A fan merch store that never touches inventory.

Fans of Still Standing had been asking for merchandise for a while, and the demand was genuine. The obstacle was never interest — it was everything that sits behind a T-shirt.

Holding stock, warehousing it, picking and packing orders, handling shipping and returns: none of that is a reasonable ask of a television production company. Frantic's priority was unambiguous, and it was making great TV.

So the brief had hard edges. Minimal upfront investment. No physical inventory. No ongoing operational load on the production team. And Canadian-made throughout, because anything else would have been at odds with the show itself.

We settled on a Shopify storefront integrated with Canadian Custom Apparel through the Print Simple app. Every order is printed and shipped on demand, direct to the customer — no stock sits anywhere waiting to be sold.

I built the store on a straightforward Shopify theme dressed in the Still Standing brand, populated with existing show content and photography so it felt like the programme rather than a generic merch shop. The opening range was deliberately narrow: one T-shirt and one hoodie, two colourways each. Enough to read demand, small enough to be wrong about cheaply.

Working with CCA, I built the product mockups from base apparel images and configured the customisation options, then ran several rounds of physical sampling before launch to be certain the finished garments met the standard both Frantic and its audience would expect. The entire engagement ran remotely.

The store went live to coincide with the premiere of Still Standing's tenth season, and sales moved briskly straight away. Fans finally had access to official merchandise, made in Canada, which mattered to an audience that watches a show about Canadian small towns.

The per-unit economics are higher than they would be with bulk printing, and that was the deliberate trade: Frantic exchanged some margin for zero inventory risk and zero operational burden. For a client whose scarcest resource is production attention, that was the right side of the trade.

The launch also produced something Frantic didn't have before — real sales data. Which items sell, in which colours, at what rate. Future range decisions now rest on evidence instead of instinct.