Client: Morbid North Ltd
Project: Literally everything from branding to marketing and actually running the company
This is the largest project I've ever created in my life and it's hard to sum up everything together what I was involved in.
This was my own company and Morbid North was originally supposed to become a creative studio focusing on metal music artists and events. Everything took a complete U-turn when the friend I was supposed to partner up with decided to move out of the country and pursue a completely different carreer. I had the company already registered and I happened to buy a bad quality band shirt from one of the Finnish music festival in summer of 2018. I had previous experience from designing and printing shirts, so after reading more about how hard it is for the upstart bands to sell their merch. I decided to take a completely new focus with already registered Morbid North brand. It would become the best solution for new small bands to sell their merch with zero money invested upfront.
THE BRANDING
The brand name is propably quite obvious as at the beginning Morbid North was supposed to become a new creative agency from Finland, but now it had become a merch store from Finland. Metal music was build into the core of the company and as most people saw metal people as something morbid to look at especially during the festivals with blood on the face, corpse paints and rough looking edgy fashion.
The logo included a Mannaz rune. I originally wanted to use the younger futhark version of it, but I tought the elder futhark worked better. Mannaz means men. Not as a gender, but as a species. My brand was meant for the people with no borders worldwide and that's exactly what it became to be as our partnering bands were coming from all over the world. Mostly from Finland due to personal connections here of course.
Because shortly after launching some of the white supremacy groups started using old norse runes as their symbols, I tried to use our social media and our blog to civilise our followers what these symbols truly are and why they had nothing to with the white supremacy. I'm also happy to say that we end up having no issues with them even though I had my fears of being labeled.
Here's just one of the sports collections we had photographed with an alt scene influencer Diana.
We also arranged a few photoshoots with bands to advertise their own merch. Here's a few from the shoot with King Satan wearing their own merch made by Morbid North.
THE WEBSITE
Everything began by building an ecommerce store to Squarespace. Back then I wasn't familiar with webdesign other than what I did back in the graphic design school, but I was focused in multimedia and print. Not webdesign, so everything was fairly new to me.
I didn't take long to get a few small bands on-board and launch the company, but I run it on top of having a full time job and I didn't want to focus on making a profit. Just to get enough to cover the expenses was fine to me and that end up becoming a problem.
Because my mission was to make as much profit as possible to the bands whos merch I was selling with high quality. It became obvious that it would be really hard to actually get anything for myself. I had to either grow the business or sacrifice the bands profits to keep things running.
Well I chose the first option. I recruited 3 partners that I already knew personally and I hoped they could help by taking off some of my workload. Unfortunately that did not happen as it took more time to coordinate them than it took to do the same stuff by myself. because I couldn't hire anyone, it was quite hard to get them as motivated as I was to work hard and get things running.
During the whole this time I also build a new version of the Morbid North website. This time it was moved from Squarespace to WordPress/WooCommerce and I got to learn web design really fast because the whole site including the store was build with Oxygen Builder with no WordPress themes helping me at all. This experience is something I value the most because it really taught me a lot about making websites and I got extremely deep into it.
The website was a lot of things and it also included an intra page for the bands to follow their sales and a b2b catalog page where bands could check out the newest products in our print-on-demand catalog.
THE SHOP PAGE
The shop page was something I was extremely proud of. It loaded fast, it was mobile optimized, easy to use, it had products filter and there was also a good search engine in the header.
On top of having this store page. Each band got their own custom made landing pages for free during the first year, but later I created paid memberships that all included it. There still was a free membership, but it didn't include any of the extra features like the custom landing page, banner advertising, social media posts and affiliate bonus from the sales.
MY ACCOUNT
Nothing fancy, but slightly customized WooCommerce my account page. The page also included some elements that depended on your account status if it was a customer, affiliate, Band Basic, Band Premium, Band Pro or Admin.
ORDER TRACKING
It's quite easy to follow your orders with the tracking code you get from the shipping notification email, but I also added the tracking tool to our page that was linked to your customer account if you were logged in. Without logging in it was just the basic tracking page that worked with your order number and email to show you the progress even before it got shipped. If you were logged in. This page showed you automatically the updates on your active orders.
THE COMPANY
Our about us page included not just the company story, but also broad explanation how our services worked, billing details and contact details.
Further down we also had a link to the brand assets. I noticed a lot of bands added our logo to their sites and all of them used it wrong, so it was just easier to share the assets openly with a few pre-made banners.
THE BLOG
Today I write reviews and articles for a music magazine called Tuonela Magazine and I also write my own blog, but my writing began from Morbid North blog. There I shared news from the music world, news from our partner bands, tips and tricks how to market the band merch and how to design them. I'm currently working on re-writing all the Morbid North tips and tutorials to Samael Creative blog.
All blog articles were written by me personally except one interview that was written by my partner.
THE FEEDBACK
Because I was the designer behind the whole site. I was easy for me to collect the feedback from the users and fix issues that they had found. I also made an FAQ page with Tawk chat plugin, so the user could get immediate answers to most questions trough automatic answers. I've had tons of bad experience from similar setups, but because I could immediately add new articles to the FAQ page when getting feedback it also allowed me to quickly respond to any issues. Obviously there was a lot of complex things to fix at the beginning, but the feedback helped me to put the site in mint condition.
CONTACT PAGE
Nothing out of ordinary here. No point to making contacting us too complex. One thing I didn't want to have was a phone number. I really hate being on phone and because I was in fulltime day job it would have been impossible to answer any calls.
Instead I had the contact form, email and chat. Each that I monitored hourly even during the weekends. Never got any complaints about the customer service!
MERCHANDISING
Merchandising page was a landing page made for new bands to join us. We made it clear that our values were QUALITY, ECONOMIC and SUSTAINABLE. And I know the whole sustainable thing was everywhere at one point, but seriously I went quite hardcore into that.
On this page we offered the 3 membership options. Band Basic that was free for everyone. Band Premium that included everything that also used to be free at launch (It also remained free for everyone who had joined us during the launch). Band Pro that included some marketing services and extra warehousing for products like CDs and other things that we didn't create in print-on-demand.
Here we also had the familiar logo wall from the front page. Because I used a separate block library element for this. I could only update one block with new bands and it would be updated on every page that had this section.
SUSTAINABILITY AND RESPONCIBILITY
Because every company was marketing about being sustainable, I really had to show precisely that we didn't talk bullshit about it. From eco-friendly products trough the print-on-demand business model to eco-friendly printing inks. Everything was build around being sustainable as possible.
THE AFFILIATE PROGRAM
At one point I got enough contact about influencers and so I decided to launch the affiliate program. This made it possible that as an affiliate you could recommend our products and get 7-10% profit from each sale that had used the affiliate link. I also offered some of our merch with 50-80% discounts to them, so they could try them out.
Because I wanted to avoid bot spammers and such. Joining the program needed an application process where each affiliate had to basically show that they were legit people instead of bot farmers.
Because I wanted to avoid bot spammers and such. Joining the program needed an application process where each affiliate had to basically show that they were legit people instead of bot farmers.
The affiliate page under the customer account page was the same page the bands used to follow their sales. Difference was that the bands could see their landing page analytics and product sales info while the regular affiliates could only see their affiliate link analytics and sales profits.
THE RETURNS
We offered 30-day returns worldwide with clear information how to do it, but not for free. This was also part of being sustainable because offering free returns motivates people to try and return products more than normally and we did everything possible, so they would get a perfect product each time. So returning was possible and it would be free if they happened to get a fault product. But I never offered it because it was more sustainable if they only proved the fault in product and I simply send another to them directly or gave their money back. Not a single customer in 4+ years had to send their product back to us.
THE CARE INSTRUCTIONS
Part of being sustainable is also make sure our products last. And because of that I also made a care instructions page, so the customers would wash them correctly and not harm the print in any way. Even today I still have the first test print products I made in early 2018 and they have near mint condition prints because they have been washed correctly.
Did our customer base including mostly big heavy metal guys follow these? I'm fairly sure the answer is no, but unfortunately that's something I could not do anything about it.
The journey of Morbid North ended after 4 years from the launching in 2022. It might be quite obvious, but even with amazingly successful launch, the COVID-19 pandemic silenced the music world and because bands were our core clients. It basically killed the whole business. I had launched the Morbid North with no savings at all, so running costs were taken from my dayjob paychecks. With the costs rising in logistics and printing our merch. It turned out impossible to keep things running anymore and I had to make the hardest decision of my life to shut the morbidnorth.com for good.
I still think this gave me valuable experience from so many things that it's hard to regret putting so much effort to it. The only thing I failed in was the timing and who knows maybe I will try again one day. I don't really fancy myself as someone who would run another business, but I now know a lot about running a merch company and a lot about making a successful e-commerce page. I truly hope I'll get a chance to use these skills I learned during my 4+ year journey.
Photo credits to Alexandra Sleaze
