Editor’s note: disclosure – Zakhar Protsiuk and some other members of The Kyiv Independent’s leadership team are also co-founders of The Fix.

Launched in November 2021, The Kyiv Independent is Ukraine’s most prominent English-language media outlet. Despite the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine three months later, the outlet was able to maintain its operations and grew rapidly, becoming a well established brand with 14,000 paying members from all over the world. 

In August last year, The Kyiv Independent launched its own merchandise to strengthen the ties with its community, but also to diversify its income streams, since 70% of its revenue last year was from reader contributions. The first results went beyond expectations: several collections were launched, and the publisher sold over 3,000 pieces of clothing.

The Fix got a chance to ask Zakhar Protsiuk, The Kyiv Independent’s Chief Operating Officer, about merchandising as a business strategy for media and what other news organisations can learn from this experiment. 

One thing is certain: One size does not fit it all – because it’s all about branding.

How did The Kyiv Independent come up with the idea of launching its own merchandise?

Back in 2022, we did a collaboration with Saint Javelin, a company that sells clothing and merchandise to help Ukrainians: We launched a joint collection and donated all the profits to Ukrainian combat medics. 

This was an impact initiative for us. It was extremely successful, thousands of pieces were sold, so it prompted us to think that we should start selling our own clothing as a way to extend our brand. 

We started working on our online store in the spring last year and launched it in August. We were getting a lot of requests from our community to start selling branded clothing, so we were expecting some demand from them during the launch. 

Zakhar Protsiuk wearing a hoodie from the Kyiv Independent’s winter collection
(photo: courtesy of the Kyiv Independent)

How does this fit with the overall strategy of your outlet? 

It supports our strategy in two ways: For our active paying members, it’s an extension of our brand, a way to express to the world that they support us and engage their friends and family. 

On the other hand, it’s also a way for many people to learn more about The Kyiv Independent and for us to use clothing as the first point of contact, which would lead people to learn about our journalism.

For instance, a month ago, a Ukrainian influencer with over 500,000 followers on TikTok published a video unpacking our closing, which got over 280,000 views. Many people bought the clothing using her discount code, but many more also learned about us as a media organisation, and that’s super valuable as well because it allows us to introduce ourselves to new audiences.

Besides, it’s a way for us to help support Ukraine. For example, we donated all profits from one clothing collection – $10,000 – to Repower, an organisation that supports Ukrainian combat medics and volunteers.

Who are your customers? 

More than half of our sales are coming from people who are not members and never donated to us before. We are really happy with this ratio as it proves that the store allows us to build closer relationships with new audiences

The overwhelming majority is based outside of Ukraine. The United States is the biggest market, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Nordic countries.

Launching an online store is a completely different challenge for a news outlet. How do you deal with the logistical challenges? 

We wanted to move fast so we outsourced both physical production and logistics. We partnered with a company called Printful – they are taking care of production and logistics while we focus on developing designs, marketing and customer support. 

What were your KPIs and did you achieve them?

The first few months of the store were more successful than we expected. We achieved our 12-month KPIs in 5 months since the launch. Since we started, we have sold 3,000 different pieces of clothing. 

There was a lot of demand in the beginning: We had high sales in August, a bit lower in September, again lower in October. In December we launched the winter collection, and the sales significantly went up – we sold almost a thousand items in one month. 

We learned that we need to constantly put something fresh and launch new collections if we want people to stay engaged and come back to our store regularly. We already have a solid repeat purchase rate – over 10% – and that will be an important metric we’ll be looking at in the future. 

What are your key insights? 

We’ve learned that the pricing has a much bigger impact on sales as compared to membership. On membership, we rarely increase sales by offering discounts because it’s more of an emotional way for the people to support us. They don’t treat it that much as buying a product, it’s more of a way to be part of The Kyiv Independent.

That is why discounts don’t really work [for membership], but for the store it works really well: Discounts make a big impact on sales. It’s obvious for the world of e-commerce, but for us, as a news organisation, it was quite interesting to see how the pricing impacts sales and limited offers. We are just slowly improving our understanding of how it works.

The Kyiv Independent’s team wearing merch from the publisher’s store (photo: courtesy of the Kyiv Independent)

Can merchandising be a good idea for any type of news outlet?

It probably depends on your brand: Do you have a brand that people want to associate yourself with? Not all media are building that kind of brand. Some are just building a mass scale traffic game, where people don’t really have a connection.

In our case, we have a strong brand and that’s why selling merch makes a lot of sense for us. It’s also an experiment. Since we are the biggest English-language media from Ukraine, we have a mission of representing and introducing Ukraine and its culture to the world. 

This story is not just about us, it’s about Ukraine and its culture in general. In our latest collection, the theme is the Christmas traditions, from the vertep puppet theater, to the didukh wheat sheaf decorations, and “Shchedryk”, the original carol now known in English as “Carol of the Bells.”

So, that’s a new way for people to learn about the history of Ukraine, Ukrainian culture, and also The Kyiv Independent. This is an important mission, that’s why we love doing this project, and want to do more of it – even if it’s not going to print cash.

Cover photo: Kyiv Independent’s team wearing merch from the Kyiv Independent store (photo: courtesy of the Kyiv Independent)


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