A fan merch store that never touches inventory.

Fans of Still Standing had been asking for merchandise for some time, and the demand was genuine. The obstacle was the operation behind it.

Holding stock, warehousing it, picking and packing orders, and handling shipping and returns are not a reasonable ask of a television production company, whose priority is making television.

The brief was clear: minimal upfront investment, no physical inventory, no ongoing operational load on the production team, and Canadian-made products throughout, consistent with the show itself.

I set up a Shopify storefront integrated with Canadian Custom Apparel through the Print Simple app. Every order is printed and shipped on demand, directly to the customer, so no stock is held.

I built the store on a Shopify theme styled in the Still Standing brand and populated it with show content and photography, so it felt like an extension of the program rather than a generic merchandise shop. The opening range was deliberately narrow, one T-shirt and one hoodie in two colourways each, large enough to gauge demand and small enough to keep the risk low.

Working with Canadian Custom Apparel, I developed the product mockups and ran several rounds of physical sampling before launch to confirm the finished garments met the standard Frantic and its audience expected. The engagement ran entirely remotely.

The store launched with the premiere of Still Standing's tenth season, and sales began immediately. Fans gained access to official merchandise made in Canada, which mattered to an audience that follows a show about Canadian small towns.

Per-unit costs are higher than they would be with bulk printing, a deliberate trade-off: Frantic accepted a lower margin in exchange for no inventory risk and no operational burden, the right balance for a client whose scarcest resource is production time.

The launch also gave Frantic its first real sales data, showing which items and colours sell and at what rate, so future range decisions can rest on evidence rather than instinct.