own edge; mounted in a frame, a slightly heavier sheet with a matt laminate prevents the stage and street lighting from turning the print into a mirror. Gloss on a night poster is the single easiest way to make a good design look unreadable.

Programme printing splits by format and by run. The festival programme is bound, printed once and carried for the whole run. The per-venue day sheet is a lighter document, usually a single sheet or a short saddle-stitched booklet, printed per venue per night and reprinted if the running order changes. Neither should be produced from the same file as a flyer: the programme has to hold a full schedule legibly on one spread, and the day sheet has to be readable standing up in a queue.

Short-run premium finishing earns its place here for the same reason it does in the launch showcase, but the objects are different. Numbered editions are the obvious case: an edition of a few hundred copies with sequential numbering on the reverse, a different paper stock from the general run, and a signed band where the artist has agreed one. Foil on a poster survives handling and street conditions better than a printed metallic ink, debossing works on a heavy cover that is meant to be held, and a spot varnish on a logotype reads correctly under a low light where a flat print disappears.

Night-venue delivery and volunteer shift logistics

The delivery window is the constraint that decides the schedule. Night venues operate in residential surroundings, and the neighbourhood conditions are usually part of the agreement that gives the festival its slot. Loading doors typically close before the first set, a venue will not receive freight during a performance, and anything oversized has to go in during the agreed afternoon slot with the venue’s own staff or with the access it permits. A rolling case that fits a corridor is a very different logistics problem from a stack of posters in tubes, and the plan starts with the venue’s stated limits rather than with our own vehicle.

Volunteer shirts are packed by shift. Each shift gets its own carton labelled with the shift name, the volunteer names and the pack-up count, so that the shift captain collects one carton rather than opening a general pile. Passes are printed with the volunteer’s name and shift and handed over at the venue rather than at a central point, because a volunteer who arrives at a different venue on a different night has to be identifiable on arrival without a supervisor present. Replacements for a multi-night run are produced from locally held stock, which is the difference between a shirt arriving for night three and a volunteer spending the night in a festival tee.

After the final night, the count is reconciled across every venue: what was issued, what remains, what was sold at the merch point and what returns to local storage. Surplus festival stock that cannot be used the following year is better handled through the festival’s own channels than shipped out of the country, and the remainder returns to storage for the next edition of the same run.

Frequently asked questions — Jazz Yerevan Festival

Running the merch point across several venues

A roaming audience changes how a merch point behaves. The people who queue are not the same people on each night: the regular follows one artist, the visitor comes once and buys three things at once, and the guest-list guest walks past a table without stopping. That argues for a small, fast-moving range at the point of sale rather than a display, and for the numbered poster edition to be held back rather than laid out, because a limited run spread over an open table stops being a limited run within about twenty minutes.

Stock control in that setting is by venue and by night, reconciled twice a day. Each venue keeps a count of what was issued to it, what has been sold and what remains, and the count goes back at close rather than at the end of the festival. Two consequences follow, and both are worth planning for. Unsold stock in the wrong venue at the wrong time is a wasted night, which is why replenishment is scheduled per venue per night rather than from a central pool. And a sold-out poster on night two of a three-night festival is a permanent loss, while a surplus is a storage problem, so the per-venue split is deliberately uneven and weighted towards the rooms with the strongest confirmed programming.

The merch point itself is usually run by volunteers, which constrains the setup. Cash handling, a change float, a receipt book and a count sheet are a real operational requirement, not a detail, and a table that cannot count its own stock at close cannot be reconciled at the end of the week. The printed elements support that: a simple stock sheet per venue, a wall sign sized to read from the back of a queue, and the shift packing list with the volunteer’s name on it. Anything that requires training to operate belongs with the production team rather than on the table.