Making merch for your merch.

When British alt-hip-hop band Karyo, described by the BBC as “one of the catchiest festival bands around”, decided to make some merch for their first EP launch they had no idea they’d go on to create one of the most celebrated indie hot sauces on the market. I chatted with Luke Fain and Duncan Powell about their decision to make hot sauce over t-shirts and what happens when you need to make merch for your merch.

[Duncan] The band arrived at a really interesting time. It was right at the end of the CD Like just as we released our first records CDs were on their deathbed.

[Luke] We decided we needed merch for our first EP. We wanted to do something for the launch and I think we just started brainstorming from there. Duncan was particularly against t-shirts.

[D] Yeah they were always too small or too square. I remember buying the fake ones from the guys outside the gigs for like half price. I had a Red Hot Chilli Peppers t-shirt where Chilli Peppers was spelt wrong. The label would fall off. There were all these shirts I'd bought and I hardly wore any of them because of how shit they were.

[L] I'm not sure how many bottles we made for the EP launch, it was something like 50. We got through them pretty quickly so we made a few more batches and started selling them at festivals we were playing. We'd just kind of get drunk and run around the festival fields with a carrier bag full of sauce and a little pot full of quids and try to get people to buy them.

[D] We weren't really aware of what else was knocking about in terms of independent hot sauces at the time. We were all living quite close to each other in Tottenham and scotch bonnets are just everywhere. Like every shop has them. So we were cooking with them quite a bit and really enjoying all of that fruitiness and the real flavour that you get through with them so it seemed like a fairly obvious place to start.

[L] I think we really found our fortune in the first batch. The second time, because we were never planning to make it again, was like chasing the dragon. It was like “How the hell did we do that?"We were trying to upscale from doing like, 50 at a time to doing 100, 200, 300 at a time. When you try and make something to scale, everything sort of changes. I don't really understand the food chemistry but like suddenly flavours kind of fall out of balance and stuff. Even if you're just upping the same quantities.

[D] Ugh the consistency was a real struggle.

[L] Thankfully our guitarist is a chemical engineer and worked in production and fluid dynamics. Every time we make a batch it's a real battle for him to get across to us just how important it is that we write down what we've done.

[D] Every time we do a cook, we refine one aspect of what we're doing and that's just one less thing we have to worry about.

[L] You look back at it and sort of laugh. Even down to the pouring of the sauce it was so bad, like the whole kitchen would just be covered in hot sauce and you're scolding yourself with this burning hot scotch bonnet sauce but now it feels a little bit more refined. It's definitely very homemade still. But, but yeah, it feels it feels a lot smoother than it used to be.

[D] For me I think the turning point for all of us was when the merchandise got merchandise. And weirdly, we decided to do t-shirts for the hot sauce!

[L] Yeah after we'd sort of gone like “no, we're not doing that for the band”. But then when it was for the hot sauce, we're like, “hey, yeah, t shirts are a cool idea!”

[D] We're really a hybrid really at this point. As the sauce reaches the popularity of the band it gets harder to say “oh you know it's just the band merchandise”.  When we consider the hours we put in, you know, we have to accept that Kayro is equal parts band and hot sauce producer, which I don't think is a bad thing. It's funny because time spent on music takes away from the hot sauce and vice versa but when you look at them together as a whole it has far more reach than either could in isolation.

[L] The thing with the sauce is, someone buys your t-shirt and puts it away in a cupboard and it's done. But with the sauce someone opens their fridge every day and the first thing they see is that bottle with Kayro on it and when they run out of it, they buy again. Some of our fans buy a bottle of sauce every month, or buy five bottles a month or three bottles a month.

[D] Lord knows you can't make money from fucking music anymore. I mean, if someone buys one bottle of our hot sauce they’ve probably done more for us than if they'd had our album on repeat on Spotify for like a year!

[L] Being in a band is expensive, and not too well paid, especially the sort of low-rent festivals which we love doing. So the sauce has been great at subsidising the band.

[D] Yeah it's really supported and helped us and allowed us to do loads of things, which we probably wouldn't have been able to do, or would have just had to have invested huge amounts of our own money to do. I mean times like this, where you can't gig - not only just spending all your time, but all of your money in chasing this, like, you know, this dream, so yeah, it's been, it's sort of helped things quite a bit.

[L] It's just been such a good regular income stream that it's taken all of that pressure off. We can just focus on doing exactly what we want to do with the band, which is a really privileged position to be in as musicians.

[D] It's funny because it was only meant to be a one off for the EP launch but I think the thing that drove us to do more was like us just loving it.

[L] Yeah it's fair to say that we've always been our own biggest fans. And I mean, I still eat Satan’s Gravy probably every single day. There's rarely a day goes by that I don't have a large amount of the sauce. It's probably the same for the music as well. We’ve always just been about making what we want really and fortunately other people seem to like it.