Hello, finally!

First thing, please accept my apologies for not having created this promised blog post earlier but we have so much going on other things got in the way.

Now, a bit of background for those wondering who we are and why we do what we do.

ClubMerchandise is made up of a group of volunteers and like minded people who love raising money for good causes, helping out groups who do fantastic work, and doing the socialist thing.

Now don't get too rattled by the word 'socialist' as I don't mean hard left, or communist. I mean that we like to do things that make our society a better place to be.

We have been going for about 10 years now and have raised over £25,000 for good causes.

Some days we sell lots and some days we don't even get a single visitor to the shop but that doesn't mean we wont be here next year, because we will.

So, a bunch of like minded people get together to give up time to run a non-profit.Simple.

But there's also another wrinkle, we also have lots of people who are neurodivergent involved, in fact we welcome them with open arms.

My own Son, Ryan is one of our awesome young adults who designs stuff, prints it, packs and posts it out. He has a diagnosis of autism and through Club Merchandise, and the wonderful feedback on Twitter, he has grown in confidence and that means he is more ready and able to take on more challenges. And we hope that we can do that for many more young adults too in the future.

But we are too small, at least we are at the moment, to offer jobs to those young people. But that is certainly a goal that we have.

We are trying to get registered as a CIC, a Community Interest Company, but we are told that what we do is no different to any commercial printer's activities. That has us baffled but we have a new application in with Companies house and hopefully the additional information we have provided will get us over the line this time!

So that is a very limited snapshot of what Club Merchandise is and what we do.

You can find us on Instagram and Twitter @clubmerchandise and of course our website is www.clubmerchandise.org

Have a great day folks.