Memorial Day Is Closer Than It Looks
If you run a shore business — restaurant, bar, marina, ice cream shop, surf shop, beach rental company, fishing charter, mini golf, anything that thrives between Memorial Day and Labor Day — your peak revenue window is about 14 weeks long. Custom merchandise is one of the highest-margin add-ons available to you during that window. And the planning starts in April, not Memorial Day weekend.
We see the same pattern every spring: businesses that order their summer merch in mid-April are walking around in May with bags ready to go. Businesses that wait until the first hot weekend in June are scrambling, paying rush fees, and missing weeks of sales they could have captured with proper lead time.
The Real Timeline
Here's how the actual production calendar shakes out for a typical shore merchandise order:
- Now (April-early May): Design finalized, sizes decided, garments ordered
- Mid-May: Production runs, final samples approved
- End of May: Delivery in time for Memorial Day weekend
- Mid-July: Reorder window — if your first run is selling, replenish before August
- Early August: Last call for in-season production. Anything ordered after this lands too close to Labor Day to be worth it
Notice how compressed that is. Three months of sellable merchandise rests on roughly six weeks of planning and production. Miss the front of that window and you lose Memorial Day, July 4th, and the first half of summer — your three biggest weekends.
What Actually Sells at the Shore
Not all merchandise is equal at the beach. After years of doing this for businesses up and down the coast, here's what consistently moves and what consistently sits in boxes at season's end:
Sellers
- Quality T-shirts with simple, place-specific designs. "Belmar 2026" with a clean graphic. People buy proof they were somewhere.
- Hats — both trucker and snapback. Functional, on-trend, easy gift, doesn't have to fit perfectly. Strong margin.
- Hoodies in muted colors. Beach evenings get cold. People always need a sweatshirt and they don't want to drive home to get one.
- Tote bags. Especially canvas ones with simple branding. Low cost, high perceived value, and everyone needs another one at the beach.
- Koozies and drinkware. Cheap to produce, customers love them, and they get free advertising for years.
What Doesn't Move
- Anything overly complicated visually. Designs with lots of detail, multiple colors, and small text don't pop on a hot summer rack.
- Off-brand colors. Maroon, mustard, dark teal — these look great in design comps and sit on the shelf in July. Stick with classic shore colors: white, navy, faded blue, sand, soft pink, sage.
- Long-sleeve shirts in non-essential designs. Save long sleeves for premium "fishing" or "lifeguard" style designs that justify the bigger garment.
- Anything with the year prominently featured if you're hoping to sell remainders next year. "Summer 2026" merch is unsellable in 2027.
The 70/20/10 rule for shore merch
Plan your order as 70% bulletproof safe items (white tees, classic hat, simple hoodie), 20% on-trend pieces (specific to this summer's design or color), and 10% experiments (something different you want to test). The 70% pays the bills. The 20% gets the photos. The 10% teaches you what to expand next year.
Sizing — The Trap That Kills Margin
Bad size distribution is the single most common way shore businesses leave money on the table at end-of-season. The instinct is to order in even distribution — equal numbers of S, M, L, XL — and that's almost always wrong.
Real-world shore demand for adult unisex tees skews like this:
- Small: 10-15%
- Medium: 25-30%
- Large: 30-35%
- XL: 15-20%
- 2XL: 5-10%
- 3XL: 1-3% (only if you have requests)
That distribution sells through evenly. An equal split leaves you with too many smalls in August and a sold-out medium/large rack by July 10th — meaning anyone who wanted a shirt and walked in after that left without one.
The Reorder Game
Here's a strategy that works really well: order your initial inventory conservatively, not aggressively. About 60-70% of what you think you'll sell across the whole summer. Then, if it's moving, place a reorder in mid-July for the second half of the season.
This does two things. First, you don't get stuck with hundreds of unsold tees on Labor Day. Second, you can adjust the second order based on what's actually selling — drop the colors that aren't moving, increase the sizes that are flying, add the design variant customers keep asking for.
The cost per shirt is slightly higher across two smaller orders than one big one, but the difference is dramatically smaller than the cost of dead inventory.
Pricing for Shore Margin
Beach customers expect to pay shore prices. Don't underprice your merch. Typical retail for shore merchandise:
- T-shirts: $25-$35
- Hoodies: $50-$70
- Hats: $25-$32
- Tote bags: $20-$28
- Koozies: $5-$8 each, often sold 3-for-$15
If your wholesale cost on a tee is around $7-$10 fully printed, $30 retail puts you at solid margin. Don't price like you're a wholesale supplier — you're a destination, and destination retail commands destination prices.
Local Lettering, Local Pride
The biggest design winners we see at the shore feature the specific town name. "Belmar" sells better than "Jersey Shore." "Asbury Park" sells better than "Belmar." The more specific to the customer's actual location, the more they want to take it home as proof.
If you're a multi-location business, that means making different runs for different locations — yes, more SKUs to manage, but the sell-through is dramatically better.
What We Bring to the Table
We've been making summer merchandise for shore businesses for years. We know which garment brands hold up against sand and saltwater, which inks fade in sun and which don't, which colorways photograph well for social media, and how to keep the per-shirt cost low enough that you have real margin even on volume runs.
If you're thinking about summer merchandise and want to talk through what would actually work for your business — design, garment choice, sizing, quantity, timeline — we're happy to walk through it. Free consultations, no minimums on most products, and we can usually have a first-run order delivered in 2-3 weeks if you start now.
Call (732) 272-1929. The faster you start, the more of summer you actually capture.